March | 2016 | Nyan Thomas L's Blog

That’s Entertainment!

Every year, the kids at Nyan’s preschool put on a big concert/recital/show at an auditorium, along with kids from a few other schools. Our boy has lots of personality, so we were very excited to see how he’d do on the big stage! Sure, a couple months prior, as rehearsals ramped up, he had expressed some reluctance to perform — but that reluctance had disappeared, and we had little reason to suspect he wouldn’t be one of the stars of the show.

Oh, how wrong we were.

It started off well. The auditorium was packed, the kids were decked out in their costumes, everyone – Nyan included – seemed in high spirits. Here’s some shots from before the show:

Then it was show time. Nyan, along with three of his classmates — Sander, Ning Ning and Kyra — had been selected to come out and warm up the crowd before his class’s performance. Here they are – a bit shy, sure, but good enough:

Then came the, shall we say, issues. The problem, we figured out later, was that the lights were off in the auditorium, of course – so anyone on stage couldn’t see anyone in the crowd. Just a sea of black. So our poor boy, in the very front row, looked out and saw nothing – least of all, he didn’t see Mommy and Daddy. He was not happy about this. How did he respond? He sulked through the entire performance. Oops. Mommy and Daddy were a wee bit embarrassed, but mostly we just thought it was hilarious. There’s always one in every crowd – and this one happened to be ours! Eh, what are you gonna do.

Check out these pics and videos (with apologies for the poor quality and shakiness):

Oh dear. At the end of the show, all the kids from all the schools came out for one big finale. The house lights were on at this point, so he could see us sitting about 20 rows back – and that seemed to make all the difference.

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Afterwards, Nyan was all smiles and silliness. He goofed around with pals Adrianna and Nathaniel:

He held hands with Ning Ning as we walked out of the auditorium:

And we joined another classmate, Tanya, and her family for lunch at a nearby restaurant. More goofing around ensued.

So, all’s well that ends well and all that. The kid doesn’t like to perform in front of a huge crowd, or even a small crowd – he’s hardly alone in that. There’ll be another school concert later this year. How will he do? Eh, we’re not expecting much. But it’s all good.

1 Comment

Posted by Chris L. on March 16, 2016 in Uncategorized

Nyan Thomas Does KL

12 Mar

A few months back, Phwa Phwa (aka Mommy’s Mommy) was visiting for a few weeks. We decided a weekend get-away was in order, so we hopped a cheap plane for the 45-minute flight to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Mommy’s cousin Molly lives there and promised to show us around a bit.

In a lot of ways, KL is everything that Singapore is not. It’s chaotic, it’s dirty, it’s noisy, it’s run-down in spots, and it’s got plenty of urban energy. It wouldn’t be a place we’d want to live at this point in our lives, but after a half day of adjusting to a ‘real’ city – as opposed to the somewhat sanitized city that Singapore can be – we really started to enjoy it.

Here’s our boy posing at the airport on the way out, and hanging out waiting for the elevator at the hotel in KL, and at the airport on the way home:

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KL is known for the Petronas Towers – a pair of ornate skyscrapers that were, when they were built in 1998, the tallest towers in the world. (Now they’re something like 8th tallest.) They’re gorgeous from outside, and well worth a trip up – you walk across the ‘skybridge’ that connects the towers at the 43rd floor, then head to the top of one of the towers for some great views across KL, even when it’s hazy like the day we were there.

Some random shots of KL in all its gritty urban glory:

Here we are hanging out in a tree, and in Chinatown:

And more random shots, including Nyan drawing at dinner, Nyan inside an electric car on display at a fancy shopping mall, and the family at dinner.

That’s KL in a nutshell. Dirty, gritty, urban, and frankly a great change of pace from Singapore. Still, no offense to KL, but we’ll take Singapore for now.

1 Comment

Posted by Chris L. on March 12, 2016 in Photos

Tags: asia, travel

Of Boats and Planes

09 Mar

We like to sniff out lesser-known little corners of Singapore, and we found a couple of gems recently: The Boat Museum and the Air Force Museum.

The Air Force Museum is exactly that – a museum devoted to the Singaporean Air Force. It’s on the edge of a nearby airbase, and it’s got a nice indoor display of the history of the force, and a large space downstairs with actual jets, helicopters, missile launchers and more. There’s even a flight simulator, though that wasn’t working the day we went.

Did our boy like it? Silly question.

We also came across the Boat Museum — more properly known as the Singapore Maritime Gallery — tucked away in a little corner of downtown, on the water, of course. It’s put together by the local container shipping industry, so it’s got a real pro-shipping vibe, but that’s fine. There’s displays of the history of shipping in Singapore (shipping having been what really put this tiny island on the map, way back when), models of boats and ships and oil rigs, and views of the nearby ferry terminal and all the boats at anchor outside of Singapore Harbor.

Perhaps best of all: there’s a boat simluator — it lets you pretend to be at the helm of one of several types of boats, and you try to steer it through storms, marine traffic, waves and more. Pretty cool!

We liked both places very much, and agreed that although they’re out of the way and not the easiest to get to, they definitely deserve being visited again. So when Grandma and Grandpa visited recently, Nyan made sure to take them to the Air Force Museum!