So, I’m at Changi Airport now. Thanks to the Singaporeans for providing free internet. I can’t upload any pictures here, so I’m just going to type some text.
We had a really great Christmas. Drinking whisk, listening to some Malayan Bryan Adams coverband in the middle of Orchard Road. It was so fucking busy on Orchard Road (Singapore’s main road with the expensive shops and what not), that we gladly paid 15 dollars for a drink. All the Christmas goodness lead to a shitload of too many, too slowly moving people and even more liight and sound. A bit like the way I experienced Singapore as a whole. Many, many people, likewise many, many noise and a lot of heat. Anyways, like enormous masses of people we walked a bit down Orchard Road to take the last metro. So basically we had to stand…
Another thing we tried on the 25th was Orchard Towers. A mate of mine in Holland gave me the advice to visit the four floors of whores. Whoaboy! Have I ever been this uncomfortable? It was horrible man! A lot of girls peaking out of nightclubs. A lot of sketchy security personnel. And a lot of even more sketchy visitors. I promised some people I would bring back pictures of transsexuals, but I was really too scared. Sorry if I let you down!
The last day we really realized it was the last day, so we did shitloads again. We decided to go to the botanical gardens. It was quite hard to find, but finding the entrance was not the hardest task here. Like people tried to confuse me at Dubai airport by calling night morning, the supervisors of the botanical gardens gave it their best shot by providing two kinds of maps. One with north pointing up, one with north pointing down. The maps on paper were rotated from those on the plates. So when I was scared that Asia was rubbing off too much by destroying my sense of direction, it felt real good to find out that it was all a master scheme of the singaporean garden owners to try and keep people walking in circles in their botanical garden. It was nice tho… the garden. But not as special as botanical gardens up north. I mean… the whole thing with botanical gardens is that it’s really hot and that there are exotic plants… maybe botanical gardens in Singapore should be cooled and have potatoes or something.
Well… my time’s up here at Changi, so I’m going to board my plane. I’ll write one more post after this one to describe my general findings, or something…
peace!

I’ve received some pictures from Holland. It seems like it really is cold out there, like it’s supposed to be with Christmas. Over here we have the hottest day up till now in Singapore. We’re moving from our first hostel to the next, in which we were supposed to stay after our trip to Jakarta.
Luckily we heard enough negative stories about Jakarta, so we’re actually glad we stayed in Singapore. A guy from Bandung slept in our dorm and told us some stories about Jakarta, which made clear that it is actually a good thing we didn’t go. Mainly stories of robberies and traffic jams (stuff I don’t like), not so many about eating and seeing (stuff I do like).
But yeah, we’ve spent a total of about 10 nights here at the Hive and it’s really a nice hostel. We talked to some people, which always seems to happen amongst backpackers. They always talk about stuff. Of course we met more people when we started sleeping in the dorms.

And I’ve learned that Asia rubs off on you. I’ve bought a handphone chain yesterday. It’s cool. I like it. I was a bit weary to buy something pink, which definetely would’ve happened if I were here for longer. But it’s a trinket on my handphone nonetheless. But it’s not only the sketchy stuff I’m buying, but also my whole English that’s changing. Everyone here talks so short. “Si’ here? O’ tae’ away?”. When I took a pencak silat lesson (Indonesian martial arts that I’ve studied for 8 years), a guy I sparred with said “hard to breathe”, about the protection gear we were wearing. But he had to tell me three times before I got what he was trying to say. People just leave away so many sounds that “hard to breathe” just becomes “har’o bree”.

But yeah, for the next days we don’t really have a clue about what to do. We are going to check out the four floors of whores, because last time we didn’t really manage to get there in time to get a last metro back to the hostel. We are going to have some dinner somewhere tonight or tomorrow. And I guess we’re going to relax a wee bit. After the first day I got some blisters on my foot, which didn’t really go away. Now I’ve got popped blisters on my feet that hurt quite a lot. I don’t really want to wear shoes, since it hurts. I’ll spare you the pictures, because it looks quite disgusting. So ye, just doing some stuff that I can do in flipflops and then we’ll see.

Well ye… It’s just plain weird. I’ve already mentioned that there’s Christmas tunes everywhere, but I now discovered they sound so out of place because of the weather. Yesterday was around 35 degrees I guess, and there was still Christmas tunes. Not only in the shopping malls, but also on the beach .
Yep, from what I’ve heard it’s snowing in Holland? I went for a swim yesterday. In order to get there however, Hoi wanted to show me a park on Sentosa Island. It was like Park Gruel I think, but so artificial. I did make a couple of pictures tho, since everyone was doing that.
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It was great to be honest. The water was warm, the sun was shining.

Hooo, we’re in a rush all of a sudden. I’ll leave you with one beach pic and the promise of some Pencak Silat pics in the next post.
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Ye… apparently this French friend of my (likewise French) aunt did not like the Indonesian women, or the Indonesian beaches. It’s just something he said at her 40 year old anniversary, and it popped to my mind when we decided to go to the beach today.

Otherwise, maybe we would have seen Indonesian beaches, but now we’re just going to chill here at Sentosa beach. And afterwards we’re going to the “4 floors of whores”. I don’t know whether Hoi-Ying is aware that is a rather sketchy place, but she wanted to go there with me, when I proposed it.

We’re off now, expect some hot, sexy, enticing, arousing pictures with us and our glistening, wet, transpiring bodies.

or not…

I’m a bit sad, since today we were supposed to be in Indonesia. We had everything planned and even already had our tickets. But there was so much to be handled, we decided to drop Indonesia alltogether, which might seem like a bad idea, which in fact, it isn’t. One of the problems was that because Hoi-Ying got pickpocketed, we had to get a new document so she could get cross the border, without paying a fine for staying too long in Singapore with a tourist’s visum. Apparently you need to show your student’s pass when you leave Singapore.

And another reason was that I’m just lame . About 2 months ago we started thinking about stuff to do for when we would be in Singapore. Since Singapore is the main hub in South-East Asia, I naturally assumed we should use this to visit some other countries. Having practiced Pencak Silat about 8 years, and specifically a style from Eastern Java, I thought Java might be a good idea. There were some really cheap flights to Jakarta! So we booked a flight and made reservations for a hotel and we went back to our everyday business which was quite a lot back then.

But as Singapore approached (or I approached Singapore, however you wanna dice it), I started doing some research on Jakarta. Which was quite disappointing… to say the least. Criminal, busy, slums, and the only thing worthwhile to see is some national monument which looks really boring. Yepz… once again my laziness paid off. If I would’ve checked out Jakarta before booking flights and making reservations, we would’ve been able to arrange something, like going to Jogyakarta or Bandung. Trying to arrange this from a hostel, while we’re still trying to see some of Singapore itself just isn’t the way we roll. Too bad, but nothing to be really sad off.

Anyways, I don’t have a clue what to do today. We prolongated our stay here at the hive, but we moved from our private room in the hostel to a dorm, which leads to Hoi-Ying not being able to sleep well. So I guess it should be something not too tiring. Maybe just watch a movie or visit a museum or something like that? It’s morning here now and it’s raining real hard, so there’s no point in making long walks whatsoever.