1000 turtles

Although I have been trying to entertain the boys as well as I can Karl keeps asking "if he can go to school tomorrow, please!". Still over a week to go. Yesterday we ventured out to the Chinese Garden together with a dutch neighbour and her year-old son. It was a very pleasant experience. It is very much a recreation of the Beijing imperial gardens - summer palace and similar, including the marble boat (well not marble in this case). We enjoyed climbing the pagodas and having picnic on the (concrete) boat. Also there is a Guinnes book attraction - the turtle museum which has the world's largest collection of live turtles. Over 1000, plus several thousand turtle shaped artefacts. One could almost get turtlephobic in there. Really amazing sizes and shapes and colours! One was bright yellow - appearantly considered very attractive although I found it slightly sickening to be honest. Most valuable species are kept in aquariums but the more common ones are roaming free and as we walked onto the bridge over the pond there were hundreds of heads out of water fighting for a bite to eat. Some had crawled on the bridge and Raoul kindly helped them back in the water. The museum was big in the press recently as a turtle-loving person had stolen several animals worth many thousands of dollars. They luckily captured him soon because he had behaved suspiciosly in the days before the crime spending several hours at the museum!
Then we had a very calming walk to the bonsai garden which was quite amazing - amongst traditional chinese pavillions there were surely over a thousand bonsai trees, many over 100 years old and certainly more valuable than the turtles. And the garden isn't even guarded! The boys spotted a monitor lizard and had a fabulous time chasing it between the bonsai trees in fragile ceramic pots.

For the evening we had tickets for a concert of the arts festival - spiritual sounds of Central Asia. (Robert's choice!) It was held at a concert hall in Raffles hotel - quite a remarkable setting. I really enjoyed the first group from Kyrgystan. Didn't have any expectations and it was very interesting and amusing. They played very unusual instruments but obviously extremely well. The highlight was an old guy who played a guitar-like instrument (only smaller and different sound) and sang to it. He was really cheeky. The lyrics were translated on a screen and these were slightly dirty. And the old chap just gleamed and the expressions on his face told everything even without reading the translation. To that he threw his hands and feet over the guitar and performed one trick after another. He looked just like someone the group leader had picked up from herding his cattle. Just put some proper clothes on and off on the plain to Singapore. Such a character.
The other two performances from Kazakstan and Azerdaidzhan were too "deep" and spiritual for my taste. Well and then we experienced the late night rain which means in Singapore that all taxis melt away together with their phone lines. After waiting a while and looking for something to eat we finally went on the MRT and when we got to our station the rain had stopped. Then the taxis had resurfaced!