Sunday 11 November 2012

Four months in Singapore

Yesterday marked four months since we arrived in Singapore. Mel and I were talking this morning that it seems like ages ago that we got here. But it at the same time it feels like the time has whizzed by.

I think the biggest change has been in Matilda. She is nearly 18 months old now and is definitely not a baby anymore. She seems to be learning new words everyday and is starting to make short sentences regularly. The other day she said "I don't like it" when she was offered some food and she regularly says "I need this" when she wants something.

Walking has become important too. When we head down to a local cafe for brunch Matilda insists on walking as much as possible. It's roughly a kilometre to the cafe and she walks about halfway without too many problems. She took a tumble this morning though and scraped her knees and fingers. While we were eating she kept holding up her hand with a pained look on her face. Poor poppet:(

We seem to have more public holidays here which is nice. They try cater for all the main ethnic groups so we had a day off last month for the end of the Hajj for the Muslims. This Tuesday is a holiday for Deepvali which is a Hindu festival. We get Christmas and New Year as well. Actually we get two New Year holidays because there's 2 days off in February for Chinese New Year.  There are some others as well but I can't remember the details.

Mel and I went into town last night for dinner and to see the Deepvali lights in Little India. The bus was absolutely full! To the point where we were not stopping. I reckon we missed a third of the stops. We had dinner at a really nice Indian restaurant and then wandered around a bit. There were loads of people around and the lights looked pretty cool. The bus trip home wasn't as busy:)



School is ok. We have an inspection for our EduTrust certification. The school needs this to be allowed to take international students. Without this we would have to shut up shop. As you can imagine this is causing quite a bit of stress. Although they aren't actually interested in our teaching practice they want to interview some of the teaching staff, as well as the admin guys. Everyone was worried on Friday as that was when we would find out if we would be the "lucky ones". Thankfully I missed out but Mel is gutted because they asked to interview some of the part time staff. She's only been there a month! They also want to see another of the part timers. She only started on Monday and has had a fairly stressful start to her job!

I can't think of anything to say right now so I'll be off.

Later
TONE