Singapore's small, and when your island fever gets too intense, you gotta skip town! The easiest solution is to get on a boat to the island of Bintan, aka Fauxnesia. Fauxnesia, like Disneyworld, Vegas or Iqaluit, is for people who want to convince themselves they're somewhere they're not. In this case, we're pretending we're in Indonesiapore.
Bintan's resort area is separated from the rest of the Indonesian island by a barbed wire fence, and its currency is the Singapore dollar. Shown below are fauxsatay, bigger than actual satay but less tasty.
Bintan is not without its dangers:
However, if you need a getaway and a 90 minute massage, Fauxnesia is easy and relaxing.
But be careful not to hyper-extend that relaxed neck.
In much of Korea, limited English is spoken. No problem, we would walk into a restaurant, shrug our shoulders, and then the above ($12 worth) would show up! Sometimes, there are pictures or plastic food at which you point, as in the below.
Barry demonstrates our confusion when this showed up. Happily, this confusion led to the servers helping us cook our own...
Until it was transformed into this (well after we ate some, since our photography vs. hunger priorities shifted)! This delectable dish is called dak galbi, and we suggest drinking it with the low cost, tasty and cooling makgeolli rice wine. This wine was another star of our vacation.
Koreans are also really good at street food.
And western fusion food. Hot dogs with Korean sauce? Sure!
Now let's talk about attitude. Korean food's spicy and bad-ass. Check out these street peppers - wouldn't wanna run into them in a dark alley, would ya?
To learn more, we went to Seoul's Kimchi Field Museum, where we learned that before the hot pepper, Korean food was duller and kimchi was just, well pickles. Sounds British, leading me to wonder why the brits didn't bring their cabbage closer to their peppers. Anyway, my faves are the radishes, as shown.
Barry was really into the kimchi museum, almost inappropriately so.
And then we learned another reason we like kimchi - it tidies!
Tell a Korean you're going to Gwangju, and they'll look at you strangely and ask why, while trying not to offend you. 
In Gwangju, we happily learnt there was an amusement park beside our hotel. However, it turns out its amusement had long fled.
We started to wonder what had happened that had scared the owners away so quickly.
Soon, we forgot about it and were on our way up a mountain in an otherwise empty chair lift.
At the top, there was a lookout.
And a fun house.
And, strangely, a former mountain train station.
To avoid getting totally freaked out, we relaxed at a restaurant, which appeared as if just for us (since we saw only 5 other people in 2 hours). Here, we enjoyed local makoli rice wine & kimchi. Yes, drinking out of bowls is what you're supposed to do.
And the view of the city was fantastic. Especially with no one else around.
I was only a little bit scared on the way down. Barry helped via 
We recently visited Singapore's Jurong Bird park. The birds were a big fan of Barry and Erin. I, however, was a little more hesitant.
These birds are ibis, though I'm more familiar with them in their hotel form.
Some of the birds seemed to be having a good time.
But others not as much (unless it's normal for ostriches to bald).
Good times,
How do you take your coffee? No, this is not a mass coffee spill: Singapore's had a few floods lately, after which our local paper published the following picture:
These clever people seek higher ground. They will later likely seek anti-fungal cream.
We have recently discovered that Singapore has its own Sasquatch, called the 
Here's me running away in fear - not of monkey man, but from a huge spider's web I had just run into.
Well, instead of finding cryptids, we found alternative creatures, such as soccer cows.
A monster snail slowly attacking my umbrella:
We found the lesser known, flower peppercorn, probably used by monkey monster as seasoning.
You're enraptured by my photographic representation of the puffball, yes?
Outside of the forest, I call this art of art imitating life...
And this: the End of Puff.
And finally: Lotus-like flower hides under the Wall. (As opposed to 