Singapore-Padangbai

I am most flattered that some of you lovely readers have felt snubbed, disappointed, offended, even, that the bloggy blog has not been updated for some time.  This is not due to lack of awesome activities and adventures being undertaken, rather an excess of them and therefore insufficient time to sit down and tell you all about them.

Now that the Easter holidays are upon us, I have taken the equivalent of a jaunt to the South of France, and am in Bali with Shining Shamrock.  We flew here via Singapore, a city-country I am now well acquainted with, having visited it all of three times in as many weeks due to Frenchie's insane job.  Shining Shamrock and I discovered yet more delights in the shape of tea rooms, outdoor sculptures, art galleries and egg men.

Egg man!

Our most exciting discovery, however, was copious amounts of food and alcohol in a restaurant called 'Crostini's' in the Muslim quarter.  Shamrock is naturally drawn to dark alleys with grafitti scrawled all over the wall, but much to my relief (and her disappointment), in Singapore, these are not the hangout spots of unsavory ladies and hoodlums, but rather 'cool', 'trendy' and 'funky' bars and restaurants.  In a word, the most pretentious alleyway in all of Singapore.  However, both Shamrock and I come from solid, working class roots, and delight in anything that makes us feel rich, spoilt and expatty, so we ate artistically created crostini, drank cocktails and beer, and made friends with the chef, who then took it upon himself to feed us complimentary dishes all evening. 

Amazing and delicious.  Everyone should go there and visit James the Crostini Chef.  He also gives you complimentary Chinese names with every meal.  Mine, obviously, is Li Hi Shan (Hardcore Mountain), and we christened Shamrock as Kai Xin Hua (Happy Flower), as she shall now be known forever more.

After savouring all the delights that Singapore had to offer us in a very brief weekend, Happy Flower and I then boarded a plane to Bali.  The journey was uneventful, other than, whilst buying an Indonesian sim card in the first sim card shop I saw to adhere to Frenchie's international phone calling demands, a young Australian man came hurriedly up to the counter, asking if the shopkeepers had seen a brown envelope.  Calmly, the shopkeepeer pulled an envelope out from under the counter.  "Drugs?"  I asked (joking, obvioulsy), "Or passport?"  The passport suggestion was also a joke, but the young man, looking quite relieved said, "Yeah, passport.  Man.  Too easy!"  I'm not entirely sure what 'too easy' means, maybe, 'it was too easy to steal someone else's identity and buy passage into Australia by organising an under-the-counter passport heist', but I tell the story to show you that it is not just me who is a fool with her passport.  18-year-olds who don't know any better and have never been travelling before also leave their important documentation in silly places.

Happy Flower and I spent two days lounging around in the pool of our hotel in Padangbai, drinking beer at the swim-up bar, watching Indonesian bands sing U2 whilst singing along enthusiastically in a small square, making friends with Peace Corps volunteers from Chicago and teachers from Scotland/Spain who were now teaching in Shanghai, and sweating off half our body weight whilst sunbathing in hidden coves before getting the boat over to Lombok for a trek of epic proportions, that we didn't realise was a trek of epic proportions...