Wednesday, November 7, 2007
I know...
I still have to write up a blog about our trip to Cambodia. I'll get to it as soon as I've finished writing up all these essays that are due on Friday :->
Thursday, October 25, 2007
A Holiday in Cambodia
So, in a matter of hours, we're leaving Singapore for an extended weekend in Cambodia. Munir is sick, so he's staying home, and we're just trying to change the booking so that Thorsten can come along.
The plan is to fly to Phnom Penh, spend a day or so there, then go to Siem Reap, the city near Angkor (maybe by boat?), and fly back from there early next week.
Also, I got new lenses for my glasses yesterday, so now I can finally see clearly again! Yay! I look forward to endless nights of stargazing.
So long!
PS: Hope you like the new header of this blog. Yeah, I was bored.
The plan is to fly to Phnom Penh, spend a day or so there, then go to Siem Reap, the city near Angkor (maybe by boat?), and fly back from there early next week.
Also, I got new lenses for my glasses yesterday, so now I can finally see clearly again! Yay! I look forward to endless nights of stargazing.
So long!
PS: Hope you like the new header of this blog. Yeah, I was bored.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Indonesia trip, part two
Now that I'm back in Singapore, I can finally upload all my photos - and videos! Yes, you heard correctly.
We did go to Borobudur that next day, and we saw the sunset. I put all my Borobudur photos in a seperate gallery on Flickr, accessible behind this link.
Anyways, on to the story.
We hired a horse carriage in Yogya to get us to the bus terminal, and it was kind of funny to go by horse on Indonesia's busy streets. Turned out the bus terminal wasn't the bus terminal - as usual, Indonesians like giving each other good business, like a few days before on our way from Pangandaran to the train station, when the bus dropped us off not at the train station, but 2km from it, in front of a couple of Becak-drivers. Yay, thank you very much, Mr tourist exploiter!
Anyways. We started negotiating with the driver (and seemingly, 5 of his friends) for a good price from Yogya to the temple, and suddenly all of the other passengers who had been waiting in the bus left/were told to leave - apparently we had just hired that bus for ourselves. Oops! Oh well :)
Borobudur is a big buddhist temple that is said to have been built in the 8th century. It consists of 10 levels, each representing a level of existance, and decorated with fitting reliefs. They are grouped in sets of three, with the levels 7-9 representing "heaven", and level 10 the nirvana. Of course, the 10th level is completely unaccessible to anyone, because all it is is an empty room without doors or windows or any means of access in the big stupa on top of the temple, go figure.
We had a very nice guide who explained all that and told us lots of funny stories about the relief pictures... most of them depicting various reincarnations of Buddha, before his final one as Siddharta.
Like the one story where he was born as a very naive Buffalo (I think), who was friends with a very clever and cunning monkey. They stumbled across a man in the forest who was very hungry, and decided to eat the monkey. But the monkey said "No sir, please don't! Eat the buffalo instead, he will certainly satisfy your hunger much better!". The man contemplated and agreed, and the buddha-buffalo also didn't mind. He said to the monkey "I'm sorry for everything that I may have done wrong" or something like that, and the hungry man overheard their conversation... it struck his heart, and he decided to become a vegetarian instead!
Or the one where he was born as a goat with 8 legs, 4 on top and 4 below.
Anyways, here's what the view from the top of the temple looked like:
We stayed until sunset, only to realize that the last bus home had already left... So we had to hire a local driver, who of course knew that the last bus had already left, and thus charged us twice what we had paid to get there in the first place...
When we got back, we had dinner in a very artsy restaurant called "Bedhot Resto". Many of the others even got a t-shirt there! But the food wasn't that hot, to be honest... I tried their pizza, and it tasted pretty dull. Well, maybe I should have tried their Indonesian stuff, I know...
Katja left for Singapore that evening because she had to meet someone or other, so for the rest of the trip, it was down to the six of us. I stayed up until about 5am and chatted with two germans who were also staying at our hostel about all kinds of political stuff, was pretty nice. I think I also finished the book "Dschungelkind" in about one day while we were staying there.
The next day, we all went and had a massage, which as bloody neccessary - the hostel only had really crappy foam mattresses... We took the public bus to the bus terminal, and had people with a guitar enter twice, I think, play a song and ask for donations - funny stuff. Then we took the bus to Surabaya, where we had our most intensive fight with two taxi drivers who demanded a crapload of money for their services. They didn't get it. We just stayed until early that morning (in a hostel where Munir's and my room had neither working light nor water) to take the first bus to the Mt. Bromo area. Again, the bus didn't drop us off at the terminal, but at a travel agency. Well, handy for us, they really could help us with our trip to the crater, and to Bali the next day. We chartered a Minibus to a village on the edge of the crater called Cemoro Lawang. It was a pretty impressive scenery, and here's a little video from the place where we had dinner that day:
And later, when the sun went down:
The tour we had booked was to start at 3:30am, so we kinda hit the sack early on. Our driver showed up in a jeep on time, and we headed off. First down into the crater (the big one, not the small active one), and then up again onto one of the mountains on the crater rim. There, we were joined by a bunch of other tourists, about 50, from all over the place, to watch the sunset... they even had a tribune there. Which Youssef dropped his camera from - thankfully it sustained no damage.
Ah well.. it was still kind of nice, and I took another bunch of nice photos, until my battery almost died. Intelligently, I left my charger at home, thinking it would last... well, it would have, had I not taken about 500 photos yet.
The last one taken down in the crater plateau. Afterwards, we went to climb the actual crater of Mt. Bromo, the active volcano you can see spewing fumes in the video above. People were trying to rent us horses, but we insisted on walking. Walking is healthy! And with this kind of short distance height increase, very tiring, too. At last, we got to the set of stairs that would take us the last meters up to the rim of the crater. About halfway through, it started smelling really bad - sulphur. Like rotten eggs! The sight was impressive though, even though the bad smell was pretty irritating.
(ninja style!)
After this, we went straight back to our hostel, aptly named "Café Lava", to have a shower and breakfast. Took the bus down to Probolinggo again and waited for the travel bus to take us to Bali.
(More photos from Bromo can be seen in another seperate Flickr gallery here.)
The bus ride was supposed to take 7 hours, and 12 hours later we actually arrived in Denpasar, Bali. Too bad that wasn't our final destination! We had decided to go to Seminyak, a "village" (more like a part of a larger urban area) north of Kuta, Bali's Ballermann. Yeah, you've got to know, Bali is to Australians what Mallorca is to Germans, and Kuta equals Ballermann. No kidding. So we tried to avoid it a little bit... we just wanted a hostel to check out where to go the next day, since by the time we arrived it was already close to 2 am.
Of course, the hostel we had picked was full already, and our poor drivers had to take us to Kuta, where we reluctantly stayed in a very competetively priced hostel. 120,000 rupia per night for a double room with shower/toilet, including breakfast - that's about 10€. And the rooms were alright actually.
Youssef, Jannika and me decided we weren't tired enough yet and tried to find some place in town to go have a drink or something, but most of it was just horrible pop disco junk... though we stumbled across a very funny reggae bar that looked just like you would imagine someone with hardly any clue to decorate a room they are supposed to turn into a reggae bar: colorful Ikea chairs, hundreds of Bob Marley photos on all walls, and horrible pop techno music playing (wtf?). Thankfully they closed just as we arrived, so we went to a 24h sports bistro instead, watched some Wrestling (lol) and Rugby, had a bite and a drink.
The next day, we hired another driver (sigh) to the south of Bukit Peninsula, the little dongle dingling from Bali's south end. It wasn't far, and we actually found a nice, quiet hostel place just at Bali's premier surf spot, Uluwatu beach! The village of Uluwatu is located on top of a cliff, the beach is basically in a grotto that gets flooded at high tide, and the waves are up to 8m high. Yeah well, I didn't surf anyway - gotta learn to walk before you run, right? But the view was damn nice. Unfortunately my battery crapped out and I forgot the charger, *cough* so I only have a handful of photos from Bali. Here's some of our place:
Our rooms from the outside, and...
...from the inside.
So the last days of our trip were spent on various beaches, just relaxing and enjoying the good food :-) Yes, we had dinner at the same restaurant every evening. It was a family-run gig, and the cook was a really nice guy and he made awesome food :)
On Monday, we went to Dreamland beach, and I hit my head on the beach floor, twice, while trying to bodyboard. My neck still hurts... The waves there were pretty damn strong! Here's me, right after the injury:
But Dreamland beach wasn't so dreamy after all... the place where we had lunch served watermelon juice with dirt in it, and when asked to make us new ones without, served us the same drinks with more water in it. When we complained, they took them away again, and one of the waiters put three bottles of water on our table, with the words "Here, easy, clean." How very friendly! ;-) Well, the best part was that they wanted us to pay for 2 watermelon juice each, instead of just one water. They almost beat up Youssef because of it... one guy already had a chair raised above his head, the other two had bottles... yeah, what a lovely place.
Tuesday morning had me and Carla visiting the Uluwatu temple, and I've never seen so many monkeys in one place. They told us to be careful with our glasses and hats and whatnot, and of course, right at the entrance, one of them stole Carla's hat *snickers* The temple is built on top of a cliff, and the view was really damn nice!
Later that day, we went to the airport and flew home. "Welcome to Singapore International Airport. The temperature is 28°C." - at 1 am in the night. Yay how I missed it! (Not.)
So now I'm back. And that's that! Hope you liked the report and photos! Till next time!
We did go to Borobudur that next day, and we saw the sunset. I put all my Borobudur photos in a seperate gallery on Flickr, accessible behind this link.
Anyways, on to the story.
We hired a horse carriage in Yogya to get us to the bus terminal, and it was kind of funny to go by horse on Indonesia's busy streets. Turned out the bus terminal wasn't the bus terminal - as usual, Indonesians like giving each other good business, like a few days before on our way from Pangandaran to the train station, when the bus dropped us off not at the train station, but 2km from it, in front of a couple of Becak-drivers. Yay, thank you very much, Mr tourist exploiter!
Anyways. We started negotiating with the driver (and seemingly, 5 of his friends) for a good price from Yogya to the temple, and suddenly all of the other passengers who had been waiting in the bus left/were told to leave - apparently we had just hired that bus for ourselves. Oops! Oh well :)
Borobudur is a big buddhist temple that is said to have been built in the 8th century. It consists of 10 levels, each representing a level of existance, and decorated with fitting reliefs. They are grouped in sets of three, with the levels 7-9 representing "heaven", and level 10 the nirvana. Of course, the 10th level is completely unaccessible to anyone, because all it is is an empty room without doors or windows or any means of access in the big stupa on top of the temple, go figure.
We had a very nice guide who explained all that and told us lots of funny stories about the relief pictures... most of them depicting various reincarnations of Buddha, before his final one as Siddharta.
Like the one story where he was born as a very naive Buffalo (I think), who was friends with a very clever and cunning monkey. They stumbled across a man in the forest who was very hungry, and decided to eat the monkey. But the monkey said "No sir, please don't! Eat the buffalo instead, he will certainly satisfy your hunger much better!". The man contemplated and agreed, and the buddha-buffalo also didn't mind. He said to the monkey "I'm sorry for everything that I may have done wrong" or something like that, and the hungry man overheard their conversation... it struck his heart, and he decided to become a vegetarian instead!
Or the one where he was born as a goat with 8 legs, 4 on top and 4 below.
Anyways, here's what the view from the top of the temple looked like:
We stayed until sunset, only to realize that the last bus home had already left... So we had to hire a local driver, who of course knew that the last bus had already left, and thus charged us twice what we had paid to get there in the first place...
When we got back, we had dinner in a very artsy restaurant called "Bedhot Resto". Many of the others even got a t-shirt there! But the food wasn't that hot, to be honest... I tried their pizza, and it tasted pretty dull. Well, maybe I should have tried their Indonesian stuff, I know...
Katja left for Singapore that evening because she had to meet someone or other, so for the rest of the trip, it was down to the six of us. I stayed up until about 5am and chatted with two germans who were also staying at our hostel about all kinds of political stuff, was pretty nice. I think I also finished the book "Dschungelkind" in about one day while we were staying there.
The next day, we all went and had a massage, which as bloody neccessary - the hostel only had really crappy foam mattresses... We took the public bus to the bus terminal, and had people with a guitar enter twice, I think, play a song and ask for donations - funny stuff. Then we took the bus to Surabaya, where we had our most intensive fight with two taxi drivers who demanded a crapload of money for their services. They didn't get it. We just stayed until early that morning (in a hostel where Munir's and my room had neither working light nor water) to take the first bus to the Mt. Bromo area. Again, the bus didn't drop us off at the terminal, but at a travel agency. Well, handy for us, they really could help us with our trip to the crater, and to Bali the next day. We chartered a Minibus to a village on the edge of the crater called Cemoro Lawang. It was a pretty impressive scenery, and here's a little video from the place where we had dinner that day:
And later, when the sun went down:
The tour we had booked was to start at 3:30am, so we kinda hit the sack early on. Our driver showed up in a jeep on time, and we headed off. First down into the crater (the big one, not the small active one), and then up again onto one of the mountains on the crater rim. There, we were joined by a bunch of other tourists, about 50, from all over the place, to watch the sunset... they even had a tribune there. Which Youssef dropped his camera from - thankfully it sustained no damage.
Ah well.. it was still kind of nice, and I took another bunch of nice photos, until my battery almost died. Intelligently, I left my charger at home, thinking it would last... well, it would have, had I not taken about 500 photos yet.
The last one taken down in the crater plateau. Afterwards, we went to climb the actual crater of Mt. Bromo, the active volcano you can see spewing fumes in the video above. People were trying to rent us horses, but we insisted on walking. Walking is healthy! And with this kind of short distance height increase, very tiring, too. At last, we got to the set of stairs that would take us the last meters up to the rim of the crater. About halfway through, it started smelling really bad - sulphur. Like rotten eggs! The sight was impressive though, even though the bad smell was pretty irritating.
(ninja style!)
After this, we went straight back to our hostel, aptly named "Café Lava", to have a shower and breakfast. Took the bus down to Probolinggo again and waited for the travel bus to take us to Bali.
(More photos from Bromo can be seen in another seperate Flickr gallery here.)
The bus ride was supposed to take 7 hours, and 12 hours later we actually arrived in Denpasar, Bali. Too bad that wasn't our final destination! We had decided to go to Seminyak, a "village" (more like a part of a larger urban area) north of Kuta, Bali's Ballermann. Yeah, you've got to know, Bali is to Australians what Mallorca is to Germans, and Kuta equals Ballermann. No kidding. So we tried to avoid it a little bit... we just wanted a hostel to check out where to go the next day, since by the time we arrived it was already close to 2 am.
Of course, the hostel we had picked was full already, and our poor drivers had to take us to Kuta, where we reluctantly stayed in a very competetively priced hostel. 120,000 rupia per night for a double room with shower/toilet, including breakfast - that's about 10€. And the rooms were alright actually.
Youssef, Jannika and me decided we weren't tired enough yet and tried to find some place in town to go have a drink or something, but most of it was just horrible pop disco junk... though we stumbled across a very funny reggae bar that looked just like you would imagine someone with hardly any clue to decorate a room they are supposed to turn into a reggae bar: colorful Ikea chairs, hundreds of Bob Marley photos on all walls, and horrible pop techno music playing (wtf?). Thankfully they closed just as we arrived, so we went to a 24h sports bistro instead, watched some Wrestling (lol) and Rugby, had a bite and a drink.
The next day, we hired another driver (sigh) to the south of Bukit Peninsula, the little dongle dingling from Bali's south end. It wasn't far, and we actually found a nice, quiet hostel place just at Bali's premier surf spot, Uluwatu beach! The village of Uluwatu is located on top of a cliff, the beach is basically in a grotto that gets flooded at high tide, and the waves are up to 8m high. Yeah well, I didn't surf anyway - gotta learn to walk before you run, right? But the view was damn nice. Unfortunately my battery crapped out and I forgot the charger, *cough* so I only have a handful of photos from Bali. Here's some of our place:
Our rooms from the outside, and...
...from the inside.
So the last days of our trip were spent on various beaches, just relaxing and enjoying the good food :-) Yes, we had dinner at the same restaurant every evening. It was a family-run gig, and the cook was a really nice guy and he made awesome food :)
On Monday, we went to Dreamland beach, and I hit my head on the beach floor, twice, while trying to bodyboard. My neck still hurts... The waves there were pretty damn strong! Here's me, right after the injury:
But Dreamland beach wasn't so dreamy after all... the place where we had lunch served watermelon juice with dirt in it, and when asked to make us new ones without, served us the same drinks with more water in it. When we complained, they took them away again, and one of the waiters put three bottles of water on our table, with the words "Here, easy, clean." How very friendly! ;-) Well, the best part was that they wanted us to pay for 2 watermelon juice each, instead of just one water. They almost beat up Youssef because of it... one guy already had a chair raised above his head, the other two had bottles... yeah, what a lovely place.
Tuesday morning had me and Carla visiting the Uluwatu temple, and I've never seen so many monkeys in one place. They told us to be careful with our glasses and hats and whatnot, and of course, right at the entrance, one of them stole Carla's hat *snickers* The temple is built on top of a cliff, and the view was really damn nice!
Later that day, we went to the airport and flew home. "Welcome to Singapore International Airport. The temperature is 28°C." - at 1 am in the night. Yay how I missed it! (Not.)
So now I'm back. And that's that! Hope you liked the report and photos! Till next time!
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Greetings from Yogya!
Hello, World!
I'm sitting in a shabby internet cafe in Yogyakarta as I write this post. The past few days have been kinda nice, except for the fact that I spent most of them in bed. Apparently (as the lady dokter told me yesterday), I have a hypersenstive digestive system, and had too much acid in it. So, the morning before we departed, it started... I'd been on Paracetamol since. The flight was short, but I spent most of it holding my belly. When we got to Jakarta, we looked for a guesthouse first, and when we found one, I lied down and didn't get up again until the next day, when it was a bit better. After breakfast (I had tea), we went to the train station, and took a train - Eksekutif Klas - to Bandung, which was supposed to be nicer and less smelly than Jakarta. Oh yeah... Jakarta is probably the most ugly city I've ever seen, even if I haven't seen much of it. Thousands of cars and motorbikes, and they seem to have never heard of catalysts. So exhaust fumes all over the place... no wonder the life expectancy there is so short.
Speaking of traffic, people here drive wildly different. "Lack of risk awareness" is how the German foreign affairs office calls it on their website. Consequently, the car drive from Bandung to Pangandaran after we got off the train was an adventure by itself. The seven of us plus our driver "Lili" all crammed into a Jeep with 2 seats in front, a bench in the back (4 people) and two with most of the backpacks in the trunk... Then a seven hour drive. Fun times.
Pangandaran was pretty nice though. The guesthouse was pretty comfortable, but the tap water was still "Air tidak minum" - undrinkable water. The bottled water they have here seems to all be the same brand: Aqua, by Danone...
Anyways, I pretty much went to bed again right away, and stayed there for about 24h... I seem to have missed a nice day of surfing and trekking and national park sightseeing. But at least in the evening I was well enough to get out again... well, not really, but I was just terribly bored. So I joined the others on the beach, and we played a bit of music on Danny's brother's guitar, and were later joined by a few other Locals. That was fun! Oh yeah, and Danny (Surfer guy from Pangandaran) tried to convince Katja, who is tall and blonde, to marry him. Much to his dismay, she didn't seem to like the idea too much.
After two nights there, we took the Becak to the bus station, the bus to the train station (2h), and the train to Yogya. The bus was even worse than our trip in the car, but at least it was a bit more spacious, and weird music was playing. I liked it though. It was kind of interesting to guess which kind of obstacle we'd almost crash into next: cars on the same lane, cars on the opposite lane, one of the million bicycles or motorbikes, a becak, or whatnot. Thankfully, it all went well... The train ride afterwards was terribly boring in comparison.
Now, Yogya is a really nice place. A lot more touristic, that's for sure, but a lot less polluted than Jakarta, and all in all nicer. Lots of guest houses too, so we got to check out a few and take our pick. We ended up in one that's not the best, but quite affordable. 3-4EUR per night including unlimited supplies of tea and coffee is kinda nice. First thing I did afterwards was go to the doctor. Someone recommended a small international clinic, and I thought that's where the taxi would bring us, but instead, we landed at the "Jogja International Hospital". It looked more luxurious than any hospital I had ever seen, even in europe... I already saw all my cash float away and credit card hit its limit, but afterwards it turned out that including the medicine, I only had to pay what amounts to about 25EUR.
Yeah, I'm better now.
Today, we're probably gonna go and see Borobudur, apparently some of the oldest temple complexes in the country. I'll see if I can make another update from Bali later this week, otherwise you'll get it all when I'm back. No photos yet, I'm sorry... can't upload them from here.
Laters! *wave*
I'm sitting in a shabby internet cafe in Yogyakarta as I write this post. The past few days have been kinda nice, except for the fact that I spent most of them in bed. Apparently (as the lady dokter told me yesterday), I have a hypersenstive digestive system, and had too much acid in it. So, the morning before we departed, it started... I'd been on Paracetamol since. The flight was short, but I spent most of it holding my belly. When we got to Jakarta, we looked for a guesthouse first, and when we found one, I lied down and didn't get up again until the next day, when it was a bit better. After breakfast (I had tea), we went to the train station, and took a train - Eksekutif Klas - to Bandung, which was supposed to be nicer and less smelly than Jakarta. Oh yeah... Jakarta is probably the most ugly city I've ever seen, even if I haven't seen much of it. Thousands of cars and motorbikes, and they seem to have never heard of catalysts. So exhaust fumes all over the place... no wonder the life expectancy there is so short.
Speaking of traffic, people here drive wildly different. "Lack of risk awareness" is how the German foreign affairs office calls it on their website. Consequently, the car drive from Bandung to Pangandaran after we got off the train was an adventure by itself. The seven of us plus our driver "Lili" all crammed into a Jeep with 2 seats in front, a bench in the back (4 people) and two with most of the backpacks in the trunk... Then a seven hour drive. Fun times.
Pangandaran was pretty nice though. The guesthouse was pretty comfortable, but the tap water was still "Air tidak minum" - undrinkable water. The bottled water they have here seems to all be the same brand: Aqua, by Danone...
Anyways, I pretty much went to bed again right away, and stayed there for about 24h... I seem to have missed a nice day of surfing and trekking and national park sightseeing. But at least in the evening I was well enough to get out again... well, not really, but I was just terribly bored. So I joined the others on the beach, and we played a bit of music on Danny's brother's guitar, and were later joined by a few other Locals. That was fun! Oh yeah, and Danny (Surfer guy from Pangandaran) tried to convince Katja, who is tall and blonde, to marry him. Much to his dismay, she didn't seem to like the idea too much.
After two nights there, we took the Becak to the bus station, the bus to the train station (2h), and the train to Yogya. The bus was even worse than our trip in the car, but at least it was a bit more spacious, and weird music was playing. I liked it though. It was kind of interesting to guess which kind of obstacle we'd almost crash into next: cars on the same lane, cars on the opposite lane, one of the million bicycles or motorbikes, a becak, or whatnot. Thankfully, it all went well... The train ride afterwards was terribly boring in comparison.
Now, Yogya is a really nice place. A lot more touristic, that's for sure, but a lot less polluted than Jakarta, and all in all nicer. Lots of guest houses too, so we got to check out a few and take our pick. We ended up in one that's not the best, but quite affordable. 3-4EUR per night including unlimited supplies of tea and coffee is kinda nice. First thing I did afterwards was go to the doctor. Someone recommended a small international clinic, and I thought that's where the taxi would bring us, but instead, we landed at the "Jogja International Hospital". It looked more luxurious than any hospital I had ever seen, even in europe... I already saw all my cash float away and credit card hit its limit, but afterwards it turned out that including the medicine, I only had to pay what amounts to about 25EUR.
Yeah, I'm better now.
Today, we're probably gonna go and see Borobudur, apparently some of the oldest temple complexes in the country. I'll see if I can make another update from Bali later this week, otherwise you'll get it all when I'm back. No photos yet, I'm sorry... can't upload them from here.
Laters! *wave*
Friday, September 21, 2007
Off I go...
Long time no blog. I guess a sort of everyday routine has caught up with me here as well, as much as I dislike that fact. Time to break it! Tomorrow, we're going on a trip to Indonesia. First off, we'll fly to Jakarta, stay there for a day or two, and then make our way by bus and train towards Bali, from where we'll be taking a plane back to Singapore on the 2nd of October.
I'll try to provide you all with tons of cool pictures when I get back, so stay tuned! :)
I'll try to provide you all with tons of cool pictures when I get back, so stay tuned! :)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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!
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!
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
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.
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.
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