Back from a weekend glimpse of our future...

Mira Kagan likes spaghetti.


Katherine and I spent a great weekend in Singapore with our friends Marty, Cyndy, Cyrus (4) and Mira (11 mo.) Kagan. Marty and I studied in St. Petersburg, Russia together in 1992. They live in Paris now, where Marty works for Akamai Technologies (it makes the internet better, somehow), but were on an extended vacation/business trip that, when over, will take them from Paris to California to Australia to Singapore to Hong Kong to Paris in 6 weeks.

Resident in Singapore is Chuck Varela, another alumnus of the 1992 semester in Russia, and his family. So we all met up for a kid-friendly meal on Saturday night at SpagEddies.


Sunday afternoon before we flew home we stopped by the famed Raffles Hotel for a beer at the Long Bar, home of the Singapore Sling. We opted for beers instead of fruity drinks (although the tomato juice in Katherine's Virgin Mary counts as fruit juice I guess).



Our weekend was chock-full of frenetic kid-energy (Katherine and I needed naps Saturday afternoon). Singapore, at least the Singapore that we saw, was one big shopping opportunity. We stayed with the Kagans in their 2-BR extended stay hotel right off Orchard Road, which is shopping central in a town seemingly created for shoppers. True to its reputation, it was very orderly, very clean, very modern, and thoroughly different from any Asian city we have visited before.

Two weeks from now we are heading a bit north of Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to meet up with our FS friends Michael and Marybeth, of New Year's in Koh Chang fame. We were supposed to go to Siem Reap, but that didn't work out. So instead of running around Angkor, we will spend the weekend sitting poolside sipping drinks, eating, and lamenting our difficult lives.