A trip to tropical island paradise! And stuff.

Now I'm finally getting around to typing up this post. Last weekend, I was on Pulau Rawa - a tropical island paradise. Maybe a kilometer or two in diameter, there isn't much more on the island than a holiday resort and a beach club. No city, no streets - just sand, palm trees, and ocean. But let's start at the beginning, shall we?

The trip was organized by a group of exchange students and former students who like traveling, and we met at the PGP stairs (for those who don't know, PGP is one of the student residences on campus, the one where mostly exchange students live.) on Friday evening. The only one I knew there was Jeremy from the US, but you all know I'm a social person *cough* so that wasn't that big of a problem really.



We left in 3 chartered vans, and made our way to the Malaysian border. That border, of course, is a river, with checkpoints on either side of it. We got out, got in line and emigrated. The Malaysian checkpoint was quite a contrast - Singapore being all high-tech and clean, and Malaysia being... well, being Malaysia.
The rest of the van ride was pretty uneventful and pretty bumpy, they just don't keep their roads as well as the Germans do ;-) We arrived in Mersing, our port of departure, at around 2 am and checked into a cheap hotel for the night.









Roughly 5 hours later, and after only about two and a half hours of sleep for me, we got up again and walked to the jetty terminal, had breakfast and got on the speedboat to Rawa... we arrived there at around 9 am, if I remember correctly, and it was incredible! Just see for yourselves:















The last pic shows a Komodo dragon, giant lizards whose scale you probably can't judge properly from the picture... oh well. Check the gallery for more portraits of that little fella!

The rest of the day was spent chilling out at the beach, swimming and snorkling! Snorkling is awesome. They had a coral reef there, with lots of colorful fishes! A school of black velvet colored fish even nibbled on my fingers when I stretched my hands out, that felt funny :) They must have thought I was a really exotic coral or something like that.
Of course, I forgot to put on sunscreen before I went snorkling, and floating top down for about 2 hours made my back all nice and crispy. And the back of my legs, up to my knees... that hurt, and it's so inconvenient! You can hardly sit down properly like that. Lesson learned! Not everywhere is it as hard to get sunburnt as in Singapore, where there's usually at least a thin layer of clouds blocking out the worst.

Shortly after that, a storm rose up on the horizon... it was awesome. You could see it coming from far away, and it slowly crawled across the sky towards us. We only took about 100 photos before it hit, so we'd have some nice new profile pictures to impress the people at home with... here's a little treat:



















More, as always, in my flickr gallery.
In the evening, we had a little party, and there's one little event that I just can't omit. Just see for yourselves:



The first person who guesses correctly what the hell he was trying to do there in his underwear gets a free cookie! Yeah, he was pretty drunk. Later that night, I stumbled into our room only to hear a slightly alarmed Jeremy yelling "Not yet! Not yet! Thirty minutes!"
Bwahaha... he had hooked up with one of the waitresses, the sly bugger! *snicker*

The next day was more relaxed, got up late, checked out, had lunch, hung out, went on top of the island and took the ferry home. Bye bye, paradise island!



So that was that. Got to know a lot of people, and now for planning the next trip!

On another note, the waitlist registration didn't help. I submitted my app 11 minutes past midnight, and when I asked at the Residential Services office, there were about 300 people before me. Damn you, slow internet connection!
So, we are staying here. Well, that's not entirely correct, since when I'm done typing this, I'll go down to the management office and switch rooms from floor 20 to floor 5... pity about the view, but yay about less traffic noise. Additionally, we got our own internet connection there already, so... :)

Another point of interest for those of you at home will be the content of my tutorials that started this week, and how interesting it is from an outsider's perspective to watch the way people talk about politics and issues around here. But I'll get to that another time!

Accommodation: Part II

Okay, here's a little followup on my accommodation situation: It's not all that bad. Monday at midnight, we registered for the waiting list for on-campus accommodation. So if we're lucky, we'll still be able to get a room on campus... but that's mostly a question of luck, I think. I submitted my app 11mins past midnight, so that might even be too late already. We'll see!

However, our current apartment really isn't that bad. I've got cool flatmates, we've got a magnificient view from the 20th floor, access to the roof for an even better panorama view, and if we have to stay there, we'll go and get our own internet connection. Youssef, one of my roommates, brought his saxophone, and we've been jamming a bit: I bought myself a guitar for S$36 - about 16-18€. It's a horrible piece of crap, but it does the job... and it's blue!

This coming weekend, I'll be going to Malaysia for a beach trip, more specifically: to Pulau Rawa. It's supposed to be a really nice island to hang out on the beach, so we'll see! I'll definitely take along that new guitar, I think!

Yesterday, I went to Aikido training, and I realized how much I missed it. You may or may not know, but I already did Aikido for a few months about 4 years ago, until a lecture got in the way of training. There are a lot more people here than what I was used to (I think we were at max 10 people back in Germany, here it's more like 30-40), and quite a large number of black belts too. Training will be twice a week, and only S$15 a month! I stuck around a bit after training, and one of the senseis is doing a little informal Shinkendo group - Samurai sword fighting! That's just so cool. So yeah, my Tuesdays and Fridays will be fun! Even though when I woke up this morning, every part of my body hurt like a bitch... yarr.

Looking back

Losing myself in reflections dancing on the river surface. Seeing the city lights without shedding a single thought.
A memory of a feeling, unreal like I've never felt it. The longing for it, so real.

Blog Labels

Okay, I'm still fiddling around with the labels (tags) on this blog, I hope you'll bear with me. For now, the labeling scheme will be as follows:

1. Labels for locality
This indicates where the stuff I posted happened. So far, we have these:
in transit (when moving between places, i.e. my documentary of my first ever flight)
singapore (guess what.)

2. Labels for content
This sort of categorizes the kind of thing I describe in the post. For example:
sightseeing (self-explanatory I think)
happenings (probably to be further divided in the future)
details (short blurbs about what's different here, compared to home)
encounters (about people I meet)

3. Misc. labels
For example:
With photos (if you only want to see posts that contain photos)
Blog stuff (for organisational stuff, like this post)

Hope that helps a bit.

Coca-Cola Lime

They have a very nice flavor of Cola at the food court here, Coca-Cola with Lime flavor. At the food courts on campus, and at many restaurants, if you order a drink, you get a sealed can with the drink in it, and a glass filled to the brim with ice.



In some shops, ordering a drink without ice is more expensive than one with ice. At most of the food outlets where the drink I got was in an opaque paper cup (like at McDonald's, you know what I mean), I usually felt cheated when the drink was done and the cup was still so heavy...

Encounter at Subway

Someone asked me if I was a muslim yesterday.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because of the beard!" they said.
After I bought a beef sandwich.

...I thought that was worth sharing.

Night Safari & Pulau Ubin

This weekend is almost over, and starting tomorrow, I'll have to attend courses again... after a mere 3 weeks of rest from the last semester. Isn't that great? Well, at least I get to do it in the shadow of palm trees. Anyways, on to the news:

Friday was rather uneventful: We went to the cinema and watched The Bourne Ultimatum. Nice, action packed movie!

Saturday, we went to the Night Safari, and that was really nice. It's like a Zoo, but at night - a nocturnal journey through the forest with a lot of tropical wildlife: leopards, tigers, flying foxes (cute and scary!), gliding squirrels (acrobatic!), and some bear-monkey looking things with an unpronouncable name that are supposedly one of the world's only mammals which produce venom. The big cats were the most impressive though... tigers and leopards really up close, with only half an inch of glass seperating him and me... impressive.





More photos can (as always) be seen at my flickr gallery, which is handily linked on the right hand side of your browser window.

Today, Sunday, we went to Pulau Ubin. That's a little island only 10 minutes from Singpore (and also under Singapore sovereignty), but it feels like an entirely different place and time. The say it's like the Singapore of the 60's, but that's really hard to believe - Where there are skyscrapers, shopping malls and modern nightlife today, there was nothing but... fishing huts? Well, they tell us that development here has been quite rapid.
Anyway, Pulau Ubin was nice. Very tropical... I felt like I was really in the tropics for the first time since I arrived. Palm trees, swamps, butterflies, flowers, the whole shebang!




The ferry ride was quite a lot different from what I'm used to in Germany - no safety rails, no restrictions on whether you can stand up and walk around the (unsecured) deck - if you can call it a deck. The whole ship wasn't bigger than a small freight truck.



After landing on the south shore of the island, we first waded through a sea of bike rentals, had lunch at a rustic chinese diner, and then started walking in the rough direction of the northern shore, where there was supposed to be a little beach. Well, it was a long trek, especially since the path we first wanted to take was closed down... so we had to track back and take a potentially less scenic detour.
The beach was a it of a let-down in the end... smallish and dirtyish, not the most inviting water color either - but what can you expect? We still went in for a little, and spent the rest of the time mostly reading and chatting.

When I got home, Thorsten, my roommate, still had a friend over: a local girl who offered to show us around a bit. We talked a lot and ordered funny pizza. Maybe we'll all go to Java together, that would be fun!





Tomorrow, uni starts. But today, I enjoyed my first ever tropical rainshower :)

Singapore National Day Parade 2007

Okay, so yesterday we went to the National Day Parade 2007. Supposedly a very big thing around here! We were supposed to meet with a bunch of people at the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit, Singapore's subway and high rail train system), but there were so many people there!



Thank the heavens for cellphones. We did manage to meet up with most of us, and then our epic journey began... So many people! It took forever to get to a (very crowded) spot from where we could (almost) see (the treeline that blocked our sight of) the parade!




There were jets flying around, and helicopters, parachutes and hanggliders (or something like that... It was dark, and I assumed they may have been remote controlled cyborg robot drones too. You never know.)
And then there was fireworks! Finally. I love fireworks! Here's just one shot:



And here's a funny photo of the entire crowd taking photos of the fireworks... kind of funny how they all tried to capture the moment, and at the same time missed it because they were too busy with their cameras.



Afterwards we went to a thai restaurant, and I had a lime juice and a limeade - which is like lemonade, just made of limes and not lemons. It tasted really weird. The juice tasted like Caipirinha, just without the alcohol.
On the way out, look what we came across - soldiers with shopping bags!



So, I'm still hoping we'll hear from the student hall soon... Really need to get out of this rathole place. Here's a picture of what it looks like from the outside:



Believe me, it's much worse from the inside...

Clubbin'

Yow, my nipples hurt. More on that later, but first:
We went to a club today, called "Double O". Would you believe it, that was actually the first time I've been to a "mainstream" club like that. Apparently, every Wednesday it's Ladies' Night in many clubs around town, so our girls got in for free, and we guys had to pay 30S$ entrance fee (about 15€). Jannika and Nicole brought along Mako, a very nice girl from Japan, and Munir and me spent most of the first part of the evening in the club alone with her, because the other girls were both wearing flip-flops - the "bouncers" (not very bouncy looking women) told us that you're not allowed to enter any club in Singapore without proper footwear - so they had to go home and change.
Mako and the two of us already went in though, and it turned out to be kinda weird. Very pink and, well, mainstreamish. The music was horrible too... So we got some drinks :-) We had hoped to meet some of the other exchange students there, but there weren't really any of them, they messaged us that they'd gone to another club, so we were pretty much on our own. Was okay though, we had a lot of fun :) Mako told us that people in Japan usually don't dance (they do Karaoke though), and she was a little shy and afraid about it, which kind of reminded me of the problems I had when I first went out... never wanted to dance because I was afraid of making a fool of myself. To be honest though, hardly anyone can dance really well, and if you look at it closely, they are all making fools of themselves! So why not just join in and have some fun? So we did.
This is the part where we get to my hurting nipples. I bought a new shirt, and it's made of some kind of weird fabric, it's kinda rough. Yeah, you can imagine the rest.
Now it's 5 am, and I'm kind of home, and done for. Oh, almost forgot: Someone from one of the Halls mailed us today and told us to send our resumés, and that maybe they have a free room or two. So our accommodation situation might change for the better soon, yay! Keep your fingers crossed!
Tomorrow is Singapore's National Day, and we're going to see the parade and fireworks! Yay, expect photos!

For now, good night.

Baybeats

Yesterday we stumbled across the Baybeats festival by accident. We just wanted to see the seaside, so we first went to Marina Bay MRT station, found out that there was nothing but streets and, well, more streets, asked a passer-by and were told that we're probably rather looking for the City Hall area.



So there we went, thinking we could check out the Esplanade as well, which is supposed to be kind of a landmark. Convention center and all, but it turned out to be really disappointing to me - overexpensive shops and no attractive food anyway... since we (which usually refers to the four of us from Germany, by the way) realized we were all so hungry we were about to collapse, we went to a differnet mall to grab a bite, and ended up in an Italian restaurant called "Spageddies", which was kinda nice. That's one thing I really have to learn to get used to though: Tips are a mandatory 10% of the bill, and prices on the menu do not include GST - Goods & Services Tax, in German: Mwst.
I had a nice Lasagna and Tomato Basil Bruscetta, yummie! So after our hunger was catered to, we went to the seaside, which was only a short walk, right across the street. Turned out there was this Baybeats festival, and we decided to stick around a bit. Then we ran into some of the other exchange students and there was that.
We also met a nice local student who asked us to do a survey, and we got talking a bit and eventually exchanged numbers - she offered to show us around town, so maybe we'll get a private guided tour sometime this week :-)

Photos Online

Just a quick note: I've set up an online photo album at this address:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7244817@N07/sets/72157601249686563/

I'll upload all photos I take there (except for a few that get censored), and just a few highlights here. If you see your photo there and don't want it on public display, just leave a comment or send me a mail, and I'll take it down, no questions asked.

Non-accommodating "Accommodation"

Okay, this is horrible.

We found "accommodation"... I'm putting that in quotes because it really is a disgrace to the word to call this rathole accommodation. List of obvious defects: I can't get into my bathroom, because the door is locked, and the lock has been demolished. I can't close my window, because someone broke off the handle. It is all really, really, really ugly. Think 70's, but the part that was NOT hip.
Apparently, this place is getting sold or demolished next week or next month, and it shows: There is trash lying all across the hallways, it's not cleaned up one bit, all kinds of things are broken, and it generally just sucks.
There is no Internet access either. How the hell is a man supposed to study like this? We have to spend an awful lot of money on Taxi fares every day to get to Campus, and there isn't a single bit of community life around here. We went to a party at PGP (Prince George Park Residences, premier exchange student residence complex we all applied to) tonight, and it was sooooooooo depressing! So many people, very nice and interesting people, and we have to live far far away from all of them. And no sports or other activities in our "home" either... I'm thinking of calling our profs in Germany to make them call and email the Singaporean correspondents to make them give us proper rooms. This is just unbelievably horrible.
Did I mention the zoo's worth of animals crawling around here? Geckos and all kinds of insects, even though we're on the 20th floor.

Anyways, the party was nice. I talked to lots of interesting people from all over the world - Canadians, Americans, Englishmen, Scots, Thais, Malays, Cambodians, Germans (duh), etc. I wish I could stay at PGP... it's such an awesome place! :(
So we have two options now... either stick with this horrible piece of crap place, or use the waiting list that opens end of August (in 3 weeks! T_T), and hope to get into one of the on-campus accommodations... hall or residence, I don't care. Or get private accommodation, which would result in the same and less contact with locals and other students, and be off campus as well. Or bitch and moan and bite and gnaw until they give me what I want, deserve, and can expect.
Seriously.
In Germany, all dorms and student accommodation are filled with exchange students first and foremost, with the locals being an afterthought... after all, they're from here, they can find a different place to stay - exchange students can't do that this easily. Here it seems to be the other way around...

Annoying. I'm just about ready to strangle someone.

Moral support please!

PS: As promised, here are some photos.

Some shots of central square food court:




This is on campus:

And these were taken on famed Orchard road:





The girls trying to tell the clerk that they want some bedlinen cover piece to slip into, and use as a sleeping bag. She was a little confused and couldn't help them in the end.

I suppose these roofs are to protect people from rain, but I have yet to witness rain here.

Our first backpacker hostel from the outside:

Shy cat in chinatown:

Student Exchange Programme - Orientation. Very depressing, since they went through all the student halls and residences... >_<
View from the roof of our bunker at night: