First swim at home

In this new luxury life that we are leaving, we have a swimming pool at home.
Actually two: one for kids to play and one for laps. The one we see from our balcony is the lap pool. Just one floor down. If that's not luxury?
After working on the apartment and feeling hot, I grabbed my swimming suit and jumped into the pool. Just the perfect temperature to cool you down but not too cold. The lap pool must be 30m long which is nice for my work out.
After the "effort" came something even nicer: the pseudo jacuzzi. It's a very small pool with jets. If you sit at the right spot you can get a massage of your back and feet or legs.

True the rent is much higher than anything we would have paid in Europe but I'm tempted to say that having a lap pool at home is really worth it.

First night in our new home

And it's too hot in the bedroom. We ended up sleeping with the air conditioning on the whole night. Set for a temperature of 25C which tells you that temperature in the room must have been above 30C.
Also our first guest arrived. Alice stopped over on her way to Cambodia. With her coming we had motivation to get the apartment in a functional status.
It's good to be home even if there is quite some work still to do.

I can't live without it

This weekend I reconfirm with myself that I can't live without a dishwasher. It's been too many years that I rely on one.
Having to wash by hands some of the dishes from the boxes so we could drink or eat something was painful enough. The idea of washing ALL the dishes by hand was scary, very scary.
So scary that tonight, we bought a dishwasher. No more delaying the decision. I even wrote the check.

It will be delivered on Saturday. And it makes me happy.

Now all I need is a cleaning lady and I can relax.

How to make your German husband smile after a tough day?

Take him to Brotzeit, the German restaurant in Singapore.
Seeing Bretzels and he smiles again.

Marche Restaurants

Since we've been in Singapore we've been buying bread every now and then at Marche. The bread they sell is expensive but really good, almost as good as if back home. One day we realized seeing people queuing that there was a restaurant under the bakery.
Tonight we tried it.
We had a good laugh when we saw the decoration. Picture a "typical" Swiss chalet revisited by Disneyland and you have it. I have to say it does make an impression.
Marche Restaurants is one of those places where they give you a card when you arrive and you can navigate between different islands offering all kind of food: pizza, pasta, rosti, salads, crepes, grill, seafood, etc.
After a quick look around, Wolfram went for sausage and I dared the veal schnitzel, for which I had to wait 10min.
The concept of the place is nice, the food is good BUT it's really overpriced. The schnitzel was 18.5S$ and it came all alone. I had the meat on a plate and that's it. No vegetable, no potato, nothing at all, not even lemon which would make sense on a schnitzel. Pretty bare if you ask me. Everything you eat costs money and everything counts. Baked potato with the sausage, 3S$ extra...
Once done with our main course we left the table for desert. It took forever to get my crepe and Wolfram's waffle and by the time we got back to our table we found someone else there. It seems that when we left they considered we were gone for good. This is not exactly smart given the whole concept of the place is that you get your food yourself. Inevitably you will leave the table to get something more.
Which is why there is a sign on the table that says "reserved".

Wolfram got someone from the staff to sort the mess out.
Once I was done with my crepe I realized that my glass was gone. When they cleared the table for the next people they also cleared my drink. Grrrr.
Wolfram once again took things in control and went to complain. A few minutes later he was back with another glass of diet coke. You could argue why such a fuss for a bit of coke? because it was expensive coke and at that price you drink every drop of it.

We tried, I seriously doubt we will go back. But at least we tried.

u.d.d.e.r.s ice cream

Today after our morning swim and before continuing with tidying up our apartment, we braved the rain to reach u.d.d.e.r.s ice cream place for pancakes. We had spotted the place on our way back from the supermarket on Friday and thought it could be a nice place for brunch.
Maybe not. We found out that it only opens at noon, luckily by the time we got there it was 11:45 am so not much to wait.
The place is more of an ice cream parlour than a restaurant. The menu is a long list of sundaes, milkshakes and other ice cream. They do have pancakes as advertised on their windows, but they come together with... ice cream.
We did get pancakes because that's why we came there. They were good although a bit small. We did get very good milkshakes. I particularly enjoyed the dark chocolate one that was just at the right level of sweet and bitter.
I left the place thinking that all the swimming I did barely compensated for the sugar shot I just ate.

Interestingly within 200m there are three ice cream parlours. Obviously we will try each of them :)

Is it rainy season already?

For the past weeks it's been raining more and more often. By rain I mean a thunderstorm showering you with warm water for 30 to 60 minutes, followed by sunshine.
Yesterday and today there were several thunderstorms in the same day forcing us to close the windows of the apartment as rain would come inside. Tonight we had the biggest thunderstorm since we arrived. Temperature dropped. Wind was blowing strong. Rain was heavy. Lightning was both scary and impressive in the sky. And it lasted several hours leading us to wonder whether we were at the center of some tropical storm.
We've been told that there is a rainy season in Singapore, in December and January. That's what they call winter. I wonder whether the rainy season is not early this year, just because we moved to Singapore thinking it would be warm and sunny all year long.
Luckily, my umbrella was delivered with the rest of the container, Let's see whether it will resist the rain of Singapore.