Temporary Living

Our first couple months in Singapore are spent in temporary housing until our stuff arrives from The States and we find a permanent place to live.  There are several full-service apartments around town and the one in which we chose to stay is the Orchard Scotts Residences.  It is just a street over from the hotel where I stayed on my business trip so it is nice to be in a familiar area.  We love the location because it is fairly quiet, close to an MRT, and just 1 km (yes I'm doing all metric these days) from Orchard Rd which is the shopping epicenter of this small country.

Living in a serviced apartment has its ups and downs so I'll share my likes and dislikes.

Like

• Cleaning service six days a week. They even do the dishes! Who wouldn't love this?
• Huge swimming pool and nice barbecue stations (they clean up after you there, too)
• Location 
• Rain shower
• Cleaning service. Yep, its so good I double liked it. 
• Being able to cook myself dinner and wash my own clothes.

Surprisingly there were no children in the pool at the time I took this.
It took longer than you would think to be able to take a picture that
wouldn't have naked Australian or European kids in it.

Dislike

• The uncomfortable furniture.  I miss my chaise lounge and Tempurpedic mattress!
• Kitchen equipment.  There are three dull knives and three pots/pans to cook with.  The gas stove is hard to control so my cooking usually involves lots of smoke and sometimes the fire alarm.  There is also an oven/microwave and I haven't really figured out how to use it as a microwave or an oven.
• Closet space is minimal so the second bedroom has been turned into our closet/storage room.
• They decided to do routine maintenance on the aircon (the term they use for A/C) in our apartment and had to turn it off for five days.  They gave us a different unit to sleep in but it was on the 3rd floor and ours is on the 10th floor.  Shuffling back and forth was annoying for us and confusing for Maddie.

Living Room

Uncomfortable king bed

Kitchen with the tiny oven/microwave

Undecided

• Washer/Dryer - the same machine that washes the clothes also dries them.  I like that I can just set it and go to work or go to bed and the laundry will be done when I get back. The bad part is it takes about five hours to do a load, which is only about four outfits, so I'm constantly doing laundry.

That is all I have for washing clothes.

Overall, life in temp living is good and we would rather be here than living in a hotel room.  We just can't wait to move to our new place!  Hurry up container ship!