Perhaps a lil' too much KU-ness, even for me

Aaron and I may have Jayhawk memorabilia oozing out the windows of our home, but we do have boundaries.


This girl apparently doesn't.
I found this picture on AOL's (or it could have been Yahoo!, I can't remember) list of worst tattoos on women.

Talk about dedicated.

Mustafa, but not the one from the Lion King

Today, I went to Mustafa. For those of you who don't live in Singapore, Mustafa is the 24 hour shopping mall. It's down near Little India and for some reason, I never stumbled into it. Then again, I've been to Little India four times and still couldn't tell you how to get to any certain shop there. I'm observant. Ha.

I went with some of the gals from around our area. We're a good mix. One of us is Irish, one is Kiwi (New Zealander for you Americans who don't know what that is) and the rest of us come from all over the U.S. It makes for an interesting outing.

And because I suck today, I forgot to take a picture of the place for the blog. I did find their website though. So if you're curious, click HERE to see what it's like. This place is crazy. They have everything. Seriously. They do. As a group, our bags contained things like Karo syrup, floor cleaner, Turkish delight, Nike sneakers, workout shirts and so on. It's at least 6 stories (storeys, as they spell it here) high, but it could be more. I only made it to three as I made a poor choice in footwear this morning.

After our shopping adventure, the gals and I went to eat at a vegetarian restaurant in Little India.

We ordered this sampler type thing. Each of our platters came with a different type of bread and then we each got several soups, sauces and sides. Some stuff was spicy. Some stuff was sweet. Some was even creamy. I enjoyed them all. Because I'm a fatty.

Of course, the largest and most phallic looking bread was placed in front of me. What can I say? My life is awkward.

Here's the group of gals.

And the girl in the back, with the translucent skin? That's me.

See Sis, I've completely abstained from tanning. I'm only wondering if it's healthy for everyone else to see someone with skin that bright in the sunlight.

A Matter of Perspective, I guess

Now this is just me talking here, but I think they may need to consider a name change for the Hotel Grand Paradise.

Hmmm....

Say it in Singlish

Actually this could just be a British thing.

Either way, it drives me up a wall.



American English: "erbs"

Singlish: "herbs" --as in, they pronounce the "H".



There's this herbal body cream commercial that keeps playing and everytime I hear it, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard.

It's "ERBS" people. The "H" is silent.

Ok. I'm done now.

Snakes on a plane

Did you all read this story today?

Baby pythons escape during flight in Australia

Four friggin' baby pythons escaped from the cargo area during a flight in Australia. Are you friggin' kidding me?!!! Seriously. Why would this even be a possibility? Wouldn't they insure that snakes would be properly secured? Especially. On. An. Airplane!!!! I mean the rest of us have to be practically strip searched before we get on board. Wouldn't someone think "Hey, we should really make sure these deadly snakes don't get out and kill everyone on board"? I mean really. Wouldn't that be on the top of the security list?

Most of you know that Singapore is fairly close to Australia. It is frequented by many Aussies during their "holidays" (also known in America as vacations). I'm a little uneasy about this now. If these kids are gonna start taking snakes on planes with them, I think they may need to think of a new vacation spot.

Singapore is already chocked full of snakes. We need no more. Every month I hear a new story about someone in our neighborhood having to call our maintenance guys to have them removed from areas in and around their homes. They're so bad that when I first met some of the wives here, they told me to always check the toilet for snakes before I sat down because it's not uncommon for them to pop up through the pipes.

Have you ever had to pee in fear? I do it every morning at 7 am when I cannot hold it any longer. What makes matters worse is that our toilets are navy blue. You practically need a flashlight to see up in there anyway.

I need to do some research before our next big move. I think I'm going to Google "Places in USA with little to no snakes".

Mr. Dentist man and his drugs

Last week I unexcitedly went to the military dentist. I had to have a cavity redone because apparently the crap the last dentist put in my tooth wasn't doing it's job. Super fun.

So when I go in there, they give me a shot to numb my mouth. And I waited. Half an hour rolled by and all I had was a mild tingling, but that's about it. Because I'm kind of terrified of pain, I told Mr. Dentist man that I need twice the amount of drugs that most people require because my body is stubborn.

That could be true. I'm mildly sure that my mom told me that once. However, I wouldn't put my life on it. Drugs smrugs. Fill er up.

Mr. Dentist man then pumped a lot of stuff into my jaw. It went numb in 30 seconds. And then it stayed that way. For a LONG time. I felt nothing in the whole right side of my face for seven hours following the procedure. It was amusing for the first two hours. Then when I got hungry, I was no longer amused. I couldn't eat for fear that I would unknowingly chew off my dead lip. So I sat there and poked myself in the face to see if I could wake up the numbed nerves. It's a no go in case you were wondering. I had to wait for food until like 9pm. So yeah, moral of the story: don't lie to your dentist about how much of the drugs your body requires.

It made me think of Little David's trip to the dentist.



I really feel for the kid.

Binderlicious

Remember the day I busted out of the house to get recipe binder ingredients? Well, after a SATC and gummi bear marathon for two days, I finished it. Um sort of. It's going to be a constant work in progress. I'll be constantly adding recipes as I get them. But it's finished for now.

I am so excited about it that I had to put it on the blog.

So here's the binder I got. Before I did anything to it. Yes Mom, it's pink. I thought you'd be excited.
And I bought some black construction paper. (The only package left in the entire store.)

And I got three different types of plastic sleeves. Here we have regular single sheet sleeves, four pouch post card-sized sleeves and double pouch half page-sized sleeves. Notice how most of the words are in Japanese? That was fun.So I busted out my "creative" supplies. I dislike the word "craft" because it reminds me of old women in the 80s who used lots of yarn, cotton balls and puff paint to make hideous monstrosities. Mine are "creative" supplies.


Here is the finished outside of my recipe binder. I'm mildly obsessed with it. Aaron didn't believe that I actually did it all by myself.

Hmph.

Inside, I have cover pages for each section. They are a lil cheesy, but sometimes I like cheesy.

For some of my recipes, I had to glue them to the black construction paper.

For others, I had to put them into the specialized plastic sleeves. See how the index cards fit great into the postcard-sized pouches? Now I can read both the front and back. Or I can even take them out if I want.

So yeah. I really like it. It's way cooler than the ones I saw at the bookstores. It'd be even cooler if I had a Hobby Lobby around here. I guess I'll just have to wait on that.

Easter Funday

For Easter, Aaron and I planned a day of activities. Actually, we only planned dinner and a movie, but as things usually go in Singapore, it turned into an all day thing.

I forgot our good camera at the house, so I had to take pictures with my handphone (Singaporean speak for cell phone). I apologize for the really bad picture quality. The camera on my phone gets pissy when there's bad lighting.

We decided to go see Fast and Furious 4. Aaron and I had both gone to see the first two movies when we were in high school. So since they brought back the original cast, we figured it would be better than the "Tokyo Drift" crap they came out with a few years back. Here's a really bad picture of a Singaporean movie concession stand. They had hot dogs, cheese hot dogs, nachos, popcorn, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, Asian snack mix, peanuts, Peanut M&Ms and Plain M&Ms. That's about it. We're not even daring enough to try the nachos either. We had a bad experience with Singaporean movie theatre "Mexican" food and can't go down that road again. (I still can't figure out why that guacamole tasted sweet.)

This is the thing that I find the strangest about Singapore movie theatre popcorn. It comes in salted or sweet. We're not talkin' kettle corn here either. It's either sprinkled with salt or sugar. Effing sick. I cannot bring myself to eat popcorn with sugar on it. Oh and there's NO melted butter to drizzle (or pour like I do) on top. Paula Deen would throw a royal hissy fit. I kept mine quiet-ish.

So after the movie, we hailed a cab and took a trip south. We decided to try Brazil's. It's a Brazilian steakhouse style restaurant that we'd heard a lot of good things about. Aaron and I became obsessed with Brazilian style steakhouses on our honeymoon. We've found three such restaurants in Singapore and go there on special occasions.

However, we arrived an hour and a half before they opened. So we had some time to kill.
We grabbed a table at a small hawker-style food shop and drank a couple Tiger beers.

We sat next to this sad little crab in this dry fish tank. I named him Charlie. I wanted to stage a covert mission to put some water in his tank because I'm fairly sure that crabs need water to survive. Aaron quickly squashed that plan by reminding me of what will inevitably happen to poor Charlie when someone orders the Chilli Crab. I had to not look at Charlie any more after that.

When six o'clock finally rolled around, we had dinner. It was everything we were told. Very delish. We stuffed our faces so fast that we were full 10 minutes in.

For those of you who don't know what a Brazilian steakhouse (or sometimes referred to as Brazilian BBQ) restaurant is, the picture below illustrates the premise. Several people go around the restaurant with these giant skewers of meat and stop at each table offering to cut off a chunk of meat. There's skewers of filet, roasted pork, bacon wrapped chicken, fish, grilled pineapple, top sirloin...and the list goes on and on. Basically you get so much meat that you can't even finish what's on your plate before the next guy is asking whether or not you want to try some glazed ham.

Oh and there is a salad bar behind the guy in this picture. It has all kinds of veggies and salad to balance out all that carnivorous goodness.

So we sat at the restaurant for almost two hours just trying to stuff as much food as was humanly possible into our tummies. It was soo soo good that we felt it was wrong to leave it on our plate uneaten.

Then this lady walked in and I had to take a picture of her hair.

Seriously. Get a look at that. How and why would you ever do that to your head?

We had a good chuckle.

Then we went home and called our peeps back in Kansas. It was a good Easter. We had a really good time.

Busting out of the house

Since my new job hasn't started yet, I find myself with a lot of spare time. I enjoy spare time. Spare time is nice. Ya know what isn't nice? When spare time becomes the only thing you have. So now that I've watched an entire season of True Blood, re-read Breaking Dawn (my favorite Twilight book in the series), cleaned every inch of our home -- minus the man cave (because it smells like a boy) and exhausted every internet site I could surf, I needed something to do. And I needed a sense of purpose.

So I made up an errand. It wasn't an important one, but in order to give myself that sense of purpose I made it sound important in my head. I needed a recipe binder. I have tons of paper scraps and index cards with recipes all over my kitchen. I also didn't want to just rewrite them in a shiny new book because I think that kills the character of the recipe. I like the tattered recipe scrap with my mom's handwriting on it. So I needed a binder that I could personalize. And not just any recipe binder. This one had to match the one in my head. They sell similar recipe binders in every bookstore and I looked through them all. But, I wasn't going to buy an overpriced, crappier version of the perfect recipe binder that I have in my head. So I went on a search to gather the necessary materials to create my own.

I hopped on the bus and rode to the MRT and then rode down to Orchard Road.

Here is my walk down Orchard Road (Singapore's shopping district) on my way to Takashimaya, the mother of all shopping malls.


Doesn't it look like half shopping district, half jungle? I really like Orchard Road. It's pretty and there's lots of westerners standing around looking lost. I fit right in. I'm lost most of my life.

Three hours later, I've gathered the tools to create my book. It was a long process that involved several stores and examining several binder prospects. When I finally checked out at some Japanese book store, the clock said it was 4:35. That meant that I had an hour to get home (because that's approximately how long it takes on the MRT/bus to make it there) and 30 minutes to make dinner for Aaron. That so wasn't happening. My shopping trip tired me out.

This is what dinner looks like in Singapore when Megan is too lazy to cook it.

No, not the Singaporeans sitting at the table. Look behind them. These are the food stalls in Northpoint Mall. We come here sometimes for cheap Singaporean food. As you can see there are tons of these little "shops" to pick from. Each one claims to serve a different type of cuisine. However they all manage to incorporate rice and fish into most of their dishes. I'm not sure how that makes them different from each other, but whatever. The best part is that each meal costs about four Sing dollars. That's about $2.64 in the States. I love CHEAP! I also love TAKE AWAY.

So we dined on Baked Chicken Cheese rice, Spring Onion Chicken and Mee Goreng in the comfort of our own airconditioned, English-speaking home. Not that there's anything wrong with not having either of those things.

This is why you're fat.

Ok so I know I do a lot of complaining about the digusting food I find in Asia. I've even eaten some of this crap for the sake of the blog. (durian, black chicken, weird yam pudding dessert, etc.) You're welcome.

When Aaron and I first started encountering these odd delights, we questioned our own culture a bit. What was it that we Americans ate that disgusted our Singaporean friends? We couldn't really come up with anything at the time. Gravy? Good. Chicken fried steak? Heaven. DQ Oreo Brownie Earthquake? Total foodgasm.

So, I think I finally found the answer. There's this awesome blog that I stumbled upon called Thisiswhyyou'refat.com. I'm pretty sure it would scare the Bejesus out of every Singaporean with a spoon. It's full of the disgustingly fattening food creations that Americans put together and eat. And I'm pretty sure in return end up wearing on their thighs. And guts. And man boobs --moobs, if you will.

The saddest part is, as disgusting as the food is. I'd eat about 75% of it. Yeah, I'm a closet fattie. I won't eat fish ball soup here in Singapore, but I'd totally dive into the Snack food pizza (pepperoni pizza topped with Doritos, popcorn chicken, corn dog slices, and something else delicious that I can't remember now).

And the deep fried peanut butter covered brownie wrapped in cookie dough? I'd add some ice cream and hot fudge and go to town. I'd even hide in my bathroom to eat it so that Aaron couldn't judge me. Then, I'd rub my face all over the plate to make sure that I licked every sugar crystal off. Nom nom nom.

You seriously have to go to the site. Then you have to try to lie to me and say that you honestly wouldn't eat some of that stuff and enjoy every minute.

Spreer Family Fun Day

On our first weekend in America we finally made it to Kansas City's Power and Light district. Aaron had never been there before and when I was in KC last, it wasn't completely finished yet. We'd been dying to go with Aaron's family ever since a certain phone call from a downtown Kansas City bathroom had us cracking up for hours on a Sunday afternoon (late Saturday night, Kansas City bathroom time). So Aaron's parents, his sister Jessica, her husband Mike, Aaron and I all loaded up the family truckster...er the family SUV (ha ha, just jokes!) and drove down to downtown Kansas City.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Aladdin, which if you haven't seen it yet, is awesome. They just remodeled it and it is pretty flippin' cute. Very modern and charming. Here's some pics:

I love this pic of Aaron and his mom. Cute cute cute.

Mike and Jess. Not the best picture, but I thought it was funny. Mike is cracking up about something in most of the pictures I have.

This was at Howl at the Moon. We all love this place. The one in Kansas City is a lot more fun than the one in Singapore. I may be biased. Sorry Singapore, my people don't live there.

The crazy kids in front of the buckets that Kenny got us. Hmmm....who's the bad influence now?

Here's the Spreer gals. I love these girls.

We had mucho fun and a couple of us had a rough morning following our festivities. :)

Things you take for granted

From the moment we stepped off the plane into America we were basically trying to soak up as much of "home" as we could. We took deep breaths and concluded that compared to Asia, America smells like fried foods, smog and rubber. Trust me, it's a good smell. It's home. :) I felt at ease immediately.

We looked around in amazement at the vast open spaces of well, everything. There weren't people lined up shoulder to shoulder anywhere and we were in one of the nation's busiest airports. It was so nice to be able to spread out without bumping some Asian person in the head. I could've skipped all the way down the terminal and not bumped into a single person. But I didn't...because my husband probably would have left my insane self there in Chicago.

There were two remarkable things that happened in the O'Hare airport that made me stop and realize just how much I'd missed some things about my homeland. To you folks, these will seem really silly and you'll probably say "who cares?", but to me it was an eye opener.

Event #1

Aaron and I stood waiting to collect our baggage from the long flight from Hong Kong to Chicago and several people stood around us chatting.

Megan: Aaron, do you realize what's happening right now?

Aaron: No, what?

Megan: We're overhearing conversations and for once, we actually understand what the people are saying!

Aaron: You're right!

It's something we rarely, if ever, experience in Singapore. Most of the citizens in Singapore speak English as a second language and therefore speak mostly in their native tongue. I hate it because I always think they're talking about us. Call me paranoid, but I swear they are. If I knew another language I would totally talk about other people right in front of them just because I could. Tell me it wouldn't be entertaining. You'd totally do it too. Don't lie.

Event #2

Aaron and I stopped by this sports bar and grill to grap a bite to eat on our layover. We both ordered a drink and some onion rings (because that was the most American thing on the menu). I was insanely thirsty after that long flight and was sucking down my Diet Coke pretty fast. As I got down to the last inch of liquid I began taking small sips in order to make it last longer. I was so thirsty that it was really hard to ration it out. Then I remembered that in America you get all the free refills you want. Heck yes! I could've jumped up and down I was so excited. I could sit at that restaurant all flippin' day and drink my weight in Diet Coke and all I'd pay was three bucks (or something like that.) After that, I was chugging Diet Coke like there was no tomorrow.

So see, I told you that they were really silly things and those were just the things we experienced in the airport before we even got to Kansas. Don't even get me started on my early morning trip to a deserted Wal-mart or driving a car again. I didn't realize just how spoiled we Americans actually are. The things we take for granted are luxuries in other parts of the world. I think we should all take a moment sometimes to appreciate the things that we get to experience as Americans. Most of us have cars, backyards, very few lines to wait in, huge ovens, Super Targets, Drive-thrus and customer service in general. Imagine if you lived in a country, like Singapore, with your husband and children. Could you do all of that without a car, a yard, a one-stop shop? Oh and P.S. grocery stores in Singapore don't open till 11am and close at 9pm. You have a very small window to get your shopping done in. I barely do it some days and I just live with one big kid. (Love ya babe.) However, when it's all said and done, I like being a spoiled American. I'm counting down the days till we move back permanently. I guess my own lesson just passed me over. :)