The Monkey Wants My Baby

This week’s post begins with a correction and a confession. First, the correction: In my last post, I mentioned Dagny and I like to visit the coy ponds in the morning. Oops. They are actually koi ponds, filled with koi fish—not modestly shy water. And now, my confession: I have most likely misspelled and will continue to misspell a lot of words in my entries. I’ve never been a particularly good speller to begin with, and let’s face it, very few things I hear during the day are written down for me. I’m working with a very wide, strictly phonetic net here. There have been times I have asked (usually for blogging purposes) how something is spelled (like ohta), but even that doesn’t always deliver stellar results. For instance, just last week I made my first ever trip to the dry cleaner… it was located in the apartment complex across the street from us, hidden somewhere in a labyrinth of buildings and walkways (the complex is monstrous). On my way in, I asked the guard at the gate where I needed to go…

“Towa jkhay,” he says.

“Tower J?” I ask.

“Jkhay.”

“Tower K?”

“Jkhay.”

Oh heavens, we’re getting nowhere—and fast. Then an idea hits me. “Tower J, as in…" But I cannot, in that moment, think of a SINGLE word that starts with the letter J. Believe it or not, my brain (which I’m convinced likes to play very cruel games with the rest of me) starts screaming, “Jabberwocky! I dare you to say Jabberwocky!”

Finally, after a moment of awkward silence, I finally say (with copious amounts of relief and pride), “Jakarta!” Go me. Everyone here knows Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. “Okay, J as in Jakarta, or K, as in…” Oh, you must be kidding me. K… K… K… “The, um, middle… letter… in Jakarta.”

And now you know why my spelling stinks, and why I probably won’t do a darn thing to remedy it at this point.

This week (though I guess by now, it was last week) was kicked off with the Hungry Ghost Festival. This week, according to Taoist and Buddhist beliefs, the gates of Heaven and Hell are opened, and the deceased return to earth to walk amongst us. Queue the creepy music from The Twilight Zone. Being a total Halloween nut and lover of ghost stories (NOT horror stories!), this festival immediately caught my interest.

Heading out of our apartment Monday morning, I’m hit with the rich smell of incensed smoke, and a thick haze that has nothing to do with the humidity (for once) saturates the air. All up and down our street, people are tossing burning stacks of Heaven and Hell money into metal drums, and are planting glowing joss sticks in the ground. Wax from burning candles streaks the sidewalks, and several times I see paper replicas of everyday items go bouncing down the street gutters, engulfed in flames, like scary tumbleweeds from an old Western. Kudos to you if you remember my trip to funeral row, where I got to see the making and selling of these paper items. The week of the Ghost Festival must be similar in scope to America’s Black Friday for those vendors.

Also, all along the sidewalks and in the parks, prayer and offering tents have been set up. The reason everyone is burning money, laying out food, and praying is to keep the wandering spirits appeased, so they (especially the ones from Hell) will return happy to their realms at the end of the lunar cycle. If the gates close while the spirits are still wandering in search of food and money (and apparently a little respect), they will be trapped on earth as ghosts, until next year’s festival.

Melted wax and ashes covering the sidewalks.

Hell money and paper replicas that can be purchased for the Ghost Festival.

Offering tables similar to these can be found all over the city... pictured here are candles, joss sticks, and plates of food (mostly vegetarian).

I recently bought myself a Singapore cookbook. Every morning, Brad and I pick out what we are going to attempt to cook that night, and then I head to the wet market and grocery store, and we all three get adventurous. We set up assembly (or disassembly) lines in the kitchen… Brad’s really good at popping heads off prawns, which is nice, because I hate doing it. I get kind of gaggy when the brains burst all over my hands in a brown gooey mess. But I’m really good at removing the mud vein. While here, I learned how to use a wood skewer to slide them out with ease, without having to slice the prawn open (or “butterfly” them, which is the “lazier” approach). Believe it or not, the cooking has been going pretty well! Several times I’ve had to Google an ingredient, having no idea if it’s a fruit, vegetable, spice, or something that used to breathe and walk, but all in all, the results have been amazingly good. And healthy! And, most surprising of all, increasingly vegetarian. Gasp!

Every time I go to the wet market, I learn something new. This week, I realized I can use my cuter-than-cupid daughter to my advantage. All I have to do is take her out of her stroller, put on her little monkey backpack with the long tail that clips to my shorts, and… Bam! I no longer have to seek out the vendors… they come to us! That’s right, Dagny giggles and blows kisses and waves to all the elderly Chinese folks, and I immediately find people offering me great deals on veggies, and free bags of peanuts and tea biscuits. Is it wrong to be exploiting my daughter this way??? I kind of think no, because she has an amazing way of making everyone she meets deliriously happy. She doesn’t care how old anyone is, what their nationality is, or whether they can walk or are restricted to a wheelchair. She loves, hugs, high-fives, and blows kisses to everyone she meets. This week, she approached an old woman who was hobbling with a cane, took her free hand, and started walking through the aisles of the market with her. The woman was just beside herself. She couldn’t speak English, but kept stroking Dagny’s arms and kissing the top of her head. And then she led us to a stand run by a friend of hers, who gave us over a pound of fresh prawns for only $6. Thank you, Dags! Dagny actually does this kind of thing a lot… takes the hands of random people and babbles to them for a little while, then blows them a kiss with a big “Mmwaah,” and is on her way again, off to entertain someone new.

Dagny working the wet market.

This week, we finally decided it was time to lease a car. Brad’s new business facility is on the north end of the island, and takes an hour and a half to get to by train—or else is a $30 cab ride each way. The car makes things a lot easier for him. And as for me, during one of my most recent cab rides, my driver had to slam on his brakes four times, kissed one bumper, and ran two VERY red lights! All this with Dagny wrapped in my arms, seated on my lap. After that, I was ready for a car, too… but I warned Brad I don’t ever want to actually drive it. I’m not ready to attempt driving on the opposite side of the car, on the opposite side of the road, in a country where even the locals openly admit they are among the worst drivers in the world.

Brad's first day of driving. Proof positive I'm a total dork, since I felt the need to mark the moment on film.

"Mom, Dad? Why is everything backward? Can't we just take the train?"

I also splurged for a bike this week, so now I can take Dagny to the beach more easily… just a quick, ten-minute ride on my bright purple jalopy. Yes, jalopy… or whatever the equivalent word would be for a bike. Even though this bike is brand spankin’ new, it sounds and rolls like the bike from the movie “Friday.” It creaks, clatters, and whenever I need to shift gears (which thankfully isn’t very often, since Singapore is pretty flat) I have to get off the bike and manually adjust the chain. But this isn’t really a big deal, since I have to stop about every twenty minutes anyway to re-raise the seat. Want to know what kind of a bike $100 gets you? A big piece-o-crap, that’s what.

Here’s a picture of Dagny in her new bike seat. I think she looks like one of the mushroom guys from Super Mario Brothers.

With our new car, we took our first family trip to the zoo this weekend. The Singapore Zoo is touted as one of the finest in the world, and now that I’ve seen it—or maybe experienced it is more accurate—I have to agree. We bought a year pass, which was a good thing because after spending almost four hours there, we only saw about twenty percent of the exhibits.

This. Zoo. ROCKS!!!!

We spent most of our time exploring the primate enclosures. Now this just blew me away… the monkeys are “free range!” This means they swing in the trees over your head and drop onto the park signs beside you, staring with amazingly human eyes as you walk past. Dagny was in heaven, giggling and pointing at all the monkeys as we walked through. Some were pocket-sized, and even the toughest-looking visitor couldn’t look at them without saying “Awww,” while others were obviously quite large (like the orangutans and chimps).

Along one of the paths, I let Dagny out of her stroller (with her monkey backpack on) and let her walk for a bit. Suddenly, a small clump of visitors in front of me start pointing and yelling something in Chinese. I immediately tense, because they are gesturing at something over my head and behind me. And then, two seconds later, a feisty little monkey comes flying off a pavilion rooftop and smacks me square on the head with a tree branch. The other visitors, who all have their cameras out, think this is fantastic… something tells me I’m going to appear in several home video viewings this week.

But the best part is that the monkey won’t leave us alone. He (or she?) is fixated on Dagny. I don’t know if it was the monkey backpack she was wearing, or if maybe her cuteness transcends species, but it followed her down the path and into a picnic pavilion. Its eyes darted between me and her, and it occasionally reached a paw (or hand? My dad and I are in disagreement on this) toward her, never aggressively, but with such affectionately wide and wondering eyes that one of the visitors says to me, “The monkey wants your baby.”

Dags with her monkey backpack on.

Just moments before the "monkey attack."

Inside the picnic pavilion... this is the little guy who follows Dagny around for about ten minutes, and won't take his eyes off her.

He occasionally reaches out a hand and tries to climb down to her, but then he catches sight of me and returns to the rafters.

Daddy and daughter in front of a monkey jungle gym. As you can see, Dags is having the time of her life!

The car Brad wishes the leasing agent gave him.

Here's hoping you all had as fun and relaxing a weekend as we did! And a final reminder from our friends at the zoo: the family that grooms ticks out of each other's hair together, stays together.