We're exhausted but home. Because the time change is so drastic, we left at about 10 am on Saturday morning in Singapore and ended up arriving in Los Angeles at 11 am on Saturday. Total flight time back was about 17 hours here, not including our stop in Tokyo (flight time was around 20 hours on the way there). I was hoping to be able to stay up until a decent hour, but I'm pretty out of it and still fading; I'd be surprised if I make it much past dinner time.

I'm about to get out of sequence in writing about what happened since I last made an update, and I also have a few overall thoughts I'd like to articulate when I'm more clear-headed. In the meantime, here's the story of Friday, the day we named "Waiting for Lydia." We didn't mean to wait for Lydia. What we meant to do was go to the botanic gardens and then later take a cable car up to check out the view from Mt. Faber. In fact, we were already in a taxi on the way to the gardens—and then, it started to rain. Hard. Just crossing the street could leave you soaked. Wandering around outside and looking at flowers suddenly seemed much less appealing, so we hastily came up with Plan B: have the cab driver drop us off somewhere near where we already were, which happened to be around Orchard Road, and find a good place to have cocktails.

Cocktails turned into wine and cheese after we found a window table in a little bistro, where we eventually saw an American woman who stuck her head in the door and shouted, "Fish and chips! Do you have them?" The restaurant served nothing of the sort—we were in Singapore, after all—but that was less funny than the fact that the woman was so intensely abrupt that she reminded me of people who make plans like, "We're going to wear jeans and be relaxed and have a good time, goddammit." When she demanded that the server recommend a place where she and her kids could get themselves some fishy goodness, he was clearly a little short on ideas. "The Hard Rock, maybe?" he offered.

"Oh, no way," the woman said scornfully as she then turned and stomped away. Now, by this time, the hubby and I were a little tipsy, and it was all we could do to wait until the door closed before we started laughing. The server shot us a questioning look. "I'm sorry—we just found her really amusing," I explained as Jeff made the new international sign for "give me some fucking fish and chips," which looks a little like the view Marshall, Will, and Holly from "Land of the Lost" had as they hid from angry dinosaurs in their cave. Obviously relieved that we felt no solidarity with Fishy on some sort of nationalistic principle, he stayed and chatted with us for a while.

Eventually, we decided to move on, but we were still limited pretty much to places we could get to during breaks between the worst of the rainy spells. We settled on a place called The Dubliner, where we parked ourselves with some Guinness and ended up having one of those afternoons that probably doesn't sound nearly as fun as it was. Public transportation in Singapore is really quite good, and the advertisements on the buses are often fascinating. One ad we had seen a few times featured a woman named Lydia, who was the star of a TV program of some sort—we couldn't figure out whether it was a cooking show, a sitcom, or something else. Whatever it was, Lydia looked wholly insane, and I started to obsess over getting a picture of one of the Lydia buses.

The Dubliner has a covered outdoor patio that happens to be right next to a bus stop, so spending some time there seemed like a perfect opportunity to sip some beer and wait for a Lydia bus. After one pint, there was no Lydia, but there were myriad other interesting buses—the stream of them was nearly constant—so I took pictures of them instead. After two pints, still no Lydia. Towards the end of the third pint, I declared that I'd now be upset if Lydia finally showed up, because her sudden appearance would have broken the Beckettesque aura with which we had started to regard the afternoon. And indeed, we didn't see her again for the rest of our visit.

After returning to the hotel for a disco nap, we had one of those nights that is lovely but not remarkable in very many particulars. It was also short; we got only four hours of sleep or so before we had to get up, shower, pack, check out of our hotel, and get in a cab headed for Changi Airport.