We considered going to Hyderabad for the New Year’s Eve party at the Secunderabad Club. But we visited Hyderabad for Diwali. Instead, it looked like we’d be in Australia for NYE. So, long before we had airplane tickets or accommodation for Australia Jo bought us tickets for a family-friendly circus-themed NYE party at the Royal Botanic Gardens overlooking the Harbour bridge and the opera house in Sydney.

About one million people line the bay to see the fireworks at Sydney each year. We got our boxed dinners and we spread our king-sized comforter cover (that we acquired for this, and to double as a beach towel). I bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc and we settled back to wait.

Along the bay there are some prime viewing locations where they allow people to come early and sit on their spot. We saw people lining up early in the morning for these spots. Later we saw them setting up golf umbrellas and supplies to last them all day till midnight. When we arrived at the Botanic Gardens close to 8pm, the streets where closed to vehicular traffic and people were thronging the bay. It was all orderly and everyone was chill and respectful of others.

Back in our section, some people knew what to do. Regular lawn chairs aren’t allowed but the type that are low to the ground that look like sawn-off lawn chairs were popular. So were these inflatable cocoon like things that looked light yet comfortable. And a few had brought king-sized full-on inflatable beds and had really settled in.

A little after 9pm there was the smaller fireworks for kids and people who dont stay up till midnight. These were a good bit better than what we see in Austin for New Year’s or 4th of July. Then the music picked up and Vivian and Jo and I went to the makeshift dance floor. A bit later, Vivian and I were dancing when she said “Dad – look at that boy in the yellow t-shirt. Isn’t he cute?” When I nodded she took off through dance floor to the edge where this kid about her age was sitting with his parents. I watched her lean over and ask him. Then he and his parents huddled for a few words. A moment later Yellow t-shirt and Vivian were holding hands and making their way to the floor. I quietly slipped back to our spot and retold what had just happened to Jo, my heart filled with admiration and a tinge of sadness.

The fireworks at midnight were spectacular. Then the grand finale blew us all away. The Harbour Bridge becomes a giant rack from which a dazzling array of pyrotechnics light up the land and the sea and the sky. Barges are towed to under the bridge and there’s fireworks flying off the barges every second. At the end, the entire width of the bridge erupts in a shower of golden sparks that slowly fall down to the bay below as if the bridge was the top of a waterfall of fire. This carries on for several minutes while the crowd cheers madly.

Then it is over and the four of us become a part of the million man march away from the bay. We walk past St. Mary’s cathedral, through Hyde Park, and up the hill at William Street to Kings Cross and home, pondering the human need for celebration and the desire to arbitrarily mark the beginning of a circle, and the year that is past, and the one new one that is upon us.

We can smell the smoke as we drive into Sydney. The air quality is worse than Delhi’s. At subway stations giant TVs show images of fire, fire fighters, and rescued koalas. The sun looks red at 4pm, five hours before sunset. Yet, besides the smokey air, life seems normal. Australia is a very big country – we never saw any fires or even rising smoke except from one overlook in the Blue Mountains about a 100 km west of the city.

The next day a gust of cleaner air blows some of the smoke away and there are occasional patches of blue in the sky. Australia has been accused of being one of the worst climate change offenders in the world today. They suffer from the same problem as Norway or Canada in one way – they are a major global exporter of fossil fuel (coal in Australia’s case). Unlike Canada and Norway, Australia is closer to the US in another way. It is led by a climate change denying anti science government. This means Australia is fucking over the climate both at home and around the world. Still, it may or may not be their own climate change karma that is leading to these fires. Assigning blame is easier than assigning causation.

Smokey skies aside, Sydney is a nice city. The metro transit is super easy to use. You don’t need to buy tokens or tickets or cards. Your tappable credit card is your ticket. One day we went to the burbs to watch an Australian premier league soccer game and we got free round trip metro travel included in the ticket.

In Sydney we are in a neighborhood called Darlinghurst. It’s very gay and busy and filled with great food. Downstairs from the apartment is an Israeli cafe. A block away we enjoy wine and dinner at a Vietnamese pho place. Across from a popular wienerschnitzel restaurant there’s a gelato bar with a line out the door all day. There’s kebab, Indian, and Thai restaurants around every corner and a great Portuguese flame roasted spicy chicken chain with outlets everywhere. Even the small Woolworth grocery stores next to the metro entrances are well stocked. Australians still favor speciality stores, so there are individual meat, fruit, flower, bread, chemist, and other stores.

Because we are within walking distance of the Sydney Harbour we spend a good bit of time around there. We see the famous opera house, the harbour bridge, and take ferries from the ferry terminal. Either because we were close to the New Year Eve celebrations or because it’s high season (it is summer and the schools are closed) or perhaps because it’s like this all year, the area around the harbouris like a zoo. It feels like there are more people here than in the rest of Australia. A lot of visitors and tour groups are from China, clearly a country on the rise. In the first photo you can see the orange tint from the smoke. Other days, the skies were bluer.

One day we drove out to the Blue Mountains about two hours away. The views were beautiful but the air was hazy with smoke. We spent more time in the picturesque little towns along the way than in the national park because it was so darn hot. The town of Katoomba has a striking street mural scene. There was a cafe in Wentworth Falls we liked so much that we had breakfast and returned for lunch. That evening the news informed us that Australia experienced its hottest day on record. The next day it broke the record again.

One morning we took the ferry out to Manly beach. Sydney harbour is situated in a bay and is about 10-15 km from the open pacific coast. Manly is on the ocean front. The beach was packed. Australians know how to do a beach day.

The next day I hiked one of Sydney’s famous walks – the Split to Manly coastal track – 12 km of beauty along secluded beaches and coves and over cliffs with dramatic views.

Another day we went to see the street art in Newtown, a slightly gritty but hip neighborhood south west of downtown.

For our final few days in Sydney we moved from the apartment in Darlinghurst to a hotel on Coogee beach. Coogee is two beaches south of its more famous and bigger cousin, Bondi beach (which, I learned is Bond-eye, and not Bond-ee). Till now we’ve been happily amazed at how empty Australia’s beaches are. Even the busiest beach on the Gold Coast or in Western Australia or even in Melbourne never seemed crowded. That’s because everyone is at Coogee and Bondi. I took a picture of a pedestrian crossing at Coogee beach. Look at the people streaming to the beach. And the last two photos are taken a few hours apart from our hotel as the beach starts filling up. Australia is a country of outdoor-loving sun-worshipping beach people. Which explains why we love it!

During our time in Sydney we also hit a low – the kids drove us crazy. All they wanted was to be on their devices. The travel skills they had picked up in the previous five months seemed to have vanished. They seem to have lost their curiosity and any initiative. They were either fully absorbed in themselves or sulky. Moments of family fun and joy were few and far between hours of tension. I have always appreciated the job teachers and schools do, but now I realize that they also save parents and kids from each other!

We had a family conference where Jo and I explained our frustration and told them that we were considering packing up and returning to Austin after New Zealand which was the last place we had already committed to visiting. More than being upset we were disappointed. We agreed to see how things went in our two weeks in NZ and then make a decision.

We drove over two days from the Gold Coast to Sydney through some beautiful scenery and small towns, stopping occasionally to drive up to a view point or for food or gas. We spent the night at a small beach town called Port Macquarie. There was what we’d call an RV park just up the path from the hotel along the river where it met the beach with every spot taken. Hundreds of kids played in a open grassy area and a small skate park. Almost in all cases they weren’t with their parents or grownups which itself was unusual and refreshing. The breakwater along the estuary is lined with boulders along the path and every boulder is painted with some sort of a message. Family names, memorials, we-were-here, wisecracks – they made for fun reading.

At Port Macquarie Vivian and Evan found a beautiful giant ficus tree to climb on the way to dinner. As they climbed higher, especially Vivian, I gently reminded them that coincidentally today, December 28th, is exactly one year since Vivian fell out of a tree in New Braunfels and broke her arm. Seems ages ago.

Speaking of trees, at several places along the highway we saw a lot of forests scorched by the recent fires. We couldn’t see or smell smoke but this stretch between Brisbane and Sydney had a lot of active fires. Australia is a huge country and even a small section of it is a lot of ground. We checked websites for information about highway closures but everything was good. This was before the Australian bush fires was international news and the mortality numbers were low. There was some news coverage about the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, vacationing in Hawaii instead of being at home in Australia even as local often volunteer fire fighters battled hundreds of blazes.

Along the highways we saw a lot of signs warning drivers against fatigue. This is unusual. In the US any PSA messaging along the highways usually is focused on drunk driving. They even have signs directing drivers to rest areas (stopping bays) that had “Driver Reviver” stations. We got curious and checked one out and found a nice food truck serving great quality coffee. I bought myself an espresso and drove on feeling much revived.

As we neared Sydney we also approached the end of our great Australian road trip. Though we flew between Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane, we had a car at each of those places and have covered a few thousand kilometers of Australian highways. We turned in our car in Sydney airport and got ready for the urban part of our trip. In Sydney we’ll use public transport and Ubers.

We thought we were headed to Brisbane. After all that’s where we flew in to from Melbourne. But as we faithfully followed the google maps lady towards our next Airbnb we discovered the Gold Coast – a whole metropolis with its own international airport and a series of beach towns along the beautiful coastline. Apparently the gold refers not to the color of the sand, which tends more towards a fine powdery off-white, but to real estate prices. This area is densely developed, with high rises all the way along the beach, and a section that Jen and I dubbed “Dubai”.

We came up to the Gold Coast for one reason – the beach. And we were more than happy with what we found. Every morning after breakfast Jen walked to the beach. Jo worked with the kids to help them finished their schoolwork and we soon followed. The day was spent in serious pursuit of laying at the beach, boogie boarding, body surfing, walking, swimming, and whatever else we could manage. In the evenings Jen and I cooked dinner and the adults had a bit of wine. And we finished watching the last four episodes of Avatar on Netflix. Evan made an Aang (the lead character) out of Plus Plus one day when he was bored because he didn’t have access to his devices.

One day we drove to a place called Paradise Country where Jo and the kids and Jen held koalas and then had a session learning about the animals. They are extremely cautious about “working” their koalas and individual animals work for 30 minutes or less a week. We learned that koalas are very picky eaters, only preferring the leaves of a small subset of eucalyptus trees of a certain age and species.

On Christmas Eve we went out for a very nice dinner and then we bowled. The next morning we went for a hike in the Burleigh Head National Park. And we went to see the new Star Wars movie.

A couple of days after Christmas we dropped Jen back at Brisbane airport for her flight back home and we turned our car southwards along the coast towards Sydney – our last destination in Australia almost a thousand kilometers away.

Catch-up time. Blog has fallen a month behind.

We arrived in Melbourne in the middle of December on a Sunday morning. It was one of those days when you arrive too early to check-in so you need to kill a few hours. But we’d woken up early in Fremantle, driven to Perth, and spent three hours on an airplane so we weren’t super chipper either. It was hard to find parking in downtown Melbourne, and driving wasn’t straightforward either because cars have to share the roads with trams (we don’t encourage that sort of behavior in Texas). We eventually parked and Jo found us the hippest breakfast joint – a place called Operator 25 in an old phone switchboard building but we had to wait a bit for a table. While the fam waited on a bench outside the restaurant I went for a short walk and discovered Queen Victoria market.

It is one of the biggest and busiest markets I’ve seen. I took Jo and the kids back there after breakfast. We strolled through the fresh food section and bought armloads of books at the used book stalls and realized that we had explored just a small fraction of the market.

A bustling market filled with all kinds a people is a good sign that a city is doing well. We still had plenty of time so we took our books and walked over to Flagstaff park. The park was full too. Families were grilling and celebrating birthdays. Kids swarmed the playground and Evan had to wait his turn at the swings. Vivian found an enormous tree to sit under and read. Eventually we drove to Brighton to our Airbnb but by then I had a good feeling about Melbourne.

Brighton looks like an old upscale neighborhood by the sea that had reached its prime a couple of decades ago. We walked from the Airbnb on a pleasant path along the beaches to the famous Brighton bathing boxes, a collection of beach huts from the 1900s.

But the sand was coarser and though we didn’t mind the beach a bit further down in Sandringham, we thought we liked our Western Australia beaches better. Yes, we are beach snobs.

A few days later Jen arrived. Our wine consumption promptly shot up. One day we drove up through the Yara valley to a very fancy winery for some nice wine and very overpriced terrible food.

Another thing we did in Brighton involved watching a lot of Netflix. Specifically, “Avatar, the Last Airbender”. Even if you aren’t into animated shows for kids you may have had the misfortune of seeing M Night Shyamalan’s really bad movie, The Last Airbender. Avatar is an animated show that inspired the movie and is a much better version of the movie. It ran for 3 seasons and is consistently rated among the top ten series ever. But why were we sitting in beautiful Brighton and watching it on Netflix ?

Back in Athens in late Fall we stayed at an Airbnb where the owner or previous resident had a Netflix account that was still accessible on the TV. Starting with Vivian we were all sick for 4 days. So we stayed in and started binge watching the Avatar. But then we left. At the next place in Greece we used our US based Netflix account but the Avatar wasn’t on it. Netflix pulled it from the US market some time back because it’s working on a live action version of the show to be released soon and probably doesn’t want to lose its potential audience to the older animated show.

So we’ve been on the prowl for a foreign Netflix app/login and found it in Brighton. To put the numbers in perspective, between 4 days in Athens and a week in Brighton, we watched about 60 forty-five minute long episodes. The kids loved it and Jo and I also thoroughly enjoyed it. Now family conversations are peppered with Avatar references. Don’t sulk like Prince Zuko. You’re as mean as Azula. Evan should get a haircut like Sokka. We left Brighton with all but the final four episodes left to watch.

Speaking of shows here’s a VR animation of Evan from the great science museum in Melbourne.

We enjoyed our time in the Melbourne area. Just like little old Austin consistently tops the list of cities to live in the US, Melbourne is often on top of the list of the most livable cities of the world. We can see why. Observation – there were zero homeless people (that we saw) and no one was panhandling at street corners. Question – how did they manage that ? It could be that Australia takes care of its destitute and mentally ill. Or they could just be better at hiding the problem. Either way, with the rising problem of homelessness in cities like San Francisco and Austin, it is worth asking. We did find little decals in public places where Melburnians apparently ask themselves how they want to live.

We didn’t spend enough time there to find out. A few days before Christmas we were at the airport in our way to another great Australian city, Brisbane.

Arjun’s mother passed away yesterday. We last saw her in November in Delhi.

I first met her sometime in the late 1980’s. I would stop for the night at their house in Delhi on my way from Austin to Hyderabad to visit my parents. Uncle would invite me for a drink, and the three of us would sit and chat in their living room.

Aunty would ask about my life as a young man in the US. She was like a judo sensei. She could gently, subtly, and without judgement use the force of my own thinking to send me in new directions and explore new ideas. Even back then I thought she was a remarkable lady.

Then Arjun was killed by a drugged motorist while riding his bicycle in Austin in 2006 leaving behind a daughter who was nine. Arjun’s parents were at an event in Michigan when they got the news that night. A pregnant Jo and I were in Florida visiting Aaron’s family. We met them at Arjun’s home the next morning along with other friends and family who were hastily arriving from everywhere.

We were shattered. Aunty, who had just lost her son was the calm pillar of strength. I went there to console her. Instead she consoled us all.

Guri Uncle has a hard time hearing on the phone these days so we chat using WhatsApp. Five word condolences and replies. I can sense his pain and loneliness. But he has taken up the mantle. In one text he said “Arun, this is life my dear fellow”.

When you spend all day every day with your kids you talk about the strangest things. A few days ago it was death. We were discussing our culture’s troubled relationship with death. I said that when someone dies we should celebrate their life. After all death is inevitable. Evan replied “but it’s okay to be sad because you’re never going to see that person ever again”. True.

We checked out the street art scene in Newtown and Katoomba in New South Wales. Pretty awesome. They even have a program that matches artists and property owners.

I hope your year went well. This is the 13th annual edition of The Christmas Letter and I’m happy to say that twenty nineteen has been an amazing year for us. We’ve been on the road for five months now, and have visited about 15 countries and 40 places. It feels like we’ve been traveling all year though we were home for the first seven months. I don’t remember that part much.

Vivian started 2019 wearing a cast after breaking her arm at the end of 2018. She finished 6th grade, made amazing friends, and grew up a lot. Her love of writing and sketching really took off.

Evan enjoyed 4th grade, especially friends and his favorite period – recess. He continues to be a bundle of contradictions, a loving turd.

By the beginning of summer Jo methodically started preparing for our impending departure by moving our shit a.k.a our personal belongings to Goodwill every day. Towards the end of July I packed my bags for Africa. Aaron met me in Arusha and we climbed Kilimanjaro.

A little bit after that Jo, Carol and the kids arrived in Arusha and we officially started our year long family vacation. Carol left us after Africa and we headed off to the Mediterranean and Egypt followed by India and Bhutan. Then we took a short break from traveling and came back to Austin for Thanksgiving. In December we resumed where we had left off, with a few days in Singapore and the rest of the month in Australia.

Vacationing requires work. Planning the trip as it unfolds, having Vivian and Evan study periodically, keeping everyone fed, and going from place to place takes effort. But in between it’s magic. We’ve splashed in stunning beaches in the Mediterranean sea and Indian and Pacific oceans, climbed up hills in Africa and Bhutan, stepped on to the sand dunes of Egypt, swam and sailed down the Nile, rafted down the Mo Chu river, climbed inside the Great Pyramid, watched the sun set over the ruins of the Acropolis, cringed at crocodiles devouring drowning wildebeest on the Maasai river, marveled at lions copulating in the Okavango delta, played with starfish in the shallow lagoons of coastal Kenya, enjoyed a breakfast at St. Marco’s square in Venice, chatted with school kids in a slum in Nairobi, spun the prayer wheels at a nunnery in Punaka, patted koalas in Brisbane, watched a storm brew over the city walls of old Dubrovnik, ridden bicycles on cobbled stoned paths along the shores of the Adriatic, toured Robben Island prison with an ex-convict, drank with the regulars in Gansbaai watching the Boks play the All Blacks on the television, rode on a tram in Kolkata, admired the erotic sculpture at Konarak, watched Christmas carolers in Singapore, celebrated Diwali in Hyderabad and Christmas in Brisbane, gazed upon Tutankhamen’s solid gold death mask, surfed down a giant sand dune in Western Australia, snorkeled in the Mediterranean, paid our respects to Michael Angelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and Dante in Florence, kissed my wife in the back seat of a gondola in Venetian canal, admired the breathtaking views from the balcony of Nueschwanstein castle, mingled with the lederhosen-sporting locals at the St. Rupert’s Day fair in Salzburg, ran along the rocky cliffs of the Western Cape to spot whales, got drenched in the spray rising from Victoria Falls, witnessed thousands of wildebeest thunder across the northern Serengeti during their migration, listened to a lion conservationist tell us about her work in the Ngorongoro crater, and looked at the fossil beds of Olduvai gorge where our species got started.

We’ve visited old friends and made some new ones. Along the way Vivian and Evan discovered a little bit about the world and Jo and I learned more about our family and ourselves. We were horrified by apartheid and how its long tentacles reach towards the future but we were uplifted by the hopeful children in the school in Mathare. We were amazed by the social lives of the wild dogs of Okavango, the most ruthless predators in the delta who tenderly take care of their young. We are struck by the open warmth and friendliness of the Egyptians and horrified by the clamp down on their protests just weeks before we got there. Everywhere that we saw division and tribalism and the ugly underbelly of fear and greed we also heard people telling us that the only way forward is together. The old cab driver in Greece who worries about the swarming immigrants from Africa and Syria said “But we have to take care of them”.

There is one place where there isn’t a silver lining. It is how we’ve fucked up planet home. Most places we visited are reeling from unusually late or early or too little or too much rain, or unexpected heat. Whether we are causing the change or not, the world seems to be entering a period of misery caused by climate change. How will this affect the lives of our children ? I don’t know. But hope by itself is a misguided sentiment. Ignorance is worse. Willful short sightedness is criminal.

As we travel I hope Vivian and Evan and Jo and I learn a little more about other places and people. Yesterday an old friend posted this quote by Dr Chuba Okadigbo, a Nigerian politician and philosopher I’d never heard of:

If you are emotionally attached to your tribe, religion or political leaning to the point that truth and justice become secondary considerations, your education and exposure is useless. If you cannot reason beyond petty sentiments, you are a liability.

Here’s to not being a liability. And to Merry Everything and Happy Always.

Warm wishes and love from Evan, Vivian, Jo, and me.

Dec 26 2019. Burleigh Heads, Queensland, Australia.

We flew from one of the smallest countries to one of the largest – an entire island continent country with one of earth’s longest continuously surviving indigenous cultures separated from the rest of their species for fifty to hundred thousand years.

We’ve been Down Under for 15 days and we’re loving it. It has mostly been a beach kind of vacation. Fremantle and Yallingup in Western Australia have spectacular beaches with clear sparkling blue water and white sands. Melbourne, Brighton, and Sandringham are more urban beaches with golden sand and colder waters (and occasionally a few flies at this time if the year). Burleigh Heads beach on the Gold Coast about 100 km south of Brisbane is beautiful with the best swimming and boogie boarding so far.

Australia to us casual tourists feels more like America than any place we’ve been on our travels. In fact, like Texas. Superficially (because I don’t know any better), people seem warm and friendly, drive trucks, barbecue, listen to country music, and wear cowboy hats. They drive on the left but otherwise the highways are more like in the US than Italian autostradas or German autobahns. But Christmas feels different. There doesn’t seem to be a frenzy of buying. And they don’t seem to make a fuss about decorating. For Christmas Eve we had a great dinner at a restaurant and then went bowling. On Christmas morning we hiked up to a lookout at a national park by the beach and watched Aussies congregate on the beach to seriously picnic.

The kids got edible Christmas gifts because we don’t want to buy any crap that adds to their luggage. And they got loads of books downloaded to their devices.

Jen joined us in Melbourne and I quickly realized that I am out of shape. But now, after a week, I feel like I’m back to being able to help Jen put away a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc during the day and a nice Cab in the evening. The wine here is good. We’ve enjoyed wandering into any old liquor store and picking up bottles we’ve never heard of before and always ending up with something supremely drinkable. The Australian god and/or his people are also more chilled – liquor stores are open at 9pm on a Sunday night!

Evan and Vivian have really enjoyed boogie boarding and swimming. For two kids that sometimes act like smiling costs money, I’ve seen noththing but huge grins on their faces when they are hurtling along on the surf. Jo and I have enjoyed walking on the beach, though rarely together : (

Jo planned a few activities that I thought I’d roll my eyes at but they have been great. The koala encounter was amazing and the kids learnt a lot about these gentle strange marsupials. Sand boarding down huge dunes of sand blown inland from the beaches was spectacular and probably what the kids will remember most about Australia. A spooky late night flashlight tour of the convict prison in Fremantle, with a couple of special effects and actors kept us on edge till the very end but also taught us a lot about Australia’s convict history and the English’s strange proclivity for island incarcerations. I enjoyed hearing Vivian and Evan contrasting and comparing the Fremantle prison with Robben Island. The visit to the Science Museum in Melbourne was hugely educational and entertaining, especially the Lightening Room where they zap different things inside a giant Faraday cage with artificial bolts of lightening from a Tesla coil.

In certain places in Australia there are more Chinese and sometimes Indians and Malays than there are white Australians but it’s spotty because at other times Australia looks like the whitest place I’ve seen. If the whites are unhappy perhaps the Aboriginal people can find it in their hearts to console them. But so far Australia seems to be making it work as a melting pot (though there was this very awkward expression of gratitude to the “original owners of this land” by multiple presenters at the science museum in Victoria). Perhaps the notion of being Australian is strong and can bind people to their larger tribe. While we’ll be here for another ten more days, we can confidently say we’d love to come back to Australia!

The City of Lions! Or so the name means in Hindi / Sanskrit. The only lions we saw in this uber-urban city state is a statue of it’s mascot – the half-lion and half-fish merlion.

The flight time from SF to Singapore is a whopping 17 hours. That’s five movies and a nap. The kids weren’t happy but everyone survived. We boarded the flight in San Francisco on Monday morning and got off the bloody airplane at Singapore on Wednesday night ( which includes the day we “lost” traveling west over the Date Line).

Singapore is a tiny place, coming in at about 190th by size in a ranking of all the countries in the world – a list that has about 200 members on a good day. It has about 4 million residents and another 1.5 million non residents who work here. It is smaller than the Austin metro area and has more than five times the number of people. It has a higher GDP per capita than the US and one of the highest human development indices in the the world – which is a measure of health, education, security, lifespan, and other factors that measure the “first-worldness” of a country. Singapore is clean and safe. With millions of people congregating in places I never once saw a police officer or an emergency vehicle while we were here.

The kids loved Singapore. In fact Evan has declared it as one if his favorite places. Vivian wandered the designer stores at the mall at the base of the building with the ship on top (from Crazy Rich Asians, also simply called Marina Bay Sands) and marveled at two thousand dollar cases for carrying AirPods. The mall is beyond posh. There’s a Louis Vuitton Island mansion in the bay (really). And a food court that shames other food courts. The botanical garden is great and the orchid garden within is out of the world. The traditional nasi lemak breakfast served at the park cafe is a decadent way to start a Sunday morning.

Our hosts and dear friends had been invited to a party at a new Bollywood dance club called Gabbar (a Bollywood reference that even I got!) at Clark Quay and I tagged along. It was weirdly fun though I spent a good part of the evening at the club next door called Cuba Libre with a great Latin band where I left more at home. At some point, while tossing back a cocktail of expensive whiskey, gin and tonics, overpriced mojitos, and cold Asahi Super Dry’s, I realized what it is. Singapore feels like Disney World and Vegas smooshed together. Everything is made up. And there’s a lurking feeling that this mediated reality is supported by a huge underbelly of non transparent forces.

I hate Disney and Vegas (I tried to type “intensely dislike”). But I grudgingly admit that I like Singapore. We visited Singapore with the kids eight years ago and they enjoyed it even more this time. Will we be back? Surely. Unless their internet truth police make me take down this post and ban me from returning.