Day 241 (February 18): This Is Not Going According to Plan
After our epic day on Monday, we were good and exhausted. On Tuesday, we merely returned to the Maxwell Road Hawker Centre for lunch, walked around Chinatown and returned to our apartment for some pool time. That summary omits a few details:
Our Grab (taxi) driver to lunch was shockingly candid about how the evaporation of Chinese tourists has decimated business. Beyond that, many locals are working from home and thus not taking rides around town. He put a very human face on the economic cost of this epidemic, especially in Asia.
We walked through Chinatown, stopping to visit a temple and to buy some souvenirs. On some advice from an info centre, we entered a mall to look for an acupuncturist. My idea was that there might be a treatment that would reduce Lily's misery from the itchiness of her numerous bug bites. The first problem is that we struggled to navigate another mazelike mall. The second problem is that even though there was a library in this mall and this one had evidence of a children's section, we didn't have our passports with us and this one didn't accept my Oregon license. The third problem was that, when we finally found the clinic, they took one look at Lily and declared a treatment wasn't available. I felt rejected for nonmedical reasons and we slinked off to give the kids ice cream. Meanwhile, Elise got lost in an adjacent mall but was able to take pictures of beautiful textiles.
Our walk back to the hotel had three hilarious photo-ops. One is meaningful to fans of the TV show Friends. The other is funny, I guess, to feminists. The third is just bizarre, unless you like getting raw or smoked salmon from a cash machine.
Then, while the other adults took the kids to the pool, I endeavored to revise our itinerary in Cambodia and Vietnam. The news of the day was that Cambodia's generosity in accepting a coronavirus-infected cruise ship had backfired: the guests had fanned out without any quarantine before authorities Most of them were in the capitol, Phnom Penh, which we were scheduled to visit on Days 3 and 4. It took a remarkable amount of emailing and calling to different countries and offices to make the changes but I eventually succeeded. As a result, instead of 2 days in Siem Reap, 2 days in Phnom Pen and 2 days in Ho Chi Min City, we'll have 3 in SR and 3 in HCMC. That's one less flight and hopefully a lower chance of exposing ourselves to the virus.
But let's end Tuesday on a funny note: feeling a total loss of desire to put the kids through another Asian meal in Singapore, we caught taxi's to none other than Hard Rock Cafe. We all ate fine, it was an easy walk to their hotel for the Ronchelli's and it put Elise close to the last spot of shopping she wanted to due before we left the retail heaven that is Singapore.
Our Grab (taxi) driver to lunch was shockingly candid about how the evaporation of Chinese tourists has decimated business. Beyond that, many locals are working from home and thus not taking rides around town. He put a very human face on the economic cost of this epidemic, especially in Asia.
We walked through Chinatown, stopping to visit a temple and to buy some souvenirs. On some advice from an info centre, we entered a mall to look for an acupuncturist. My idea was that there might be a treatment that would reduce Lily's misery from the itchiness of her numerous bug bites. The first problem is that we struggled to navigate another mazelike mall. The second problem is that even though there was a library in this mall and this one had evidence of a children's section, we didn't have our passports with us and this one didn't accept my Oregon license. The third problem was that, when we finally found the clinic, they took one look at Lily and declared a treatment wasn't available. I felt rejected for nonmedical reasons and we slinked off to give the kids ice cream. Meanwhile, Elise got lost in an adjacent mall but was able to take pictures of beautiful textiles.
Our walk back to the hotel had three hilarious photo-ops. One is meaningful to fans of the TV show Friends. The other is funny, I guess, to feminists. The third is just bizarre, unless you like getting raw or smoked salmon from a cash machine.
Then, while the other adults took the kids to the pool, I endeavored to revise our itinerary in Cambodia and Vietnam. The news of the day was that Cambodia's generosity in accepting a coronavirus-infected cruise ship had backfired: the guests had fanned out without any quarantine before authorities Most of them were in the capitol, Phnom Penh, which we were scheduled to visit on Days 3 and 4. It took a remarkable amount of emailing and calling to different countries and offices to make the changes but I eventually succeeded. As a result, instead of 2 days in Siem Reap, 2 days in Phnom Pen and 2 days in Ho Chi Min City, we'll have 3 in SR and 3 in HCMC. That's one less flight and hopefully a lower chance of exposing ourselves to the virus.
But let's end Tuesday on a funny note: feeling a total loss of desire to put the kids through another Asian meal in Singapore, we caught taxi's to none other than Hard Rock Cafe. We all ate fine, it was an easy walk to their hotel for the Ronchelli's and it put Elise close to the last spot of shopping she wanted to due before we left the retail heaven that is Singapore.
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| Lily ordered a steak that I think was 20 ounces and finished off most of it without my help. #growing |
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