Apartments and supermarkets

3pm, Thursday January 8th 2009

Courtney: Third full day well under way now, and an interesting mix of discoveries.

First and most tragically, there is no crusty french bread available in singapore...too humid. Apparently you can try but during the 4 minute walk home it all goes mushy again. C'est la vie -- guess we'll have to eat naan.

We spent the last two days apartment hunting, and today we had a fantastic day -- we now have three on our short list, and one that we love love love. It's in the same hood as our current corporate apartment (Robertson Quay) and is walking distance to a great area of pubs and restaurants where they pull down tv screens and watch English football outside in the evenings. It also has a balcony that opens off the whole front of the living room with huge doors that open all the way so it feels like half our living room is in the open air. And there's even a tennis court! the condo website is here and has some great pictures.

http://www.singaporeexpats.com/singapore-property-pictures/condo/the-imperial.htm

Walking distances here are very funny. Basically if it's over a 10 minute walk, it's not considered walking distance because you get too sweaty. 10 minutes is a long walk. People literally measure distances from subway stations and grocery stores in 1 minute increments - the difference in sweat between 5 and 7 minutes is substantial, especially if you're on your way to work. Oscar, one of the guys on my team who just arrived from California, told me that his 10 minute walk to the subway is the worst part of his day -- no hyperbole!! We're having a lucky stretch of weather so far...it's not too hot or overwhelmingly humid, but it's still pretty warm. You get to a point if you haven't had anything to drink in a couple of hours that you just get really crabby and yucky feeling.

On the food front, I'm astounded by the variety of American and British food available. We ate Buitoni refrigerated pasta (cheese ravioli) for dinner last night in our apartment, just like we do at home sometimes. Shockingly most of the American food is less expensive than the local grocery store in San Francisco, which makes me think these companies jack up the prices for us in expensive cities. So as a result I don't think it will be any more expensive for us to cook Western here than to cook at home in the US. and if Keith starts eating Asian food, we'll save loads of money...he has promised to eat one Asian meal a week. Today he even said he might be open to eating some beginner sushi!!!!

So tomorrow (Friday) we'll view our top 3 apartments one more time and I'll go into the office for the first time for a few hours of meetings. Hopefully we can get the keys to our new place in a couple of weeks so we can start getting all the TV and wireless and all that stuff set up soon and get out of the small and dark corporate apartment we're currently crammed into! (The main upside of our corp apt was that we were able to special order The Football Channel for the TV and now have 24 hour a day access to the Premier League, Carling Cup, and other footie joys.)