Short Cut

My apartment building is in a cute neighborhood, sort of removed from the action. It's not where I initially pictured myself living, but it is big & cheap and I love it. I take the bus to work. It is about a 10 minute walk to the stop, which is located on a main road, Bukit Timah Road. The name of this road is one of my new favorite things to say. Try it...Boookeetee Mah. Bukitimah, bukitimah, bukitimah. Fun, no?

Anyway, back to the point of the post, my commute. There is a shortcut from my apartment building to the road, which cuts the time in half. For the first 25 feet or so, the paths is like a sidewalk, but fenced in on one side and with a wall on the other. At the end, the path turns left, and continues for another 20 feet or so, with a chain link fence on each side, Then, it turns right begins to run alongside a cement drainage ditch. It is fenced in on the other side and there is about a foot of space between the ditch and the space, so I have to cross over the ditch, which is about 4 feet wide, on a makeshift bridge consisting of a board. Then it's about another 25 feet to the road, where I scramble up an embankment and (as gracefully as possible) swing myself over a 2ft-high cement wall.

This is a pretty well-traveled path. I occasionally will see a few other people using it, but it definitely has the atmosphere of being a place where the druggies & homeless people would camp if Singapore had druggies or homeless people. (It doesn't - when I asked one of the Wendys what happens when someone is homeless here she said, "The government gives them a home.") Anyway, most of the time my path is pretty deserted.

So, two interesting things have happened on the path recently. First, I left my apt to go to work the other morning, turned on my ipod and selected Shakira from my list of artists. Well, I can do a mean mean Shakira. So here I am belting out "Underneath Your Clothes" at a pretty loud volume when I turn the corner, come to a spot where the foliage doesn't cover the fence, and see three or four nannies sitting in the backyard of an apartment building watching the kids on the playground, staring in my direction and laughing their asses off. Don't worry, I didn't let them stop me (this used to happen all the time in my convertible - I would pull up to a stoplight and forget that the top was down and that everyone around me could hear my interpretation of John Legend or Rihanna or Billy Joel) - I just smiled and continued to sing.

A few days later, I was taking the same path to work, and what do I almost run into? A big smelly pile of sh*t! I mean, it was really really big. A human couldn't have made that. A dog definitely couldn't have made that. It looked like the big old elephant turds I have seen at the circus. (Ok, so maybe not that big, but still really big.) I really can't figure out where it came from, and I am not so sure I want to know. Singapore is a tropical island, with some dense forests that could definitely hide come gorillas or tigers. I think this means that I am going to have to continue to sing in the mornings in the hopes of scaring off whatever animal likes to take a dump in my short cut.