Happy Singapore National Day!

Today is Sinagpore's 61st birthday and we were lucky enough to get tickets for the National Day Parade (NDP)!

This is what it looks like!

There are over 2600 performers (which I calculated with math while Barry did not)!

If you're an outstanding citizen, you get to stand on these really cool floats, so I have a new life goal now.

I have a few partners in the cat rescue world who are worthy, I think.

My favourite was the dugong because dugons are fabulous.

As a systems person, I also loved the crowd management. Thank you, volunteers, look at that crowd all fitting nicely into the subway!

Happy Birthday, Singapore, and thank you for welcoming us and being our home for 19 years!

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Polish Art Trolling

We went to Wroclav, Poland to see the trolls. Turns out that they prefer to be called dwarfs.

There are over 1000 in Wroclav, which is not pronounced as something that sounds to us chumps like "Crashclash".

Anyway, some look quite wise, others not so much.

They have their own homes and everything.

And hang around the city doing various activities.

The dwarfs seems to suffer from the same gender imbalance issues that the smurfs and Paw Patrol do, so the ladies are treated extra well.

It is a nice break from the religious art, which often seems disturbing, like this.

It is a very sculptury town!

Perhaps you are wondering what else there is to do? Well, we ate all of the pierogies, which were amazeballs.

But all I only took pictures of this guy and of the sauerkraut being sold by the bucket, which seems optimal.The town also features a video game museum, so I reminisced about Little Professor.

And Barry tried to look cool while hunting ducks.

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Centaurs, Communism and Skating at Easter

A late update, but we went to Prague in March. This is great timing because they had Easter markets, and here we are trying the local delicacies.

We were there for the figure skating word championships.

It was fantastic, but our pictures look mostly like this.

So let's focus on more fun stuff! We went to the Museum of Communism and here is Barry with Marx.

I think you have to be serious in the Museum of Communism, like this.

Communists made mosaics, which in this case resemble some pandemic paint by numbers.

In addition to communism, the statues (Atlantes) seemed to suffer many burdens.

There was a lot of sculptural suffering.

This guy is trying to feed a pill to a cat, and I know how he feels.

Here are Barry and Andrew posting in a fancy doorway, as you do.

We went to the library, and it was beauteous.

But the only book we were allowed to see was this one? It seems to be labelling the anatomical and other parts of a rather short centaur.

Here are some pictures of Czech historic figures, many of whom supported their pious celibacy with bad haircuts.

To take a break from the heavy culture and history, I took Barry and Andrew to a miniatures museum.

This is what they thought of that.

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Fun with Lubes and Tubes

Look, here is Barry with a big green tank!

We visited the former Lube Blending plant in Woodlands, northern Singapore. Isn't it industrial chic?

(It will soon be safely demolished, don't worry.)

According to our (non-oil expert) guides, the tanks were painted green so as to not offend the Sultan of Johor. It's best not to offend sultans, I guess.

So you gotta mix the oils from the tubes correctly to make the lubes. One of them is called Osmanthus, but not related to the flower.

There's a lotta tubes. Unsurprisingly, this system has been replaced with computers and automation.

Vacant plants are fun! We pressed buttons.

You can see that Barry is sick with power.

We couldn't fix the internet though.

No containers showed up.

Despite the obvious temptation, we followed the signs to not randomly get into the tanks and suffer from fumes because that would be embarrassing.

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