Singapore, Day 2

So we woke up a bit late. Our dark cavern of a room only has a small window close to the roof so not really any idea of time. Below me the next bunk down (flimsy bunk), I think the bloke had a gay lover or something. (I think homosexuality as a matter of fact is one of many illegal acts in Singapore). Anyway, I don't care about that, and I'm not sure if it was something that I just dreamed, but anyway, having two people underneath made things a bit rocky up the top, and you know that double bed at the last place was sounding real good.

We do have air con in the room which we haven't had before in the trip. Anyway, enough about the hostel. It is called The Little Red Dot, which is what people refer to as Singapore, when looked at a world map.

We took a wander around the city, stopped at the National Museum of Singapore (free entry after 6pm). Something I was really impressed by was an exhibititon on the work of the cameraman Willie Phua who was from Singapore and filmed for 30 or so years for the ABC, capturing almost everything in Asian history in between.

It was mainly just wandering around, getting ourselves oriented, finding the train stations, getting lost again. We got ourselves very lost coming from the train station back to the hostel, what should have been about a 5 min walk ended up taking much, much longer than that.

We did walk past a stadium not far from here though...as we walked past (not sure what was on, I guess it was a soccer match, probably part of the S-League...but anyway, we're walking and you don't hear so much, and then the crowd ROARS as one, GOAL. (Roars like the Lion, Lion City/Singa Pura) or the Tiger (Beer or Air Company, the beer certainly has a better reputation...

Today we walked around more, went down Orchard Road for a while. Just before that I continued my plan of hitting 5 add tricks in front of famous locations. (Tomahawk, Istana Park).

Here's the list:

Blurry Whirl- Petronas Towers, KL

Stepping Ducking Osis- KL Bird Park

Matador- Jonker St, Melaka

Ripped Warrior- Melaka Shoreline

Tomahawk- Istana Park, Orchard Rd, Singapore

Still have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but not enough to last 60 or so days, let's see how we go with that!

Anyway, today we did more walking, plenty of it. We also caught a few trains, we got down to the Chinatown area after the shopping district. Talk about not my kind of scene oh yeah, one street with something like twenty shopping centres...No thanks.

In the Chinatown area I was looking for a certain bookshop (didn't really know the name or address aside from street name, but I read about it in a zine report from a year or so ago, but I couldn't find it. Did find another kind of gallery/stuff shop (a la itripiskip etc) (eg sellers of junk, sometimes including zines). Picked up "Pocket Rocket" it's basically a paper plane zine. Also grabbed the free Juice Magazine and was very surprised to find an article on Black Flag of all things...

So now we are back at the hostel, it's like 9pm, haven't eaten any dinner yet, might head to the Hawker centre, those non airconditioned combinations of discomfort and cheap cheap food... and maybe a couple of beers for the road, but I would like to wake up early too, so let's see how that all goes. I was reading a new book, a collection of things from Lester Bangs, and it dropped down the side of the bed, I wonder if it hit the guy below? Anyway, I wish my reading material was a bit more related to the areas we are going through. It would be good to be reading The Great Railway Bazaar, but I already read that so I can just think about that in my head. Too bad I didn't find that bookstore today.

We also visited the Museum of Asian Civilizations today, very good stuff. Impressive collection of different things, mainly focusing on South East Asia, but they also have some of the terracotta warriors from China. Doesn't seem quite as busy in the Little Red Dot today, but might get something to eat or something along those lines.

Back to KL tomorrow, hoping to get a bus at 8am so I can make it for a kick with the Malaysian Footbag crew, at 5pm at Maybank Bukit Bintang. After a quick browse of Hostelworld, seems we're just as well staying at the same place as last time, saves time looking for directions to begin with. So off on the bus tomorrow. Bye bye Singapore. Don't think I would really like to live here and probably wouldn't go out of my way to visit again....let's see how the beer goes down though...

Melaka and on to Singapore

We spent the last couple of days in Melaka, formerly the hub of everything on the Malay peninsula (it's not really at that level any more, but it is a really interesting place). I'm not using my computer so I won't bother we any pictures today.

Anyhow, we got the bus down to Melaka, I was expecting it to take longer, but it was pretty smooth getting to Melaka Sentral, from there it was on to an old old old bus packed to full house, we didn't really know where we were going, something about Ocean, I'd only written down some vague notes. We ended up in the square of town and Francisca's bag had one of the handles fall off and we just decided to get a taxi.

He took us around the block and charged us 15x the amount that the bus was (we could have walked in about 5 mins, or caught the taxi from Sentral for the same price. What we didn't do though was ask for the price before getting in (rookie error), so when I heard the locks go down, I knew we were in his power.

Up the stairs to Ringo's Foyer Guest House, where we meet Howard, what a character. A good bloke to run a hostel, getting everyone together, and Jonathan is there too. We go for some lunch and then we drink some beers and play this game called Carrom. I'll tell more about that later...it's an Indian game, with elements of pool, air hockey and chess. Howard gets everyone together from the hostel and we all go for dinner in a satay place. That's the way to create a good vibe, get everyone together, knowing each other and having a good time.

Walked around quite a lot yesterday. By the end of the day we were retracing our steps, so two solid days was probably enough, although I was keen to check out the Muesum in the Statdyhus (Ethnography, History and Literature), Melaka in itself is a museum (it is a UNESCO listed site after all), but I am definitely glad to have gone there, somewhere I didn't really know anything about before this trip, but now I would like to learn a lot more, particularly about the days of the rule of the Sultan.

Now we are down in Singapore, we got another bus today, most of our other mates from the hostel headed up to KL, but we had already been there, most of them had come up from Singapore. The hostel here, old mate is sure no Howard. Quite the opposite as a matter of fact...

We're going to have another night here, then we'll head back into KL and move on from there to India, which is the next phase of the trip. We've already been going for almost a week, it's really only just begun but feels like we've been a while on the road.

Speaking of On The Road, I just finished The Portable Jack Kerouac. Good read, I bought that in San Francisco last year. Has taken me a while to get stuck right into it. All done now. I wouldn't mind finding some kind of (light) book on the history of the Melaka area or something along those lines...