Ice Cream on the Street with Lyndi

There is a little ice cream vendor guy that sits at the gate by the walking exit of the school every day selling ice cream. He has a cute little covered cart like all the other vendors which he drives as a side car attached to his motorcycle.   At first I assumed they were totally overpriced cones.  I was completely wrong. Each serving is only $1.00 ($0.75 US).  This is what he sells mostly.  I have red bean ice cream in the picture and it was pretty tasty.  Other flavors include: peppermint chocolate chip, yam, sweet corn, chocolate chip, durian, chocolate, blueberry, ripple, mocha chip, mango, coconut and honeydew.

You choose your flavor and he digs in the cart to find a box of it.  Then he uses a huge knife to chop through the box.  He tosses the box back in his cart then picks up your serving and peels the cardboard off the sides then lets you choose how you want it served.  Options include: wafer like cookies for each side as I have on mine, a cup OR my favorite one to see (though I haven’t tried it yet) ice cream wrapped in a slice of white bread.  The white bread idea seems genius to me because it absorbs all the drips unlike the ice cream cones my children pick.  People say it makes the bread rather tasty too.

Yesterday Lyndi bought us some from a guy downtown.  There are signs hanging from the pole of the umbrella stick showing the menu and you point to what you want because he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Chinese.  I got this one downtown on Orchard Road outside of the Paragon right where Jana Hyatt is living.

Lyndi Prendergrast was in town for about 8 hours today so we met up just to say hello and she offered to buy the kids a treat.  Ben had a fever overnight so he got to stay home from school and join in the fun.  Lyndi moved into the Great World Serviced Apartments about the same day we did.  Only she was pregnant and came from Jakarta just to have the baby.  She was supposed to come four or so weeks early and stay six or so weeks after the baby came.  She had weird pains the day before she left Indonesia but thought it best to not mention them and just get out of there to where she could get good medical care.  She arrived and they wanted to take the baby that day.  She talked them into waiting for her husband to fly in for the birth.  Then baby Collin went to the NICU for a couple months.  What was supposed to be no big deal turned into a long ordeal for their poor family split between two countries.  She spend most her time going to and from the hospital.

Once Collin was finally discharged her husband brought the little kids over to stay with her in Singapore while he kept the school aged kids in Jakarta.  And that is where we really got to know each other.  Both of us stuck in our temporary worlds just waiting, waiting, waiting to move on with our lives.  Her to join her family back home with the new baby and me to get my shipment of household goods so I could unpack and settle into my new life.  It was so great to have someone in my building to swap childcare with or meet at the pool or playground or even drag along to Chinatown for a morning excursion.  She was a great friend and I was really excited to get together again, even if it was only for an hour and she didn’t have her other kids, Mark and Clara, that we grew to love so much in those two months together.  (Baby Collin’s visa was about to expire so he had to leave the country, Indonesia, and reenter or he would get fined.)  I’m convinced the Lord puts the right people in our path at the right moments to help us make it through whether we are trudging along with heavy feet and the friend can help lift our burdens to make them lighter or we are soaring already and they simply send us higher.