"All You Have To Do Is Come Back Home" - Ray Price, 1986

And we have gotten home from Singapore! It was so nice to have John with me on a business trip, although it made me wish I'd had more free time to share with him. I'll have to see if I can talk him into releasing more of his trip photos...and if so, perhaps I can post the URL here. (Or maybe he'll post them on his own blog?)

Another highlight of the week was getting to spend time with my friend Fumi...and finally introduce her to John, and vice-versa! Thanks for sharing so much of your time with us, Fumi!

Singapore is a really interesting place. It's "Asia Lite", as one of my oil industry friends once said. That makes it any easy place for a Westerner to spend a week; but I sometimes wish it felt more authentic, if you know what I mean. It's also a little antiseptic for my taste...a bit like an Asian version of Switzerland. But I feel relatively safe there, which is always an important factor when traveling.

The food there is one of my favorite features. It's the most interesting mixture of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Japanese, and others. The seafood is wonderful. They have availability of lots of wines from all over the world. And the service is always friendly and helpful.

Singapore is also very beautiful and green, with even more exotic flowering trees and plants than Houston. However, I couldn't live with the very hot & humid weather all year around.

And we found the coolest CD shop in the entire world, as I wrote while we were there. The chain is called That CD Shop, and the one we went to is on Scotts Road. I've never seen CDs marketed in such an unusual way. (Sorry I couldn't find a website link better than the one I just used.) We found lots of Lisa Ono CDs there, and we've brought one home with us. We were introduced to the Japanese jazz singer by Fumi. If Oscar Castro-Neves works with her, that says all I need to know!

But now we're home, safe and sound. The jetlag is awful. Our bodies are exhausted from the 14 hours crammed into the plane. But at least we can now watch the rest of the Winter Olympics at times other than the middle of the night, as we were doing in Singapore.

So I'll write more later, OK? Am I excused?

Whew...thanks!

Janet