Getting there is half the fun

Happy Canada Day!

Another Canada Day not spent in Canada:( There will be no long weekend for me, I am stuck at work. At least I am wearing red!

Posted by Evan at 6:50 PM

Radical groups are taking over Malaysia!!

Looks like some remaining members of Hitler's supporters have escaped to Malaysia and set up shop in a cleverly disguised bakery in Johor Bahru.


It also looks like some rednecks from the US have started a luxury coach service, KKK Lines, and are slowly expanding their ideal throughout Malaysia. I wonder if that's why the bus is white too!

Posted by Evan at 7:40 PM

Melaka, Malaysia!

This weekend Samson, Lisa, Cindy, Misha, me and Raina (from Mauritius) took a trip into Malaysia to the city of Melaka. After 2 hours to get to Malaysia through the crazy border lineups and then 3 hours on a bus we were there. Once again I was the only white guy on the bus!! You just don't see too many Western travelers in Malaysia, I guess they're all in Thailand.

Melaka is hailed as a historical city because of its rich history, and while it was nice to see it has nothing on most European cities as far as things to see go. Malacca started off as the most important trading port in Asia and the center of the Malay Sultanate. Then the Portuguese arrived, being the first Europeans to SEA, and were subsequently attacked by the Sultan. So the Portuguese sent a load of ships to retaliate and took over the city, collapsing the country. The Dutch were the next to take over, defeating the Portuguese. And then finally the city was handed over to the British when the Dutch were occupied by the French. Unfortunately the British destroyed the massive Portuguese fort before they handed the city back to the Dutch. This is all that remains of it:


There are also a few other cool colonial buildings still remaining:



We also got another one of these photos! This time with 2 boa constrictors and an iguana!!


At night we checked out the Chinese night market. I had the worst tasting fruit ever in my life, something like 'Bua Ley', a Chinese pear. It tastes like sour varnish! I don't understand how people can eat those things.

The Chinese also really love their Karaoke. This was the largest of many karaoke set ups in China Town.


We also went to a Portuguese festival in the old Portuguese part of town Saturday night. This is the only pic I took.


There are way more pictures of the city in the gallery here!

Posted by Evan at 6:59 PM

Free Online Travel Guide!

Jet Lag Travel Guides publishes a free online travel guide to Molvania. Molvania is supposedly a small, unheard of country in Eastern Europe, land locked and untouched by modern dentistry.

Recently, Molvanian heart-throb Zlad was disqualified from the Eurovision Song Contest for his song "I am the Anti-Pope". His music video can be seen here!

Zlad was also disqualified from Eurovision 2004. The article is summarized below:

MOLVANIA DISQUALIFIED FROM EUROVISION!

The tiny Eastern European republic of Molvania was disqualified from the Eurovision Song Contest this year.

Zladko “Zlad” Vladcik was to perform his very popular techno-ballad, “Elektronik – Supersonik” - described as “a melodic fusion combining hot disco rhythms with cold war rhetoric”.

However, the 23-year-old singer was arrested at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport and immediately deported. While Eurovision does not normally test for recreational drugs, unfortunately for Vladcik, Turkish Customs do.

On his return, “Zlad” apologised to everyone in Molvania for letting them down, especially his family, his friends and his dealer.

“ZLAD” – A SHORT HISTORY

Zladko “Zlad” Vladcik rose to prominence in 2002 when he won Molvanian Idol in controversial circumstances - the other finalist, Ob Kuklop, pulled out due to a serious throat condition after one of the judges tried to strangle him.

“Zlad” immediately released the megahit, “Juust Az I Amm” – hailed by Rolling Stone as the most incorrectly spelt song of all time.

After barely 2 days on the Molvanian “Rhythm & Polka” charts, the track went platinum – remarkable considering it was only available on cassingle.
Then, in an exciting move, “Zlad” formed supergroup Wow! But while on their very first tour, he decided to go solo again, citing the fact that the rest of the band was “moving in a different direction” (Romania).

Posted by Evan at 7:00 PM

The Largest Fountain In the World

Yes folks this is supposedly it, The Largest Fountain In the World! Located in Suntec City here in Singapore. It doesn't look that impressive if you ask me, they just let the water run way out on the skirt.


Well actually the water squirts down from the giant red halo overhead, but it wasn't on when I was there. They only turn it on at certain times so I will have to go back I guess.

Posted by Evan at 6:34 AM

Clark Quay & Chinatown

Today Samson, Lisa and I went for a little look around in the city. Our head boss flew in from Japan for the weekend so we had to go into work in the morning to meet with him:( So with not much day left we went sightseeing in this beautiful city!

We first went to Clark Quay, a river side area of fancy restaurants and sucker boutiques. Really not my scene.


There are lots of bum boats ferrying tourists up and down the river. It's on the to do list!


Here I am trying to be "artsy". Not a bad pic though if you ask me!


We then took the MRT to Chinatown.


Sri Mariamman (Hindu) temple in Chinatown.


This is Club Street. It used to be full of Chinese Guilds and Clubs, but now all but a few have been replaced by restaurants and bars.


And here is a main street by Chinatown with the towers of Singapore's financial giants behind.

Posted by Evan at 7:28 AM

Videos from Bintan!

Here are a few videos from Bintan Island, courtesy of Lisa (thx)!

This one is of our 'complimentary hotel shuttle.' The owner is taking us for a ride up the coast to drop us off. Take a look at the doors on the thing - everything is busted off, there aren't even handles, you have to practically kick the thing open. A bonus of the shuttle is the way it sounds. Lots of people pay big bucks to get that kind of quality rumble through custom exhaust work. Our hotel owner simply had to buy questionable petrol from one of the many street stands everywhere.

And this video is of one of our trips to a 'sea village'. I am not too sure what they are called but they are just buildings and docks built on stilts out over the shallow water. Lots of fishing boats and kelongs can be found moored at them and there are tanks of live shellfish stored there. Also, it seems like the entire thing is some sort of fish catchment area. The boardwalks have nets beneath them down to the seafloor that form giant holding cells. So these stilt cities make for a good place to go for fresh seafood! In this video we are walking through the boardwalks about to go for lunch. Please note that the kid floating in the water is in fact alive and having a swim!

Posted by Evan at 10:41 PM

Driving on the wrong side of the road

A lot of countries in Southeast Asia drive on the left, and probably most people (myself included) don't know this. Most of the left driving countries in the world are former British colonies. But Indonesia drives on the right because it was a Dutch colony long before Napoleon conquered the Netherlands and forced them to the right side. I am still getting used to left side driving here in Singapore. Good thing jaywalking is 'very' illegal because they don't have the convenient "look left/right" markings like they do in the UK.

Posted by Evan at 7:00 PM

Bintan Island, Indonesia

This past weekend Samson, Lisa, Misha and I took a ferry to nearby Bintan Island for a little taste of Indonesia. Bintan is an island about 2.5 times the size of Singapore and only about 50km from here. We took a ferry early Saturday morning to the resort port as it's the only port on the island authorized to hand out visas on arrival. The entire northern coast is owned by posh Singaporean resorts and golf courses. Starting at $100-200 (up to $500 or more!) a night they cater to the richer class - We were looking for dirt cheap! (side note: I don't know why people can be so crazy to come to a third world country and pay exuberant first world prices, the profit for the owners must be insane) After clearing immigration and being warned of what's also severely illegal in this country

we went in search of a ride. Since the entire northern part is resort owned we were forced to take the resort owned taxi service (read: expensive). After about 15 minutes of driving we came to the end of the resort territory and passed through a heavily guarded checkpoint complete with fully automatics and razor-wire fences. Immediately the manicured expressway transformed into potholes and oil patches with dogs sleeping at the roadside. The next hour of driving was quite interesting. The roads were really skinny, about one and a half lanes wide, so it was like a game for the driver to see how close he could get to the oncoming scooters with large baskets hanging off the side. After an unmeasured amount of time we reached the east coast!


Half way into the drive our taxi driver graciously informed us that the place we requested he drive us to had closed down recently. So instead he took us to another place. Leaving the paved roadway to drove through sand for a few hundred meters to reach a place called Shady Shack. The owner wasn't in so our driver translated for the owner's wife. Although the place was on a very nice beach and was quite cheap it lacked certain amenities, like electricity! I personally wouldn't have had a problem staying there, actually I thought it would have been quite fun, but I was grossly outnumbered - the other guys wanted to try some place else. So we drove a few kilometers down the coast to Trikora Beach "Resort". The place was a lot nicer and was actually a real hotel. But apparently they haven't had many visitors lately as half of the place was falling apart, the rates were slashed in half, and the kitchen no longer served food other than omelets. We ended up staying there for $25sg a night each, so not too bad, but I was hoping for maybe $5!

The first important lesson of the weekend learned is that taxi drivers only take you to places owned by friends or where they get free coffee. Walking up the road to find lunch we came a cross a really cool "sea hotel" on sticks that was a little cheaper. We had a good lunch of some fish (can't remember it's name) and seafood mee goreng.



The waters around the island coast are really shallow for hundreds of meters out so you can walk for a long time through the mix of sand and seaweed patches. But after a while this got boring and we all got cut from stepping on stuff so we rented kayaks and set off for a gold rimmed island in the distance. Sorry that I didn't bring my camera so you'll have to take my word for the white sand beaches and crystal-clear waters we swam in there.

Sunday we got the hotel guy to give us a ride in the "complimentary shuttle"



We got dropped off in a small town down the coast. There was only one street and is was lined with people just standing around. As soon as we got out of the van and it pulled away we had a few hundred Indonesians all staring at us. Man it felt weird. This is when the scale of poverty here first started to register. The people don't appear to have much at all. And a lot of the living conditions were quite dirty. I didn't take my camera out for fear of losing it but I got this one picture of the creek running behind the main street.


Eventually the masses stopped staring and shouting stuff in Bahasa Indonesia at us so we could relax and look around at the few basic shops. After a short walk around and some delicious fish paste (otah or otak?) we stuck our thumbs out for a ride back up the coast. Misha was determined to get a ride in one of the many dump trucks passing by but they were all (luckily) full of something other than stupid travelers. Eventually we got picked up by one of these island roaming vans. We had some fun taking pictures in its relative safety:



Later got another ride in our rockin' hotel shuttle and checked out another floating village for dinner.


This boardwalk to the village was a little too well used!


Our pre-arranged taxi picked us up in time and even early enough to make a detour to buy some dinner from a market. There really wasn't much in there that we could identify so we all just went for some cookies and bottled water for dinner. Arriving back at the resort area our vehicle was screened and then later checked for bombs before being allowed into the "compound" with the rest of the "travelers". The abundance of golf shirts, Chinese business men and while folk confirmed with us that we were indeed heading back to Singapore.

All in all a pretty good weekend and a decent first taste of Indonesia! If I ever go back and plan on traveling outside of the tourist areas it'd be best if I at least learned the rudiments of the language. Going there I felt so bad not even being able to say thank you at first, not to mention basic questions and courtesies.

More pictures can be found in my gallery - link to the left

Posted by Evan at 4:28 AM

Conundrum

To all of you out there living in rez: how exactly do you afford it?? I was hoping to live in rez for what is possibly my final year at UBC but now it looks like I won't be able to afterall. I applied and got in, and 2 months ago they asked for a $250 deposit to hold my place. Fine. But now, in June, months before the semester, they are asking for another $450 in just one weeks time. My main problem with this is how far in advance this is. I rely on student loans to get me through school and you can't even apply for student loans until June, so how the hell are you supposed to know if you can afford to live in residence if you don't know how much aid you will receive. The other problem with this is I don't even have $450 in my Canadian bank account right now! So with only 2 days to pay the $450 or else forfeit my $250 already paid I guess I need to decide quickly. Right now it looks like I am leaning towards forfeiting my cash.

This ordeal is also making me realize the true costs of school. For just 8 months of school it costs an awful lot. My figures are as follows:
Living in Rez + Tuition = $13000 minimum
Commuting by car + Tuition = $9000 maximum
So an extra $4000 buys convenience and a more fun lifestyle. The way I am starting to see it now is that's $4000 I won't be in debt for, or $4000 I could put towards a cool trip or a new bike. Or I guess I could always pay off some student loans...hmm, nah. What would your choice be?

So on another note, anyone fancy commuting from North Delta with me next year?! My other plan is to either sell my non-aircared truck and by a camper van and sleep off of Marine Drive, or else pitch a tent in Pacific Spirit Park! What do you think, seriously?

Posted by Evan at 10:53 PM

don't be takin' my money!...

(ya, I know, it is such a crappy pic, but don't you worry, more to come tomorrow!)


2,000,000 of those funny money units they have in Indonesia! 2 million!


And one more...


You've gotta love that 1 to 7,671.64 exchange rate! It's only about $260 canadian, but that's over 2 million in Indonesian Rupiahs!! Looks like we're gonna have a fun weekend...

Posted by Evan at 8:41 AM

oh how I miss Germany...

This is not even closely related to Singapore, or even Asia for that matter, other than that an Indian co-worker in Singapore sent me these pics. If only I found this place when I was in Germany. Just think about it, you could go there for just one meal and eat for the rest of the week! The restaurant is called Waldgeist and it's in Hofheim. If you go there I hope you really like Schnitzel. But if not every table has aluminum foil ready to use as a doggy bag.



And if Schnitzel is not your thing maybe try their Wurst?

Posted by Evan at 8:05 AM

East Coast Park & Steamboat redux!!

Tonight we (the usual 5) went in search of the steamboat place Malini took me to first week here. This was going to be a slight problem though because when I went we drove there in a car and I couldn't remember the name of the place. Well we made it to East Coast Park just fine after asking some kids how to get there. But the problem is East coast park is just that, the entire east coast. We walked around for almost an hour but couldn't find the place. But the time wasn't a complete waste, we stumbled across a swimsuit photoshoot on the beach and in the open...jackpot, of man!!! We stopped here conveniently enough to take a rest from all the walking. Needless to say Cindy and Lisa weren't too impressed with us. But hey, majority rules!

East Coast Park is entirely man made on reclaimed land and the sand is shipped in from Indonesia. I guess they cleaned off the part of the beach that they were using because this is what the rest of the beach looks like on the east coast. The water is brown and a little oily and there is garbage and sea junk all over the place. I guess that's the price you pay for a world class ecomomy and the largest container port in the world.


Giving up our search on foot we decided to take a taxi. No taxi driver would take all five of us because they were too worried about being fined $1000 so we had to take 2 taxis. Here I thought we were in Asia, where you see pictures of people on the riding on the roofs of buses and oozing out of the windows just to get a ride! So what's the big idea about squeezing one more person in the back of a Mercedes? Now I had a general idea of where the place we wanted to go was, but I didn't know the name. This is apparently not allowed in Singapore. I asked the driver to just drive up the coast until I recognized the place. This seems like a modest request, since we are paying him to drive us. Unacceptable he said, we HAD to have a destination. So I told him I wanted to go to this place up the coast with some bars, outdoor restaurants and a steamboat place. But without a name he said he could not take us. He also assured us there were no steamboat places on the East Coast even though we went to one before, but he would take us to one anyway. So despite us being a few minutes away from the place he took us in the complete opposite direction back into town "to THE Steamboat Place." Trying to argue with him was exceptionally hard when you don't have a clue where you want to go, so in the end he won and drove us halfway home to where he recommended. The place did actually look quite good. There were quite a few Steamboat places there with tons of people around, but I still think he was just trying to get an extra long fare out of us!

Now you may be wondering what this "Steamboat" thing is that I am talking about. I had never heard of it before, but apparently you can find it anywhere. Well for about $12 you get an all you can eat seafood buffet where you have to cook your food yourself. So if you get sick from undercookeding your seafood or using your raw chicken plate for noodles afterwards it's YOUR fault. There will be no sueing like some greedy/stupid people like to do back in N.A. if their coffee is too hot. The place we went to tonight was the best I have been to yet (out of 2 anyway). They had tons of stuff to choose from, and many different types of each: clams, muscles, prawns, chilli crab bodies and pinchers, fish, noodles, vegtables, chicken, mutton, beef...the list goes on and on; half of the stuff I couldn't even identify but tried it anyway! I am a complete amatuer when it comes to Steamboat, wanting to try everything and filling up on the cheaper foods doing so. A lot people come there just for one 'species', usually indians for some reason, and fill up on only prawns or crabs. Then they have this heaping pile of prawn crabs or pinchers sitting next to them. So I have a lot to learn in the world of Steamboat. But first I need to get over ripping the head off and eating the entire thing, legs and all.

Here's a pic of one of the seafood buffets. The best part of the pic is the lady licking her lips as she goes to grab some prawns. I can't blame her, they were damn good too!


This is the cooking thingy. There is a propane burner under the bowl. You can either cook your food by putting it on the tin foil like a bbq, or you can put it in the water to boil. For the water you choose either chicken flavour or spicy Tom Yam.


Loading up on delicious meats! I really liked these little fishies.


The best part about Steamboat is that since you are forced to eat slow due to waiting you never get full! So you can sit there for hours chowing down, or until you get sick of eating so much meat and seafood. I can't wait to go back agiain!

Posted by Evan at 8:27 AM

Tonight the 5 of us headed over to Jurong to see the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The movie was alright, not great but not bad, but at least now I don't have to read the book! We actually don't do a whole lot during the week other than watching movies and playing soccer or basketball, so there nothing really interesting to write about until the weekend. But Jurong was a little interesting tonight. I haven't been off the uni since Sunday so it was a short reminder that I am in Asia and not just at another university. These are some of the differences I noticed tonight: We left during rush hour (if you can even call it that since it never seems to end) so the MRT was just packed with people, there are millions of Chinese everywhere, but at least I can see over all of them on the metro! There are stands selling everything all over the place, and the vendors yell at you in Chinese or Malay to buy their wares. There is a actually a lot of Chinese writing everywhere and on everything. I ordered my dinner from a Hawker stand and didn't use any English, the guy just kept speaking Chinese to me while I nodded when I recognized the dish I was asking for, Kway Teow (I think it's actually Malaysian). There are a lot of different races here, it is a complete mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian. And I didn't see a single white person tonight! I guess it's these small things that make living here interesting everyday...

Posted by Evan at 8:58 AM