24 Hours in Singapore

Continued Travels!

On our way to India we scheduled ourselves a layover in Singapore. We had 27 hours to get out and see the city. We decided we would go out to see the city and come back to the airport to sleep. We arrived at 5:30am, got back to the airport at 11:30pm slept until 6am when we had to get on the plane and head to Mumbai.  

We really enjoyed Singapore. We experienced Singapore as "Asia Lite."   It's clean, everyone speaks English, the trains/buses are punctual, and it's a cosmopolitan city.  It has a true feeling Chinatown and Little India so you can acclimate to those experiences without actually dealing with the stress, crowds, and confusion of China or India.   And, it really is a garden city. There are big trees everywhere. That was pretty neat. 

I took a bit of a lazier approach by just explaining the photos.   Enjoy!

And leave comments!  I love comments!  Have you been to Singapore? How did you like it? No?  just say any old random thing.

 Made it to Singapore! The airport is packed full of art and decoration and things to do.  Bored?  Check out their roof top garden. Want a bit of wildlife, go to the butterfly garden.  Too hot? Swim in the rooftop pool. Extra money to spend?  Shop in every store imaginable. Lots of time to kill?  Take a free tour to the city!  Really. It's kind of unbelievable. 

I'm trying to capture the "NO" signs which, you might notice includes Durians.  A very smelly fruit.  Other signs also told you of the potential fines you could face for breaking these laws.  Smoking was $1000, eating was $500.  I'm not sure about the Durian fees. 

We started our day in Singapore with a trip to their Botanic Gardens. A Unesco World Heritage site. They were stunning.  The gardens were used to create and experiment with rubber trees.  Singapore provided most of the worlds rubber until the mid 1900s. 

Look at us at the Gardens! 

It's us again!   

On a treetop walk!

The city was decorated for Christmas!  We decided to take the bus from place to place so we could get a sense of the city.  Glad we did. the buildings are gorgeous and, as you can see,  festive.  

Our next stop after the Botanical Gardens was Chinatown. The first thing we did, of course, was to eat but once that was accomplished we wandered around. We both really enjoyed the architecture of the buildings in conjunction with the markets below them.  

The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple.  Yes, there is a buddha tooth here. It's houses in a solid gold reliquary that is the size of a small car.  

There was a lovely garden at the Buddha Tooth with a prayer wheel.  That big structure inside spins and as you spin it you are sending out prayers. It's pretty incredible.  

And we ate again!  

After we left Chinatown we went over to Little India.   

Isn't he adorable in all the color?  

Diwali is coming up and Little India was also decorated. In India, Diwali is as big as Christmas in the states.  

Again, we enjoyed the Architecture. We wandered down this street until we found a little corner cafe to eat.  We were the only foreigners and I was the only woman so we got a lot of stares.  

We stumbled upon a Ukulele store in Singapore.   Only Ukuleles!  It was so fun.  And run by some awkward but charming 20 something year old men.  We watched some emo music videos with them and were warned to not travel to the Philippines because the guards put bullets in your luggage.    Right? Interesting.  The store was pretty great and we did enjoy our time in there.  http://ukulelemovement.com/  They let us play with all the Ukuleles in there!   

And then, while trying to get to the CBD, we wandered though the underground shopping area following signs and hoping to arrive in the right place. After wandering thorugh the parking lot (followed signs) and then through the lobby of a performance hall (still following signs), we went up and escalator and came upon a Ukulele sing-a-long!  Over a hundred people with Ukuleles singing John Denver and Johnny Cash!  How to get Shannon to fall in love with a city?  bring her to s sing-a-long! 

Took a break from walking around by watching the light show across the bay. Pretty amazing and such a lovely rest. 

The other side of the bay.  Beautiful! 

Finished up our evening with another meal!  Singaporean Carrot Cake (an egg thing) and some satay.  Delicious!  The food stalls are really conveniently set up. You order from any one of them. They are all part of the same organization, so they give you plates and silverware that you just leave at any of the tables and the tables are bussed and cleaned.  So easy, delicious and safe. 

Long day. Jamie looking like a local sleeping on the train back to the Airport.   We got back to the airport at 11:30, found a quiet corner to sleep until 6am and then hopped on the plane to head to Mumbai. 

McMurdo Winter C17 June Flight

          The first official "winter flight" came and left last week.  It was a big event.  It's remarkable for any plane to arrive on it's scheduled day so for a plane to be only 3 hours late on it's inaugural winter flight is pretty remarkable.

For the flight to land, we turn out all the lights on the runway because they use night vision to land the plane and the lighting will ruin their ability to see.  To help them use the night vision more effectively, we put out the incredibly reflective cones all up and down the runway. INCREDIBLY reflective. According to the pilot, they could see the cones 250 miles out.  I was lucky and got to go out to help with them.  It was kinda fun to be out there during all this prep for the plane and to see who all is involved.   The Fleet Operations guys had been out there daily for 6 days prior and then constantly for 30 hours prior to the flight. They groom the runway so that a plane can land on it and considering that the runway had been unused for 6 weeks, they had quite a task cut out for them. This was not made any easier by the bad weather and wind bringing in snow drifts and uneven ground.   They were all exhausted. Also, in the days leading up to the flight, there's around 4 mechanics that just hang out incase a vehicle breaks down.  To add to the excitement on the Pegasus Runway, a seal had made it's way onto the runway.  The firefighters had to use their expert skills at Wildlife Management to move it.  Unfortunately, they aren't allowed to touch the seal, so "expert skills"  amounted to them waving their arms and yelling "shoo" from about 3 feet away.  The seal could have cared less.   It was kind of hilarious and kind of sad because it's quite possible the seal was out there in the first place because it was sick and dying.  As a side note, I often think about how if the seals talk to each other, I imagine they experience us as a kind of "alien adduction". Especially if it's scientists that are coming upon them they get treated to spinal taps, anal probes, flying vehicles (aka helicopter or airplanes) all that craziness.   Not so far off from our "alien" stories.  OK back to the flight. 

For loading and unloading the plane, the supply crew gets brought out to become the "cargo" crew to help get all the pallets of food, equipment and luggage off the plane.   The fuelies are standing by in case the plane needs fuel (unlikely for a C17) and then people like me get brought out to do the little tasks and fill in where needed.  The plane lands, does not shutdown, unloads and reloads and then heads off again-all in less than an hour.  It's a pretty remarkable system. 

In other news, May is over and done!  June is here.  We are moving so quickly through this season.  May brought with it the end of "Civil Twilight" so we are in darkness all day long.   I've included a picture of May 1st and then May 31st (both taken at 1pm).    I'm surprised at how easily I've transitioned into living in constant darkness. I thought it would be much more difficult.  I took me quite some time to get comfortable with constant daylight so I expected a similar thing going in the other direction but it hasn't been so bad.  My guess is it's because I was here for the transition.  It's not like I stepped off the plane and it is was dark constantly and I had to adjust immediately. Experiencing the change has been very helpful.   It was a mildly difficult sleeping when I could still see lighter colors in the sky. I think my body was waiting for the sun to come up each day because the sky would be somewhat light in the morning but then when it never did it just meant I was tired all day long and then couldn't sleep at night.   When that was happening it felt like it took forever to wake up.  As it is, it still feels like I'm not fully awake until around 10am, but I can sense that this is slowly lifting and I'm settling in as there is less variety to the light.   I've also made some dedicated life choices and I think those have helped stabilize my mood and transition.  I do a "bootcamp" class twice a week and try to walk/run two other times.  I've also been drinking a lot less and trying to sleep 8 hours every night. Who knew doing healthy for your body would lead to healthy things for your mind!  Gosh!  Can't believe I'd never tried it before! 

Enjoy the pictures.  I started us off  with pictures from the Top Gun party to show off my awesome makeup and crimped hair.  

The supply department put on a Top Gun Themed party and as I didn't have flight suit, we just went for a general 80s look.  

Aren't we adorable? The party itself was incredibly fun. They decorated the cargo bay with Cargo netting and airplane props,  we had a beanbag toss (called Corn Hole in the Midwest-who knew!) and they had a Tom Cruise Scientology Center.  The Scientology center was great because the Scientologists had, earlier, in the season sent us a LOT of literature on Scientology, bizarre, but we finally found a use for it.  

On that C17 flight we got mountains of mail!  More mail for 142 people in June than we got for over 700 people in December for Christmas.  The flight came in on Wednesday. The mail lady and 12 volunteers started sorting Thursday Morning at 9am so that everyone could get their mail by Thursday afternoon. What service!  And thank heavens too as we had planned Christmas for the Saturday following the flight.   Santa comes in JUNE! 

Not only did we get mail on that flight but we got fresh vegetables! 3700 lbs of it!  Nothing better than fresh lettuce in Antarctica!  And Coconuts and Papaya!  And Feijoa!  What's a Feijoa you ask? It's a fruit that looks a bit like a kiwi but is bright green and has a sweet/tart flavor. As I was eating this Feijoa (in Antarctica),   I was marveling at how rare it is to try a truly new food.  I can't remember the last time I've had something that I had never had before.   It was a delight. 

And here's the plane! Landing in the dark.  Four people were scheduled to leave on that plane however by the time the plane left, it has 8 people on it.  It brought us 7 in so our winter population is down to 141. 

May 1st 13:00

May 31st 13:00.  Admittedly, it's not this ridiculously dark when I'm taking this photo.  My sad camera has begun to die and doesn't do a great job anymore.   we have gotten a new one.  HOWEVER,  my point is clear. the sky is black and at 1 pm it's nighttime outside. 

The last Sunset at McMurdo

Hello! 

Guess what we had last week at 1:45pm on April 24th! The last sunset!   Now, don't be thinking that we are wandering around in utter darkness just yet.  In fact, it's still quite bright for a few hours in the afternoon.  I've included a picture I took at 1pm on the 24th, still plenty of light.   

March and April have been fun months to be living through.  For March we had almost normal sunlight.  The sun would set around bedtime and rise as we were getting up.  It was novel.  The first time I didn't have to close my shades at bedtime was very exciting and all the summer people were marveling about it at breakfast for a few day.  After that novelty wore off,  we got the April sunset. Pretty much constant sunrise/sunset colors. The mountains and sky were a stunning pink and red all day long for weeks.   It was a delight.  One of those days, I looked over toward Erebus and saw the steam coming out of the top, but with the pink sky, the steam was glowing red. Spectacular. 

I'm curious to see how I'll settle into the darkness. As it is,  I can still feel myself waiting each day for it to get brighter and experience a minor sense of relief when I walk out of a building and it's a bit lighter out.  I wonder if this isn't partly because the sky is still in the process of  lightening and so I expect it to get bright. Perhaps I won't feel that expectation when we are total dark mode.   It will be an interesting experiment.   I have a friend her that's been tracking all the data for sunrises and sunsets.  She's still putting information together so will have some trends to share with us in the future, but for now I've learned some interesting facts about twilight. 

There are three different types of twilight: Civil, Nautical and Astronomical.  Nautical is named this way because it's the twilight when seafarers can see the stars enough to navigate. Astronomical Twilight is when it's dark enough for astronomers to stargaze.  In any day, you will go through all three of those twilights.  Start at night, move into astronomical, next is nautical, then civil and then day. 

Currently, with the sun just setting, we are in Civil Twilight for most of the day. The sun in only about 6° below the horizon.  On May 11th we'll move into Nautical twilight with the sun 12° below the horizon.  We'll have Nautical twilight at some point during the day until the next sunrise.   We'll start with about 6 hours a day and then by June it will drop down to 3.  So there is no point during this winter when we will have full "night" for 24 hours. Isn't it all so interesting?!

And Auroras!  There have been some sightings but I've yet to see any.  I'm really excited for an Aurora viewing. 

Well folks,  I hope everything is well with you wherever in the world you might be.  Enjoy the pictures! 

This is my 1pm photo on the day of the sunset.    I've been taking one every day (almost) at this time and I'm hoping to put them all together.  We'll see. 

A storage space at Lake Hoare in the Dry Valleys with the Canada Glacier in the background. That glacier is their source of water.  They collect (you're going to love this) "Glacier Berries" and melt them down. Glacier berries are parts of the glacier that have calved off. 

A super secret silent dance party on New Years' eve.  We met up at 11:30pm,  brought our own music and headphones and danced around to our own beats to ring in the new year. It was incredibly fun.

The inside of an empty LC-130. 

I like the story of this Helo pad with it's tiny H.  When the painters were sent out there, the Head Pilot told them to paint something fun on it. The painters painted a butterfly. You can kind of see the outline of it still.  Someone, however, didn't like that and made them go back out and repaint it.  What a bummer.  On the bright side, because of this project, I was allowed to ride out in the extra seat on the helicopter and got a little fly over in the Dry Valleys. 

The moon and Antarctica. 

It snowed in my pickle (the name of the tractor). The pickles are very old vehicles from the military and there is no real seal on the doors so the wind blows the snow right inside. 

SCIENCE!  The Research Assistant, Liz, touring us through the Arrival Heights building where she monitors a variety of science experiments. 

This is the boxes that the science equipment from Japan comes in. HOW ADORABLE! 

All the science equipment, all lit up. 

Fun in Antarctica!

When we were first planning on coming down here, we had been told of all the fun things there are to do but it's a bit hard to believe how much there is to do until you've been down here.  We brought books and movies down here to pass the time.  Oh were we wrong. Even with a 54 hour 6-day work week,  the social calendar during the summer is non-stop and infact it feels a bit frantic.    Things are a lot quieter now that it's winter but there's still a fair amount going on.  Here's a general list of things that happen here.  Almost all of the things happen both winter and summer but during the winter it's not necessarily every week or with so much at one time.

Here's a basic list of the things that happen here:

Weekly Events: 

Travelogues: Every Monday people have the opportunity to share pictures and stories of their travels.  We've heard stories of peoples trips on Cargo Ships around the world,  hiking the Anapunra trek in Nepal, bike trips across Australia, rickshaw races across India and all the long walks across America. The weekly travellogue is a dangerous event to attend because it just keeps adding to the list of places to visit and things to do.
TedTalks: On Wednesday there's a selection of TedTalks that is shown in the galley.
Science Lectures:  Twice a week the scientists give lectures of the work they are doing down here.
American Night at Scott Base:  The New Zealand base is 2 kilometers from ours and on Thursday nights they open the store and the bar to us Americans.  It's really nice to be able to go somewhere new to hang out and shop.
Brunch:  Every Sunday the kitchen prepares an excellent brunch.  When we were living in Korea I remember paying upwards of $40 for brunches that weren't even as good as these are.
Open Mic Night: Technically not every week, but still an incredible event.  The talent here is remarkable.  There are so many talented singers, songwriters,  poets and performers.
Two-Step Tuesdays:  Every other Tuesday we clear away the tables and two-step!

The following events are pretty self-explanatory. 
Karaoke
Yoga
Insanity
Volleyball
Basketball
Soccer
Rugby with the Kiwis 
Boxing Classes 
Spin Classes
Trivia



Outside Opportunities:
Hiking: There are 4 different walks you can go on here.  Two small ones out from and around town, both about 3 miles.  The longest is Castle Rock Loop, 10 miles and during summer you can walk/ski out to the Runway.
Cross country and skate skiing:  These can be rented from our "gear issue" and you can ski out to the airport, our out on the castle rock loop.
Snowboarding: The Kiwis have an actual ski lift which if you make friends with them, you might be able to use.   However,  you can hike out the the hill at the Castle Rock and ski or snowboard down that.
Marathon and half-marathon: Heck yeah!  If you're really motivated, you can train to run the marathon or half-marathon.

Bands and Parties:
Halloween: This is a huge party and one that people make plans for before the even get down to the ice.  People come with great individual costumes and group costumes to compete in a costume contest. If you win, the prize is usually a trip somewhere.  Very fun!
Waste Barn Christmas Show:  The Wasties go all out for the Christmas party.  This year the theme was from Ferrous to Paris and they decorated the barn like a street full of cafes in paris.  People sing all sorts of songs both Christmas and other.  Again, this is another event that people look forward to all year.
VMF Christmas Party: On Christmas Eve the VMF hosts the Annual Christmas Party.  There's a performance from the Choir, a Santa appearance, photo booths, a photo display, live music, a wine bar,  and snacks.
Icestock: Perhaps the biggest event of the year.  Icestock is our New Years party.  It starts at 6pm and goes until midnight on new years (although this year it was technically a on January 2nd and the countdown to the third was 5 minutes late).   Bands practice all season and perform on IceStock. There's a chili cook-off and usually about 7-8 different types of chili to test and sample.
Math Club:  This is a weekly, alcohol free party this is strictly about dancing.   It is incredibly awesome.  Even people who hate dancing usually love Math Club.  It's early in the evening so people aren't drunk, there's no guys creeping up on women. It's dark with fun lighting and no one cares about how you dances.
Dance Parties:  Aside from Math Club, there are spontaneous dance parties all the time. People love to dance here! Any opportunity to dance here!
General work center parties: Throughout the season the various work centers have parties with live music (and dancing!).   Carp shop, helo hanger, the BFC. Any place that has a big enough space and the time to host a party.


Other Random Things:
Dance Groups:  Special Project Other is a dance hip hop dance crew and will not only put on one or two dance performances but also a great flashmob at Icestock.
Cribbage Tournaments: This is an hilarious obsession on station.  Tournaments are almost constantly ongoing but there is also the "Cribbage Bracelet" that people are constantly challenging each other for and then flaunt when they win.
Film festivals: Each season, both winter and summer, there is a film festival that people on station can participate in.  During Winter, the festival branches out and becomes and international festival and people from all the stations in Antarctica participate.  I can't wait to see it!
Discovery Hut and Cape Evans Hut: Discovery hut is Shackleton's hut that sits right near station.  We can walk out to see it and a couple of times a year we get official tourguides to open it up and we can go inside and look around.  The Cape Evans hut is a little farther out so less people can get out there.  Only about 50 people made it out there this season (neither Jamie nor I).
Room with a view: This is a trip we can sign up for or win by raffle. It's a snow mobile ride out to a hut with an excellent view of Mt Erebus.
Ice Caves:  Another trip that can be won by raffle and another snowmobile trip. This one goes out to the IceCaves in the Erebus Ice tongue. It's the glacier that flows off of the volcano, Erebus.  
Tug-of-war competitions: This used to be an annual event that they brought back this season.  We had a team of 6 vs the Kiwis.   We lost royally.  The Kiwi had actually practice.   We lost in seconds. But it was great fun!  And a very serious event.  We had to weigh in before we could compete. The Kiwis were overweight so that had to drop one person.  Did I mention we lost?
Manhauling competition:  This is a ridiculous competition where people haul, either in teams of 4 or singly, weighted sleds across the ice.  Technically this is part of the Tug-of-War competition, the team that loses can then challenge the winners to another competition.  Whoever decided on Manhauling, i have no idea.  I'm sure you can guess, the kiwis were very good at this too.  They are a bunch of young and very fit men that are competing.
MAAG:  A yearly art show; Performance art, painting, sculpture, music

The Ice Caves.  And the video tour! 

Halloween!  A ghostbuster and David Bowie

Skiing out to the ice runway. 

Our friend's band, Shitty and Loud.  Their title is very literal. 

Dance Party! 

Icestock!!

Inside the Nimrod hut. 

MAAG.

Karaoke! 

The start of the 5K.  You didn't think we actual ran a marathon, did you? 

Hiking with Sage!

VMF Christmas Party

Holiday Meal!

Room with a View Trip

Trivi Night.   Notice the concentration.  They've won twice in a row and are a bit intolerable.  

More hiking! 

My awesome dance crew.  Special Project Other. Feel free to click the link and watch us! 

A link to my performance with Special Project Other: