Europe Travelblog  -

+ 8 - 2 | § ¶Back Home, but With Some Stumbles

We're home.  We actually got home Saturday evening, but I don't think we're fully caught up from jet lag.  All of us are feeling a bit sick, and Douglas's sleep schedule is completely messed up.  Overall, we recovered from the long travel much better at the beginning of the trip than at the end.  Douglas was more cranky on the three flights back from Singapore than he was on the way to Singapore, but that might have just been exhaustion from two weeks of travel.

Getting home entailed a few flying fiascos, though.

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+ 4 - 6 | § ¶Back to Singapore, Getting Ready to Go Home

We're back in Singapore now, about 14 hours from our flight home.  Unfortunately, that means a 6am flight and a 3am wakeup call, but that's what happens when Northwest has only one flight a day and we used miles.

It's been a few days since I blogged, but the rest of our nine days in Malaysia were great. (more)

+ 6 - 5 | § ¶The Joys and Pains of a Package Tour

We are now into our second day in Kuala Lumpur, our second city we have visited in Malaysia using a package tour from Malaysia.com.  This is far enough into the trip that we are able to draw some conclusions about using a package tour for the first time.  While we are overall glad that we used the tour, there are some definite downsides.

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+ 6 - 5 | § ¶Dueling Sentosas

In the last three days, we've been to two different places called Sentosa (Malay for peace and prosperity), and the differences between the two show some of the differences that have grown between Singapore and Malaysia since they split 42 years ago.

Sentosa Island in Singapore is a very strange place.  It seems to be one of the most popular local resorts for Singaporeans, but the attraction is largely artificial.  There are beautiful white sandy beaches, but the sand was imported from Indonesia, and the view from the beach is of passing freighter and tanker ships and of refineries.  There are beautiful gardens of spices and flowers (mainly orchids), but strangely the gardens have plastic statues of Western fairy tales.  There are some exhibits on the beauty and history of Singapore, plus an aquarium that is supposed to be great, but the only attraction on the island that seems authentic are the remnants of a British fort that was overwhelmed by the Japanese in 1942 (the Japanese came by land instead of by sea, rendering the fort worthless). 

Beautiful beach at Sentosa Island, with visible tanker ship


Today in Malacca, Malaysia, we visited another Sentosa, Villa Sentosa.  It's a private home built in the 1920s in the traditional Malay style where the family still lives.  It's an unofficial museum that is open to the public, and an elderly member of the family led us around the house, showing us awards, art, furniture, clothing, and other possessions that the family has picked up over the years.  It's a very interesting visit, to see where and how an actual family has lived in the same house for 9 generations.

Inside the Sentosa Villa


Singapore has a lot more money now than Malaysia does.  When Singapore wants to celebrate the spirit of Sentosa, it goes all out, making a huge resort with an attraction to appeal to anyone.  Malaysia doesn't have the money or control to do all that, so Sentosa there is a family sharing its history simply and beautifully. 

We could spend a full weekend at Singapore's Sentosa, but I think I learned more from Malaysia's.

+ 4 - 6 | § ¶Heading to Malaysia

We have a few minutes left in the hotel before we are picked up for our trip to Malaysia.  We're starting a planned tour from Malaysia.com, and we're not too sure about the whole thing.  We've become very practiced at travelling independently in Europe, figuring out trains and hotels as we go.  This time, however, the combination of our first trip to Asia and travelling with a child for the first time led us to play it a little safe.  So, we let a tour company plan our hotels and some local tours in the cities (Melaka, Kuala Lumpur, Cameron Highlands, and Penang), and we're relying on them to pick us up and drop us off at each hotel.  We think it'll be good, because we've made sure to have a free day in most of the stops, but it's more expensive than we're used to.  We'll see.

Our last full day in Singapore was pretty good.  We walked around the Central Business District and the historical Colonial District for a while, highlighted by a stop at the oppulent Raffles Hotel.  Then, after a tasty and very messy lunch of chilli crab at the Boat Quay, we went to Sentosa.  Sentosa is an interesting place, a resort island that is very popular with Singaporeans.  There were parts that were very cheesy, but there were also nice beaches, pretty gardens, silly fountains, and good views of the city.

The strangest thing about Sentosa for me was the incongruity of having a beach resort directly on the Straits of Malacca.  So, if you looked up from the sand, you could see huge freighters and tankers passing by, and you could also see refineries not that far away in the water.  But I guess the mix of tropical paradise and commerce is a good encapsulation of Singapore.

+ 2 - 6 | § ¶The Monkeys stand for Honesty, Giraffes are Insincere...

We spent the whole day yesterday at the Singapore Zoo and the evening at the similar Night Safari.  It's a great zoo, and we saw a lot of interesting animals, but it was a long, hot day.  We got there at 9am in order to have a wild breakfast (pictures with an orangutan and a boa constrictor and eating a drangon fruit), and we didn't leave until about 12 hours later.  It was really interesting, but it was just too long of a day.

Singapore is hot.  We're about 1 degree north of the equator, so it's always hot.  We felt it more yesterday than the days before because we were outside a lot instead of being in and out of buildings.  Fortunately, the Zoo has a few air-conditioned shelters sprinkled through the grounds to help us cool off and be able to feed Douglas.  Unfortunately, they like to charge a lot for bottled water, so they made the drinking fountains scare.  It was nearly impossible for us to refill our water bottles.

I don't want to only complain; the Singapore Zoo has a great collection, including apparently the largest primate collection in the world, and we saw a lot of them: orangutans, chimpanzees, sloths, lemurs, macaques (I liked the lion-tailed version), gibbons, mandrils, etc.  They also have an Australian outback area, a section on tropical crops, a lot of snakes and reptiles (including a Komodo dragon!), and many, many other very interesting animals.

We probably should have headed back to the hotel for a break between the Zoo and the Night Safari, but we had taken a bus to get to the Zoo, and it took about 90 minutes.  We didn't want to waste three hours for a round trip in the middle of the day, so we stayed there the whole time.  Only later did we realize that a taxi would have taken less than a half hour, so we could have managed.

The Night Safari is a lot like a zoo, but it's intended to show the animals at night (when most are more active), so they don't allow flash photos.  We took a tram that drove us through areas with many tropical animals at play.

+ 1 - 6 | § ¶Where are all the Indian Women?

"Where are all the Indian women?"

That's a question we asked our hotel clerk last night when we returned from dinner.  We were wondering, because it was Sunday night in Little India, and there were literally hundreds (probably thousands) of Indian men milling about in the streets in the blocks around our hotel.  They were standing in groups, not really doing much but chatting with friends.  But where are the women?

Apparently, the men are all temporary workers here from India, working on construction sites.  Sunday is their only day off, so they congregate every week in Little India to relax with their friends.  The Indian women guest workers, however, don't work at construction.  Instead, they work as maids in the houses of the Singaporeans.  And they don't get any days off.

So the Indian women were all at work.

+ 4 - 4 | § ¶An Unexpected Convenience

When travelling with an infant in a tropical area, there are several needs that become evident; finding an air-conditioned sitting area to cool off occasionally, finding a quite place to nurse the hungry child, and finding a clean bathroom in which to change the baby's diapers.  We weren't sure how we were going to satisfy all these needs, but it turns out that Singapore has a bunch of places throughout the city that satify all these needs:  the subway stations.

When Douglas is getting cranky, whether it's for heat, food, or a change, we head down into the underground subway stations and find a bench on the platform.  There we are cool and have a discreet place to feed him, and then we can use the free, clean bathrooms to change him.

Compared to the mass transit systems of cities like St. Louis, Hamburg, or New York, the Singapore system is clean, efficient, and shockingly baby-friendly.  Who would have expected it?

+ 6 - 2 | § ¶Singapore Loves a Baby

We're near the end of our second day in Singapore, and we really like the city.  Lots of guidebooks we read said that Singapore is a good first city in Asia to visit because it's clean, English-speaking, and efficient.  We're definitely finding that to be true.  There's a lot of culture here that's new to us, but also an air-conditioned, efficient subway system with computerized fare system and TVs in the train cars.  In addition, there is a large Indian population/neighborhood (where we are staying) and a large Chinese population/neighborhood (where we spent the day).  In a way, it's like an introduction to all of Asia with a comfortable sheen of Britain atop it.

In our first two days here, we've visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens, took a downtown river cruise, and spent lots of time in Little India and China Town.  We've had an expensive nouveau-Asian meal in an air-conditioned restaurant in the Botanic Gardens surrounded by only white tourists and expats, had a tasty cheap vegetarian Biryani meal surrounded by local Indians and few tourists, and a fantastic Dim Sum brunch where 99% of the patrons were local Chinese.  Quite a variety.

And everyone loves Douglas.  As we ride the subway and walk through the streets, it seems that everyone turns to smile at the cute little boy on his daddy's back.  Perhaps it's because of the child focus of the culture, perhaps it's just because he's so cute, perhaps it's the rareness of tourists from Europe or America bringing babies here, but we get a lot of positive attention here.  We've struck up many conversations with locals because of him, and so far he loves the city as much as it loves him.

BTW, pictures of the trip are available at http://finneytravel.shutterfly.com/.  The connection here at the hotel is a little odd, so I can't post pictures with the blog posts from here.  I hope it'll be better at the next place.

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+ 5 - 2 | § ¶Singapore, Here We Come!

We're packed and ready to go.  In a few hours, we'll get on the plane to start heading to Singapore.  A short 45 hours later, we'll be in Singapore.  Yep, 45 hours of travel.

It's actually not that bad.  We're flying through Minnesota, so we got lucky with flights and get to spend almost 24 hours with my family there in transit.  Despite that, it's still going to be a long set of flights, especially with a 6-month old.  I'm sure we'll get a lot of angry stares when we bring Douglas on board the 12.5 hour flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo and the 8 hour flight from Tokyo to Singapore.  Oh well.

I've created a Shutterfly collection where we will post our travel pictures: http://finneytravel.shutterfly.com.  I'll post a few pictures within blog posts, and I'll eventually put the best pictures in the gallery on this site, but that's where they'll all be initially.

We're very excited, and we're ready to go.

+ 4 - 5 | § ¶Intelligent Design Sort

Brilliant algorithmic analysis:

Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design.

Algorithm Description

The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it's in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it's clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it's safe to assume that it's already optimally Sorted in some way that transcends our naïve mortal understanding of "ascending order". Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted.