Adventures By Design

In which the travelers go on safari

Today was a busy day. Although we arrived at our hotel at about 2am last night, our phone rang at 8:30 with our morning wake up call. We had an appointment at 10am to meet Glenn Odland, the headmaster at Canadian International School here in Singapore. We quickly showered and made ourselves as presentable as possible after being on the road for over two months. Our hotel actually had a hair dryer in the room, greatly increasing Gin’s presentability. We emerged from our hotel at 9:30 and found a taxi to take us to the school. Luckily the taxi driver knew exactly where the school was and how to get there quickly. Thanks to the driver we arrived at 9:55, just enough time to find the office for our 10 o’clock meeting.

This is the second international school that we’ve visited on our trip (the first one was NIST in Bangkok). Although we have jobs in Suzhou, China, for the next two years we’re still interested in seeing what other schools are like, the unique things they do, and if we’d like to work there in the future. So far both NIST in Bangkok, and CIS in Singapore have passed the test. The principal of this school, Glenn Odland, is Canadian, originally from our hometown of Calgary. He put us at ease quickly and we had a great conversation with him about the school, and international teaching in general. At the end of our meeting we were impressed both with Glenn, and the school. Singapore is an expensive place to live, but who knows, maybe in a couple years we’ll make the move…

 

After we left our meeting we wandered around the school a bit. Since it is only a week until the end of school there was a special event on for the students. It was called “Energy Explosion” and it was basically a fun sports and games day. The kids all seemed to be having a great time with bowling, obstacle courses, water balloon fights and more. Coming from Korea, it’s really nice to see this kind of event where all the kids are well-behaved and organized, instructions are clear (and in English so we could understand), and all the teachers and parent volunteers are having a great time too. In Korea, this kind of event was always very stressful for us because of a general lack of organization, and because instructions were given only in Korean so we never knew what was happening or how to help out.

After leaving the school we found a bus to take us to the metro, and then went to the mall beside the metro station (in our experience every metro station in Singapore has a mall beside it, shopping is kind of a national pastime here). We hadn’t had breakfast before our meeting and now we were starving! We ate in the food court, browsed the shops a little, and then decided to see a movie in the theatre on the top floor. We saw the latest Narnia movie, which we thought was better than the first, but pretty cheesy towards the end.

In the evening we headed towards our primary tourist destination in Singapore: The Night Safari. This is a zoo for nocturnal animals that’s only open in the evening after dark. (Singapore has a regular zoo too, for diurnal animals but we didn’t go there.) We had heard great things about the Night Safari and were pretty excited. Although there was a lot of cheesy tourist kitsch going on, it was still a pretty amazing place!

We started our visit with the Night Animals show which they do three or four times a night. In the show a few trainers from the zoo work with a bunch of animals to show off their (the animals’) skills like smelling, hearing, and jumping. Since these are all nocturnal animals it’s really important for people to not use flashes on their cameras because it can disorient the animals and freak them out. Unfortunately, many of the tourists didn’t seem to able to figure this out and there were a lot of flashes going off during the performance. Because of this the show didn’t go that well and the trainers had a lot of trouble getting the animals to show off their skills. Towards the end of the show the trainers brought out a big snake (a boa constrictor) and asked for a volunteer from the audience. One of the trainers pointed to Ric for a volunteer, but he’s slightly afraid of snakes (and more afraid of audiences of 1000 people) and he demurred. The trainers tried to get him to come up on stage for a while, but in the end gave up and found a willing Danish man instead.

After half an hour the show ended and we wandered away from the amphitheater to go check out the rest of the zoo. However, on our way out we saw the main trainer from the show, Genie. Now, Genie has a pretty strong and entertaining personality, perfect for directing this sort of show and yelling at stupid tourists who can’t figure out how to turn off their flashes. She called us over and started to apologize to us, partly for putting Ric on the spot with the snake, but also for the quality of the show we had just seen. Apparently it was one of the worst shows they’ve done, with lots of the animals missing their cues, and not performing tricks properly. Genie encouraged us to come back for the next show where we could see hyenas and a puma as well as the other creatures we hadn’t seen before. She convinced us, and directed us to just go back the way we had come (“pretend to go to the bathroom, then just find a seat”), and skip the giant line of people waiting to get in for the second show. Although it took another hour of our time at the zoo, we are so glad that we went back for the second show. It was much better, only a couple of illicit flashes went off, and we got to see the promised hyenas and puma.

At the end of the second show we said thank you to Genie, and assured her that the show had been far superior that time. Then we headed off to the tram that we take us around the park to see all the animals. The tram was great, with an excellent commentary in English (we love Singapore for that!) and we got to see so many animals! There were lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! and lots of deer and birds, more hyenas, and hippos and rhinos too! There were no monkeys or apes because they are diurnal (awake in the daytime) so you have to go to the regular zoo to see them. Halfway through the tram ride we got off and took a walking trail around so that we could see some of the animals, like leopards and bats, a little closer. On the trail there were all sorts of different animals, all sponsored by various companies or organizations. One of the first we saw were the sugar gliders (like giant squirrels with Elvis capes that help them glide from tree to tree). The sugar gliders were sponsored by Coke, which we thought was appropriate. Even more appropriate though were the tigers who were sponsored by… you guessed it: Tiger Balm! In the weird sponsor category were the eagle owls brought to you by the Singapore Prisons Authority… bizarre.

Although there was more we could have seen, we had had a very full day and we were both pretty tired by 11pm. We wandered past all the gift shops, found a bus to take us back to our hotel, and headed home to go to bed.