On the Move

I seem to have gotten about 2 days behind in my blog, so I am going to do a little fast forward here to catch up. Two days ago we moved to a new hotel. Before we left the first hotel, we went for a swim in the outdoor rooftop pool on the 24th floor. Yes, we remembered the sunscreen.

The purpose of moving is partly to save money. The one we are in now for Fri. Sat. and Sun. is a fancy convention centre hotel but cheap on the weekends as it is used more for business through the week. The good side about moving is that you get to live in a different area of the city. We have discovered a great food court near this new hotel called the Food Republic. It has a nice decor, decorated like a library with wallpaper that looks like shelves of old books. There is a big variety of food and reasonably priced. We don't really know what everything is but we both like ethnic food such as Chinese, Indian, etc. so we are willing to try new things. It is busy at lunch time so you have to share a table with other people. If you want a napkin, you have to buy it and cold drinks are sold at a separate booth. We seem to be having our main meal at lunch because Jim doesn't want to eat a big meal before going to class.

Food Republic

Anyway, back to the hotel issue. You will not believe this, but as of tomorrow, we are homeless. We have nothing booked for the next 10 days. The school was going to book our hotel, but we said to just give us the money allocated and we would take care of booking it our self. Easier said than done. We now realize that we need to move closer to the school, which is in the Chinatown area. Jim is using a taxi to get back and forth to class, and even though it is cheap compared to home, it still adds up over 2 weeks. He tried the subway on the first night, but it is too much walking and he took over an hour to get home. So a main goal today is to find a hotel in the perfect location.

Now, to answer the language question. There are 4 official languages in Singapore.


This photo shows them, from the top--English, Chinese (Mandarin), Malay and Tamil. Most people speak English here because it is the language of instruction in schools. Chinese is the largest population group, making up 75% of the people in Singapore. English TV shows have Chinese subtitles, and vice versa. After all, China is not all that far from here.