Tired, with birds

Last night the fireworks went off at midnight, which didn't wake my wife from her baby-induced slumber, and also didn't signal the end of the music from below. There was another hour of loud music, and now if I hear Gangnam Style ever again I may punch somebody in the face.

About 1 o'clock it either got quieter, or fatigue finally overcame noise, and I fell asleep, waking up at 6:30 to switch off my alarm, and again at 7:45 to get up and go out to the Bird Park.

A success with the birds

A beautiful, sunny day in Singapore. I got up at 6 this morning and ran just under 10k. I got confused on my run and thought I'd done 10 when I'd only done 9, and had to grind out another one; not my most enjoyable effort, but at least I'm gradually starting to catch back up with my training.

Today is a public holiday, which is fortunate because after that I was a busted flush, capable only of lying on the floor all morning. If I'd had to go back to the office, things would have looked bad.

In the afternoon, we went over to the bird park in Jurong. In one of the aviaries they have the world's largest man-made waterfall. In an aviary. The park kept stressing this, almost as if they wanted somebody to point out there was a larger man-made waterfall outside of an aviary somewhere else. I'm not sure what the criteria for a waterfall are: perhaps I could run a hose out the window from the kitchen sink of our 21st storey flat.

It's not that a sixteen storey high man-made waterfall in an aviary isn't impressive, it's just that you don't visit the bird park for the water features.

You visit for the monorail.

A gift from above

A bird shat on me today, as I walked to work. I suppose that's good luck. It was a little splatter of green-brown guano that hit my trousers and the edge of my Kindle. I must have been lucky, because I had a packet of tissues in my bag and I wasn't looking up at the source of the defecation.

Then again, perhaps if I'd been really lucky it would have missed me completely.

I hope it was a bird. Let's say no more of that.

The Birds

After a 6-hour coach ride (which felt more like a 4-hour coach ride punctuated by two hours of the coach sitting in various random car parks) I got to Kuala Lumpur, and walked from the Berjaya Times Square mall to our hotel. Along the way, I had taxi driver after taxi driver ask me if I wanted a ride.

As I got closer to the hotel, three women scuttled out of a doorway to ask if I wanted a ride. "Hey baby, do you remember me from Australia?" one of them lilted. I considered stopping and asking whether she'd served me a Thai green curry in the Gold Coast in 2008, or if she'd been queuing up for a delayed flight to Hong Kong with Qantas, but I had to assume she was just guessing I was Australian. After all, I was a solitary male, who needed a shave and a bath, and I was wearing shorts and pulling a suitcase. This was just the latest ignominous misidentification of my nationality (after the Singaporeans guessing I was French or Dutch) so I trundled along to my hotel, where the check in staff didn't believe my passport and had to wake up my wife before allowing me into the hotel room. That I had booked and paid for.

(I can't be too annoyed, because at the same time that this is going on, HSBC are continually texting me whenever my wife uses her bank card, as if she can't be trusted and her husband requires full financial oversight. It's strange living in the 1850s, it surely is.)

Anyway, today we got up and after I ate my own body weight in croissants, we took a taxi to the bird park. It's big: apparently one of the largest in Asia, and is chockful of peafowl, cattle egrets and blue crested pigeons. There are a lot of different aviaries, including some where the inmates will climb onto you. For a while I was amused as lories stood on a man's bald head, until a cockatoo alighted on my backpack and then tried to eat my camera.

Jurong Bird Park

I woke after twelve hours of blissful sleep, to hear my wife completing the washing up from last night. (In the old days we'd have paper plates or smash all the glasses, but now we're 'civilised' there's extra work entailed.  It doesn't feel like a progression.  I was planning on spending the whole day being lacksidaisical, but instead, in just three short hours I was propelled out of the flat, down to the MRT station and over to Boon Ley to catch a bus to the Jurong Bird Park.

Leeds Castle

Today we got up early - or rather, early for me, which means extracting myself from bed before 9:30 in the a.m. and then getting in the car and hurtling down to Junction 7 of the M20.

Then realising that Leeds Castle is near Junction 8 of the M20, and having to go round the roundabout again, get back on the motorway and hurtle a bit more.

Oxford

Last night we drove to Oxford, and stayed in a strange hotel down towards Henley. It was odd in many ways; the photos on the website suggested it was a small building, when it turned out to be a maze of converted barns, joined together by a multiplicity of corridors. The exterior and the entrance way were incredibly grand, but the room (when we reached it, after trudging through an eternity of fire doors) was somehow basic and utilitarian. Yes, it had a bed, and a carpet, and a lovely view of the river, but it felt most suitable for a conference or a joyless affair conducted after work. Odd, that.

Wetlands again

With an old friend in town, and recovering from the glory of yesterday's birthday dinner (crowned with an enormous apple pie with my name on it) I planned to revisit the Wetlands Park today.