Trash in Singapore

When we met with the landlords I asked what I thought was a totally normal question.  “What day is trash day?”  They looked at me a little weird and replied, “Everyday.”  My response?  “What?  You mean they pick up trash every single day?  What a waste of resources (time, money, gas, manpower)!!” 

Of course I have no say in the matter, so I dutifully put my kitchen trash out in the green bin provided and delivered it to the street to be emptied.  They took it.  Blah, blah, blah. After a few days I noticed that we were getting flies in our trash can.  Didn’t take long to realize that there were stinky diapers sitting in there.  Ugh.   I guess they’ll dump them tomorrow.  Nope.  Still there. Now we have three, four, five days of diapers in there.  What am I doing wrong? This morning I happened to see the trash truck come through and watched.

Turns out they open the lid, take out the sack and put it in the garbage truck.  They don’t lift and dump the cans at all.  No wonder the stinky diaper pile was growing each day.  I immediately undertook the unpleasant task of retrieving a weeks worth of dirty, stinky diapers that had festered in the heat for nearly a week in the can in the hot sun.

Tomorrow is the big day.  They are bagged and ready.  Trash can on the road.  Please, please, please take those stinky diapers away from my front yard Mr. Garbage Man.  I chalk this up to just one more bump on the learning curve of life in Singapore.  I thought I was doing a good thing by taking the stinky diapers outside and tossing each one into the trash each time I changed Jacob.  Lesson learned.  Bag it with the rest of the trash or it’s gonna stick around a long, long time.

 

Side Note – Recycling is only once a week.  After eight days they haven’t taken my recycling either and I haven’t caught the truck to know yet.  I bagged all my recycling and will leave it out all week to figure that one out too.

 

Other random things? 

**The streets got swept twice last week. That’s what you have to do when there is no change in season.  There is no autumn so leaves fall down all year round and they have to be cleaned up somehow.

**My mailman rides a moped and a helmet to deliver the mail.  Does that make you laugh as much as it does me?