Practice Makes Perfect

I guess technically here it would be "practise" but I try to eschew as much ridiculous British influence as possible. National Day in Singapore is August 9th- but these folks have been practicing for the celebration and show of military force (gotta show Malaysia who's boss) for MONTHS. This involves jets, like serious massive airplanes, buzzing downtown and more recently F-16s flying in formation directly over the IR casino. I cannot usually see these fly-overs- since my office window faces....a wall, but I hear them and feel them shaking my building almost every afternoon for the past month.

This weekend I happened to be in the office during such a military show drill and sprinted to the good side of the office in time to see some pretty impressive aerial moves. Things unlikely to ever happen in Manhattan include close-up views of fighter jets outside your office window. All of this is ridiculous for a few reasons: 1) Singapore is tiny- I am not sure they really need so many legit fighter jets and 2) How many times do you have to buzz downtown to prepare for 1 day? We don't plan to stick around for National Day anyways, but even if we did, I think we have already seen the highlights. And this is just the build up- the week before the holiday, they will apparently ramp up operations and do multiple full scale parades and fireworks show!

From our living room window we did see the following, which was pretty cool:

Here is a close up:

This is a massive helicopter trailing a massive Singapore flag. 

These guys just flew around off the coast for a while, hanging out.