The big girls tried out a drama class. It's a weekly 1.5 hour class for ages 5 to 7 that leads up to a performance of the Lion King in December.

The first half of the class included lively musical games, dancing across the room in a line to learn the dance moves, and singing musical scales at the piano. After that everyone gathered together in a circle for the scrip reading, and that's where Ms.E gave up and asked to leave.

I think 45 minutes was a really good try for something that clearly wasn't her thing. Ms.E said "I didn't know it would be like that," but she did say she enjoyed the singing. In contrast about 3 seconds into the class, I knew Ms.C had found her calling and would be enrolling in this one. I'm not sure I've ever seen her more enthusiastic about anything, and she's a pretty enthusiastic 7 year old in general.

We left Ms.C to enjoy herself and headed out for a walk. There wasn't quite enough time for the playground, so we headed for the opposite side of the street and the Southern Ridges. It's a 10 km trail of linked metal bridges high in the tree tops. We made it 0.3 km, before we ran out of time and had to head back for Ms.C.

Our walk had started with Ms.E counting elephants at the little alter outside the lift (elevator) at the Drama School. We see little alters like this all over the place. They seem rather randomly placed around businesses. If you look closely at the alter, you can see paper money beside the black elephants and also the red incense sticks.

We headed up the main road, keeping to the walking path side of the sidewalk. There was a nice bike path to one side. It's a bit of a hill, so I imagine the bikes fly down it. There's a pretty reasonable slope to get up to the top. I was pushing 75 lbs of kids in the stroller in 32 C heat and I didn't mind the climb much. If you don't like heights, this is not the walk for you. If you look at your feet, you can actually see the forest floor through the grating waaaaay below you.

I thought found Autumn for a moment and was a little confused, as Singapore doesn't have the four seasons. Being on the Equator it's basically hot and humid all year here. Turns out the Ketapang Tree's leaves turn red and fall off in the dry season. This isn't due to a lack of sunlight like true autumn leaves. I nostalgically crunched as many leaves as I could with my feet, and Ms.E and I talked about Canada's Fall.

As we walked away from Autumn, a pair of bright green parakeets flew by and we were back to marvelling at Singapore. Another thing which surprised me was the size of the palm tree fronds (the leaves). I couldn't find a way to take a picture which did it justice, but I saw on palm where I think each frond might have been 30 feet long.

Next week we're going to try out the Nature Playground at Holt Park.