Penguin Walking in Singapore

Okay, so maybe the tittle is weird.  Let's face it, the tittle makes approximately 1% of sense. But you'll see what I'm talking about in a bit. Probably. Hopefully.

One time I was in Singapore with my family.  We were there for about a week, staying the Chinatown area.  It was a pretty nice location, especially considering that there was a subway station literally right below our AirBnB.  Consequently, we took the train a lot.

One day the five us of (my mom, dad, brother and sister) we over by the Singapore Art Museum at the marina bay.  It had been a long day and we were all ready to head back to our apartment.  We had never taken the train back from this part of the city before.  I don't know why, but our parents decided to give the three kids a challenge.  We were given our train cards and told to find out way back to the AirBnB on our own.

This is the marina bay in Singapore,  The white building that looks like a flower is the art museum.  (The girl in the bottom is my sister Grace.)

We had to wait until out parents were out of sight, but then we set out.  We decided that even if our parents didn't consider it a race, it most definitely was.  All three of us were set on being the first back.  With that settled, we had to find a MRT station (the MRT is the subway in Singapore).  Cannon (my little brother) spotted a sign for a station in a shopping mall by the museum.

Going as quickly as we could, we tried to find the route back.  For reference, this is the MRT map in Singapore.  We were somewhere on the green line, and we had to get to Chinatown (blue/purple line).  Frazzled, we realized we had to take the green line to Outram Park, and then take the blue line to Chinatown.

Determined, we got on the train.  It was only once we were speeding along underground that we saw our parents on the other end of the train.  Hoping they didn't see us (not that it made much difference, but we had always wanted a chance to perfect our secret agent skills), we ran out as soon as the train stopped.

And here, at last, is where the title comes into play.  We couldn't run, since we were in a crowded MRT station.  Besides, no running was one of the rules we had all agreed to beforehand.  Still, we wanted to get past out parents as quickly as possible so they didn't have time to notice us.  Our compromise was to speed walk awkwardly past them on the escalator.  We dubbed this "the penguin walk."  It remains unclear exactly why that term came to us, but it's still an inside family joke among the kids.  If you set the speed of this video to 2x, then maybe you can get a bit of an insight into how absurd we looked.

Anyway, we got to the next train before our parents did.  Unfortunately, the train took so long to arrive that they caught up to us. :|  After the short, two minute train ride we sped out, once more running past our parents.  We ran up an absurd amount of escalators (I lost count, but it sure seemed excessive).  At last, we made to the fresh air and to our AirBnB, with no parents in sight.

Victory! :))))))))))))))