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Smoky

This week has been odd; I first noticed the haze last weekend when the morning sun was a lovely red colour. Since then the haze has ceased to be 'lovely' and more of an annoyance. It's like standing next to a really smoky bonfire for a week - and apparently it's set to continue for another few weeks. Evidently there's some slash-and-burn clearing going on in Indonesia and Singapore gets the smoke from there every year or so. This is the first time we've experienced it - and it's not nice. We've even resorted to turning our air-conditioning on...something we've never done in Singapore. It's quite surreal, it's like a smelly mist that won't lift.

We've had friends here this week, it's been nice to come home and chill out with friends from the UK. It feels really good to be able to just pick up where we left off with them, and it's really good to have the space to put people up now.

After Alpha last night we were walking back along Orchard Road (the main shopping street) towards the bus stop and we fancied popping into HMV (this was 10.35pm), to our amazement it was open. This epitomises the shopping culture here; I think we have grown very accustomed to being able to buy anything we want at any time of the day or night. It's quite bizarre.

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