Singapore - Running Errands

Nothing much on the agenda for today except getting ready to head to China. Late last night we ordered "Lonely Planet China" and "Globetrotter Highlights of Cairo and Luxor" from GuideGecko.com, which does next day deliveries of select guidebooks to our hostel on Wednesdays. The Kindles have not been working out so well for guidebooks... the technology just isn't there for paging through a reference book like you want to with a guidebook, looking at the maps is almost impossible, and if you have to show your tuk-tuk driver the address of where you want to go, as soon as you pull out your Kindle you look like even more of a rich tourist sucker than you did before.

Anyhow, we spent time packing up and getting ready to mail some stuff home. It turns out that the price is fixed for surface mail up to 5kg to the US, which is significantly more than we had to mail or wanted to spend. So we're holding off on that for now.

For lunch we had Hakka Abacus Seed, which was very good. And of course raised the question of whether you could plant one of the seeds in the dish and grow an abacus. The seeds sure looked like the beads of an abacus. Some research on the internet says no--abacus beads are traditionally made of stone, while abacus seeds in this dish are made of yam and named for their appearance. Will have to try making this when we get home, as it was so good. This looks like exactly what we ate.

We also purchased a watch for Josh. He finally found the watch I was going to get for him for his birthday in a store so we could see it in person, and it really didn't look as good as it did in the photos online. And looked crazy big on him. So we got a different watch, which was nicer.

From Singapore

Then we changed the rest of our Thai Baht and Malaysian Ringgit into Hong Kong Dollars and Chinese Yuan.

For dinner we dropped in at a Thai place and had our best Pad See Ewe of the trip, and some amazing pepper pork.

We spent the evening relaxing, reading about Egypt and Hong Kong, and watching the news about the violence in Bangkok, which seems to be getting worse.