Your tax dollars make me smile

Sorry for the delay in blogs. My new job has had me working a lot this week and to top it off, one of the lovely monsoon storms of Singapore knocked out our internet and we've both been too busy to call and get it fixed. So here's the blog I meant to write on Tuesday:



Thank you tax payers of America. Because of you, we not only got a lovely free flight to Japan (to merely get to a decent grocery store) but we also got enough food to feed a small country on both the flight to and from. Please read about the ridiculous amount of food we were given.



First, the lovely flight attendant came around with a basket of peanuts and pretzels. She even told us to take a couple if we wanted. Um totally. Airline peanuts are so much better than regular peanuts. I grabbed like three.



Then, she came around five minutes later to take our food order. Chicken or sea bass? Sea bass?! On a plane? Interesting...



However, I don't trust seafood from unreliable sources and I hadn't warmed up to the free flight people yet. So I got the chicken.



Look how much food they gave us:





That's two large chicken breasts, steamed veggies, mashed potatoes and gravy, a dinner roll, biscuit crackers, shrimp cocktail, a brownie/cake, cheese spread and OJ. I could barely eat half. I snuck the pre-wrapped stuff into my carry-on. You can give a cheap skate money, but deep down she's still a cheap skate. :)



So then, after the smorgusboard of food, I tried to take a nap. Twenty minutes in, the same chick came around with a basket full of candy bars. Twix, 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, Snickers, and the list goes on. She again told us to grab a couple. This chick played dirty.



I finally get a nap in during the in-flight movie. I awake to this:

A SNACK! A friggin' snack?! Are you kidding me? I can't possibly fit anymore food into my body —or my bag for that matter. So I get the brilliant idea of just taking it off the plane with us, in plain view, and hoping no one notices. The guy working "customs" was so tired and annoyed that we got in late that he didn't mind much. We ended up taking three boxes of snack with us cuz all of us were too full. I had dinner for three nights. No joke.

And now here's the best place in Asia. It's the building that holds the commissary, BX and two food courts. It's ginormous. I love it. We went here everyday. Apparently this is the type of thing that they have on most bases, just not ours. We totally got shafted on the whole convenience thing.

So yeah our NEX doubles as our commissary and a PX, but...it's about the size of a large gas station convenience store. If they don't have what we need, which is usually the case, we must go out in town. However, that requires paying four times as much. For example, the equivalent of a gallon of milk costs about $10 in Singapore grocery stores. A small bottle of Coffee Mate coffee creamer costs as much as the milk. So yeah, it sucks. That's what happens when you live in a country that must ship everything into it. Tropical paradise it might be, but for those that live in it, it's an expensive hell at times. Needless to say, I'm ok now. I brought home some coffee creamer in a cooler. I love you Japanese commissary! Will you please come home with me?