First Day

We arrived in the beautiful garden city at 1AM local time on Friday the 2nd. Happily, all our luggage arrived safely including the computer. We made it through customs without getting anything confiscated and got on a Maxicab, which took us to our hotel. Samara fell asleep around 4:30 so we napped until she woke up right on time at 7:20. Time zones are no match for her internal waking clock. We ate breakfast then headed out to meet up with the HR contact at Duke to get paperwork started. We weren’t but 100 yards away from the hotel, when a bird pooped bright green poo on me. Is that good luck?
We were busy taking in all the sites and sounds and missed the turn to the Duke-NUS building but eventually found his lab. Ben gets a work permit and Samara and I get a dependant’s pass, which allows us to get library cards, zoo memberships, etc. We had do a medical check-up before we could get our passes so we decided to get that of the way since results take several days. We were kind of worried about what it would entail. My friend, who is living in Taiwan, had to get buck-naked for a visual skin test and give a poo(yes, a poo not a urine) sample for their medical check-up so we were pretty worried. Fortunately, we only had to get a chest x-ray, blood drawn, and a mini-physical. Unfortunately, it took 5 hours. We then went to a government-run housing office where foreigners can apply for the local housing, which is cheaper. The pictures of the sample housing made prison look appealing and since you can’t see the unit before you rent it, we opted out of saving a few hundred bucks a month and went back to the hotel to call a realtor to set up appointments to look at condos. After setting up appointments for the following day and trying unsuccessfully to get Samara to take a nap, we decided to go out and get some food. We went to a nearby mall, which was very nice and had a grocery store in it. Poor tired Samara finally fell asleep in the stroller after being awake almost 12 hours and having slept only 8 in the previous 30. We found a grocery store called Cold Storage, which has a lot of American products. This particular one happened to be an organic market. We were amazed at all the obscure products and brands they carried and even more amazed at the prices--$16 for Samara’s quart of whole milk yogurt we paid about $4 for in the states. We wept and left the store opting for the non-organic loaf of bread wondering the whole way home how many parents were glaring at us saying to one another as we often do, “Those parents have it so easy—their kid will sleep anywhere.” It was a long, long day.