Lanterns, Glasses, Home-made Food: January in Photos

Here's a new blog strategy--I haven't blogged for awhile, so I just look through the photos on my camera for the last couple of weeks, upload them, and explain them. Let's see how it goes, shall we?

My dad likes Japanese lanterns. Not the paper lanterns, the stone ones. For all of you saying "Huh? Stone lanterns?", see the following photos of the specimens that I've run into in Singapore in the last few days.

This one was in the lobby of my friend's condo.

This one is outside of an HDB (apartment) building right next to our church. I've seen it about a billion times and said "I should take a photo", but I just recently actually got around to it.

A cute mug that I bought the other day for my office because I'd been needing one and just stealing random ones from the pantry to drink the occasional cup of coffee, or tea, or Milo. Some students were having a sale of mugs that they had decorated themselves to raise money for some organization or another.  There were actually several really cute ones, but I eventually settled on this one because it's very pretty and I like the wraparound effect.

On the same day that I made the mug purchase, I also bought a bagel "with cream cheese" from a coffee shop. They put the cream cheese on themselves (wearing plastic gloves) because they don't have the individual cream cheese packets, and when I opened it up this is what I got. Talk about disappointing. This must be why Singaporeans are skinny.

Random Dr. Seuss-looking tree that I encountered on campus the other day. Dan didn't think it was as weird and awesome and I did. I'm just like "How in the world did that happen?"

Now get ready for: NEW GLASSES!

I didn't do my hair before these pictures, sorry for the frizziness. It doesn't always look like that. (Although I would be lying if I said that it doesn't often look like that...haha.) The ones on the left, the oval ones, are actually a very pretty dark blue, but it only comes out strongly in the sunlight. The ones on the right are a dark brown with a hint of green color, kind of similar to the shirt I'm wearing but a bit more brown. They look almost exactly like Dan's glasses actually...

Now for the cooking section: I'd been meaning to try my hand at some local Singaporean food for awhile, but I had never gotten around to it because it's kind of sad to make a big experimental dinner just for yourself. And I didn't want to try it for Dan's family in case it didn't turn out very good, which is likely when you try something completely new. So instead, I called up my new American friend Kathryn, who is a very good cook (much better than me), to see if she wanted to participate in the experiment. She did, and we tried our hand at Hokkien Mee, one of my favorites. It turned out really tasty, although it didn't really taste much like the real deal! Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of that experiment. However, I had leftover raw ingredients, and so I whipped some up a couple days later myself, making the adjustments that I'd learned about in the first batch, and it actually tasted a lot like the original this time! Here's a picture:

Hokkien mee is a mix of firm yellow egg noodles and thin rice noodles, cooked in pork stock with lime, shrimp, squid, sometimes some cabbage or other green veggie shavings, and of course your standard Asian seasonings--garlic, ginger, green onions, chili, soy sauce and oyster sauce. However, there's actually no seafood in this one (or cabbage or green onion) because I didn't have any of those things leftover. I made the pork stock with a bit of leftover bacon that I had frozen, but despite that and the missing ingredients, it still tasted pretty good.

So then I was in the cooking mood, and I decided to use some of my leftover linguine pasta from a previous Western food attempt, and attempt an original East-West fusion pasta dish. This sauce is made out of tomatoes, potatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, ginger, oyster sauce, soy sauce, and bean sprouts.  It was actually pretty good, but not liquidy enough, and also not flavorful enough. Because I was trying my own fusion, I was very hesitant with the spices/sauces because I was afraid of mixing up the balance, but it ended up a bit too bland. Still good though, and an interesting experiment! Now I know what to do better next time.

Of course, at this point I have a ton of leftover veggies and noodles, and I have to use the veggies ASAP because they're fresh, so I cooked up a couple other things in the next few days:

Dark soy sauce is an amazing condiment that automatically makes your noodles awesome and Asian-y tasting. This is just noodles, garlic, and onions (and my last tiny bit of leftover ginger), but it was awesome.

Back to Western food with a nice omelette. This one was potatoes, tomatoes, onions, avocado, and cream cheese. I also made a version of this with scrambled with tofu instead of the eggs and cream cheese--inspired by Julia, my vegan roommate from last year, who is one of my cooking icons. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture. Not a huge shame since I added too much dark soy sauce, so it didn't actually come out that well.

So there you go! Other things in the last couple of weeks: Dan's sisters have been in town for a week or two, so it was nice to see them. I bought my plane ticket back to the States and worked out my housing situation for when I'm gone and come back. I'm working on forms for my new job. I met up with a friend that I had known when I was in China--she's from Australia but she has relatives in Singapore and Malaysia and was in town for a wedding. And I had a hot pot/teppanyaki dinner at my friend Jocelyn's house with Dan and a few of course friends, and I brought Kathryn and a friend of hers who was in town for a weekend, so it was fun to have a bit of a party. Other than that, just working and hanging out with Dan. Nothing too crazy! ;)

Job

Hello!

So I recently accepted an offer for a new job, which I figured was blog-worthy even though it doesn't come with pictures. Here's the story.

My current job ends on March 31st, so I started looking for new employment in December. I was looking online and redoing my resume and also getting the workd out to my friends and contacts that I was on the lookout. One of my friends, who is a graduate student at NUS, where I work, is in my Syntax Interest Group that a few of us have weekly with my boss, Mohanan. I mentioned that I was looking for work and she is a teaching assistant and said that sometimes the department hired full-time teaching assistants, even for those who aren't graduate students. So, I emailed the head of the department. He told me that while they occasionally hired people full-time, they didn't have any space in the budget for that right now since they make the graduate students do it for free! But he did refer me to another person who was the head of my specific major that I'm working in (English Language). This person is someone I actually happen to know because I've read his work on Singlish and I sat in on his class a couple of times this semester. He asked me for my resume, just in case something came up.

A week or two later, he mentioned that there was a linguistics professor at the other major university in Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, who was looking for a research assistant. So, I looked up her email address and sent her a short email about me to say that I was interested. She asked for my resume, and then set up a meeting for me. The meeting was set for Friday, January 8th. So I was pretty much expecting an informational meeting. After all, we hadn't discussed any details. When I got there, me and Professor Tan really got along. (Of course, now she wants me to call her Ying Ying, which I will struggle with for a while I'm sure.) She told me about the project and I thought it sounded really interesting, and she asked a little bit about me, and then basically said she wanted to hire me!

I was very surprised because she hadn't really asked me too many questions. Turns out, it's not because of my sparkling resume that she was convinced to hire me. Actually, she is a previous student of my current boss, Mohanan, and she had happened to have dinner with him sometime between when I first emailed her and when we met up, and apparently he said very nice things about me. So, this is the second job I've gotten thanks to him! :)

The job is pretty technical and wide-reaching right now, and a lot of it is in the developmental stages. I'll describe it as briefly and interestingly as possible. We are looking at the phonology of Singapore English, and in particular the suprasegmentals, which are a certain subclass of sounds that are very hard to pin down because they're the less obvious sounds, not the things like "the difference between p and b", but more like, "whyat are the things that allow us to differentiate two speakers even when they say the same things?". Kind of. And in particular, we're looking at stress. Our focus is Singapore English, but to look into that we'll also be digging into Malay and several Chinese dialects. There will be a lot of detailed data collection and coding.

One interesting thing is that there are a lot of undergrads who will be helping with the nitty-gritty work, and one of my jobs will be to be supervising them. I'm super excited, because my last job didn't enclude too much in the way of human interaction.

One not-so-great thing is that NTU is further away from my house, as well as further away from downtown, further away from Dan, and further away from pretty much everything in Singapore.Oh well, you can't have everything.

So, that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about my job. (Unless you're a linguist...) I was going to end this post with pictures of me in my NEW GLASSES that I just bought a few days ago, but for some reason my pictures are failing to upload. (Although heads up--they look a lot like my old glasses...) So hopefully there will be visual documentation within the next couple of days. Also be looking forward to some pictures of food that I've been making in the last couple of weeks, some cool Japanese lanterns (for Dad) and a few other assorted interesting things. 

Engrish: Singapore Edition Part Deux

You know what time it is--time for an update on the most interesting uses of English that I've seen in the last few months, complete with pictures for proof. And let me reiterate that I do not search these out, I simply document them as they come across my path.

Thank you so much, Jerry's American Restaurant (which actually has really good ribs), for taking what could have been a simple, un-amusing typo and using some creative formatting to bump it up to Most Hilarious Beer Listing Ever.

 This one isn't too bad, but I'm just confused as to how it happened. (I'm referring to the bottom-most phrase, in case you're confused.) How do you have "Clean" and "soft" without the -s, and "shines" and "protects" with the -s? I mean, they're even alternating!  Did they do that on purpose? Maybe they though that clean and soft were adjectives, so they didn't need to have an -s? I'm so confused. Who was the label designer on this?

At first this just seems cheesy, but like something that probably wouldn't be out of place at some of those stores for pre-teens in the US. However, the last line just puts it WAY over the top--refer to the close-up below.

What!?! Where did that come from?  It's like some enterprising but poorly-trained production editor tacked it on like, "What the heck? I mean, everybody likes to be told that they're hot, right? Can't hurt."

This one isn't actually wrong at all. (So you can stop searching if you were trying to find the mistake.) I just thought it was kind and odd thing to print on a shirt...but also very cute! The only reason I actually took this picture was because it was right next to this next shirt, which caused me to get out my camera.

SCORE! There is just nothing not awkward about this t-shirt. This might be my best recent find...although there's so much competition...such as this beauty:

Oh my goodness. Mike Mouse. Classic.

This picture is practically a gift from God. This shirt belongs to Merry and I'd seen her wear it before, but I didn't want to ask her if I could take a picture of it because then I would have to tell her why I wanted to take a picture and she might have been embarrassed. However, luckily enough it got mixed up in my laundry this week, so I sneaked a pic before I returned it to her. Yes!

Hope that you've enjoyed my recent finds. Let me know what your favorite is! And if you have any amusing caption ideas or imagined backstories, please do share in a Comment :)

Four-and-a-half Holidays

I realized that I did not blog a single time over the holidays! Well, once between Halloween and Thanksgiving...but I didn't upload any pictures! So I figured I'd just do it all in one fell swoop. Prepare to travel from October 31st-January 1st in the next few minutes! :)

HALLOWEEN

So they do have Halloween here, but it's mostly just a holiday for young adults who dress up and go to bars or clubs, but kids don't dress up or go trick-or-treating or anything. Still, Dan and I thought we should do something. I don't really like loud clubs, so instead we went to a beachside bar on Sentosa island. You could either dress up or wear yellow, which was the theme. We thought about dressing up, but we a) were afraid nobody else was going to dress up, and b) kind of ran out of time to get costumes. So we just went with the yellow theme. This is actually a photo of the free photo that they took and gave us copies of. It had been rainy that day, so there weren't very many people there, so we just got a drink and then walked on the beach for awhile, which was super nice. Very low-key but enjoyable although not-very-Halloweeny Halloween!

THANKSGIVING

Here's dinner!

So no, they don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Singapore, of course. But I wanted to! So Dan and I decided to have a party at his house and invite all his friends, and I cooked. Yay! There were 13 people including us. It was a big project, and it required many trips to multiple grocery stores, starting to cook the night before, and careful over-scheduling--you see, Dan has a small countertop plug-in oven, so you can only fit in one thing at a time. I couldn't even get both pumpkin pies in at the same time!

I was pretty pleased that the turkey turned out well, despite the fact that I was using a plug-in over that I'd never used and I didn't have a meat thermometer or pop-up timer. Eek!

Yes, I should have taken pictures before we ate all (most) of the food, but things were so crazy that I didn't get around to it until later. I tried making Green Bean Casserole for the first time, and it actually turned out well! Also, the sweet potatoes with marshmallows was surprisingly good, the gravy came out well, and a few people even enjoyed the salad! (They don't really eat raw vegetables here...)

So here are some post-dinner shots of people trying to digest their food-babies.

 

2.5-YEARIVERSARY

Not really a holiday, but I figured I'd throw it in here. As of November 29, Dan and I had been together for two and a half years. We tend to celebrate half years, particularly since we're not always in the same place/country on our actual anniversary. Dan took me to a nice Italian restaurant. He also surprised me by recruiting a friend that I had gone shopping with to help him track down a dress that I mentioned I had tried on and wanted, but waited too long and when I went back to the same outlet it was gone. Him and my friend found the dress at another outlet and he bought it for me--it's the dress I'm wearing in the picture. He's the best boyfriend ever. Also featured in this picture are our wonderful desserts--that chocolate cake thing with liquid chocolate on the inside, a la mode, and a wonderful panna cotta. My main course was a fantastic gnocchi. All-around score!


CHRISTMAS

 

 

Pictures of my Christmas tree! Dan and I went out and bought it. He physically took it out of the box and set it up, and I strung the lights and made all the ornaments by hand. It was pretty fun, and the overall effect isn't bad at all. (As of today, the tree is still up. I REALLY need to take it down this weekend!)

I made a small reprise of Thanksgiving dinner on Christmas Eve for us, Dan's parents, and Karthi. Not too much this time, just turkey, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and green beans Greek style. I didn't even bake a pie! We did have log cake for dessert though, which can be good or bad depending on whether or not you're lucky when you pick the cake out! Here is Mr. Ling attempting the traditional patriarchal carving of the turkey. Look, they even broke out the nice plates and glasses!

After dinner Mr. and Mrs Ling went to their church, but Dan and I decided to try out the big Anglican church, St. Andrews. It was pretty good.

The next morning Dan and his parents went to church again, but I stayed home to talk to Mom, Dad, Bobbie, and Claire, since it was their Christmas Eve. We had the Skype specially set up, and I opened their presents to me and they opened my presents to them. We were afraid my package wouldn't get to them in time, but it came on Christmas Eve afternoon! Thanks, Jesus :) And thanks to my family for making the effort to allow me to feel as much as I could like I was home for Christmas.

Dan joined us for a bit when he got home from church, and then in the afternoon it was time for him to open his present. I had made him a scavenger hunt with small presents and clues (in little bottles) along the way and the main one at the end, which was an iPod shuffle Special Edition (with his name engraved on it). The clues were in the pattern of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. Good fun was had by all.

 Dan studying the first clue.

In the evening we went out to two parties and ate too much Christmas dinner. (Both hosts were Dan's Army friends...or to be more specific, Dan's Army friends' mothers and maids. ;) The first dinner was half Western and half Chinese barbecue. The second was half Western and half Indian. It was heavenly.) I don't have any pictures, although I can assure you that Dan and I looked the same as we do in our 2.5 Year picture above, because we were both wearing practically the same thing. The second house we went to actually had tons of Christmas decorations, inside and out, which is very rare in Singapore so I was SUPER EXCITED when I got there, even though it was late at night and I was a bit tired. Altogether it was a wonderful Christmas.

But don't forget Boxing Day! That's the day after Christmas, which is when many people actually open their presents, if they do presents. (Dan's family doesn't really.) What a wonderful thing. It's just like an extra day of Christmas! This was the day Dan gave me my present, which was an AWESOME spa treatment that lasted 2.5 hours!!! I was so surprised. Once again, best boyfriend ever.

NEW YEAR'S

I actually didn't take any pictures of New Year's Eve because we were being super lame and didn't do anything cool. Dan had been feeling sick recently and we weren't really interested in going to a club, and nobody was having a party, so we ended up buying some bulk gummi candies and a Bacardi breezer and watching several episodes of How I Met Your Mother until midnight, when we promptly went to sleep. :)

On actual New Year's Day we had a big Chinese meal at Dan's house with his family (his second sister was home from college), thanks to Merry who cooked all sorts of awesome stuff, and we used the good matching table settings and everything! Then we ate "traditional" Chinese New Year dessert: icey-slushy canned peaches and canned lychee fruit, which I thought was gross, which is nothing strange because Chinese people suck at dessert. No offense--they rock at the regular food, it's just the sweet stuff where they're a bit lacking. All around, though, it was a good New Years.

Sorry I didn't take as many pictures as I should have. However, the holidays aren't over! Next month in February we have Chinese New Year AND Valentine's Day--which just so happen to be the exact same day this year! Interesting...so I'll try to take better photo documentation and share those holidays with you soon!

Semi-Interesting Things I Did Today

1. Confirmed a meeting with a professor at another university on Friday morning to see about a job.
2. Practiced guitar--interesting note, Taylor Swift songs are very easy to play. I can play one already and I just started playing on Saturday :)
3. Finished a series called "Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do", which is a popular course at Harvard that they videotaped and put on Youtube. It's pretty awesome.

That's about it. I mean, I did other things, research and re-organizing documents and doing some linguistic theory construction. But nothing much.

Just trying out smaller blogs that I can do more often, to try to become a good blogger. And oftentimes having to get the pictures uploaded and organized delays me, so maybe I'll try to do these short ones often and then a long, actually interesting one with pictures every now and again! Hm...

Catching up...and some fun food pictures

Hello folks! I am a horrible blogger. If all you knew about me was my blog, you would think I’d been sleeping since mid-November. However, I did not go into hibernation, I promise! I’ve actually been doing quite a lot of things and just being selfish (or generous, depending on your viewpoint) and not taking the time to write it all down. In order to break my bad habit, today I’m just gonna write a short blog about what happened…well…today! Which is how this whole thing is actually supposed to work, I think. Then look out for catch-up blogs in the next week or so with a few fun holiday pictures and Engrish: Volume II. 

Today was a super tiring day. I’m very tired and should probably be sleeping instead of blogging. I had a meeting this morning with a Professor Low Ee-ling, who works at the National Institute of Education, which is the main teacher training institute in Singapore. And by “main”, I mean “only”. In other words, every public school teacher in Singapore goes through NIE. Besides teacher training, they also do some education research. It took me about 1.5 hours to get there and I was actually a bit late to my meeting, how embarrassing. I’m still really bad at estimating how long it will take me to get places using public transportation here. I keep getting lost/delayed when I don’t expect to. I guess I should just expect to and leave earlier…

Anyway, I was given Prof Low’s name by a teacher I had at OU, and I’m so glad because she was really helpful. I’m applying for a few research assistant positions there for the next year or so, so I was asking her some questions about that in particular, but also about herself and education in general. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my next step since my current job is up at the end of March—trying to decide if/when/where I should do grad school, and in what. Or do I want to get a public sector job before I go back to school to see how I like it? If I do, what kind could I get? Publishing? Human relations of public relations? What about a teaching gig? Then do I need some sort of certification first? Etc etc.  Talking to her was helpful because I was able to add another story and point of view to my list of things to think about. 

After our meeting, I agreed to be a guinea pig for one of Prof Low’s doctoral students who is studying General American English. (Funny story—a month or so ago when she mentioned this to me, she also said “And maybe you could ask some of your American friends in Singapore if they would want to participate too.” Then I realized that I didn’t have any American friends in Singapore!  I have met a pair of American friends since then, however—more on that later.) Anyway, the doctoral student ended up being from Yunnan, where I studied when I was in China! Our schools were right across the street from each other. Pretty cool! I did his study, and then he showed me where I needed to go to hand in my applications, but they were out to lunch, so we went to lunch and spoke in that funny half-Chinese half-English way that people end up speaking when they both speak each others’ languages. (Although his English is fantastic, whereas my Chinese is barely so-so at this point.) 

Then I turned in my forms and went to work. I tried the subway instead of the bus this time, but it still took me just as long. Spending so much time in transit is really draining, especially when you’re in your especially nice clothes because you had a meeting that morning. So that was my day.

In other recent news, Dan has been having stomach aches for about a month and finally went to the hospital and found out he had worms or parasites of something. Ugh. He’s feeling a lot better now. The good part was he got to miss a bunch of Army because he had medical leave. The bad part is that now he’s behind but will probably still have to finish the course. Oh well. Please pray for him to feel better/catch up/get a good posting or result after this training session. 

Also, I started learning how to play guitar this weekend! My fingertips really hurt. A lot. But it’s fun! And at least Dan has a guitar with nylon strings so they don’t hurt as much. I know like 2 songs, and I can occasionally play them without messing up. But usually not. Oh well :p Slowly but surely. 

AND, my friend count is improving!!! I think I have friends in the double digits now! They’re not all one-on-one friends, but they’re all at least I-can-hang-out-with-them-even-if-Dan’s-not-there friends, which is good enough for me! Three new friends were introduced to me by my friend Jocelyn, who was originally Dan’s friend (and still is of course) but I’ve been stealing her to be my friend. One of them is on the Singapore national synchronized swimming team! So cool. 

Another friend is my office mate Adeline, although she just moved to the US. But we became pretty good friends in the last couple of months.

The last two are my new American friends. It’s a very small world—my good friend from high school, Justin Quam, has a cousin who just moved out here a couple of months ago with her husband. Weird and awesome, right? So I met up with her for the first time about a month ago, and she’s really nice and interesting and likes politics and church and farmer’s markets and cooking and having the correct glassware for the correct beverages, among other things. So we had lots to talk about. Then the week before Christmas I went over to her house to bake Christmas cookies and met her husband, who is also cool. (Not unexpected.) So, thanks for the email introduction, JQ!
 

Well, this blog is already so long that I doubt many people have gotten this far. If you have, here are a few pictures as a reward:

This is a seafood rice burger from Mos Burger, which is a Japanese fast food chain. This is inresponse to Mrs. Anderson asking me about some weird food that Singaporean McDonald's currently has. Unfortunately, that dish, Shaka Shaka Chicken, has been discontinued, but never fear because I can look no further than Mos Burger for all my Asian-y fast food needs.

However, sometimes I have non-Asian food needs, and then I often as not have to make it myself. This is black bean slasa that I made for the end-of-semester party for the class I was auditing. Yes, it tasted as good as it looks. Better actually. I'm getting hungry now...

Unfortunately, you have to pay premium prices for non-Asian foods. This is the bag or tortilla chips that I bought for S$6, and this is how full it was when I bought it. That's like 30 cents per chip! :)