Exploring the East Side

These birds are everywhere! I'm not quite sure what they are called, but the remind me a bit of grackles...

Hey everyone! I know it's been a few days since I've updated -- things have been a little busy with school work and exploration, but things are settling down a bit and I'm getting used to a schedule (and the buses on NUS campus). On Sunday I didn't do too much other than rest, read, and find the pool on campus. The water was a little warm for my liking, but it was an outdoor pool in Singapore, so I'm not really sure what else I could've expected. A few of us decided to go to Holland Village for dinner that night, so we got on a bus, and once we got off went in the direction where we thought Holland Village was... instead we found a nice hawker stand that had yummy food and ate there instead, although it's debatable that the little dried fish pictured below could be classified as "tasty." They were more-or-less just really salty and, surprise-surprise, fishy.




On Monday a lot of people went with groups to various places around Singapore. I guess we're finally getting the feel of the place, and being a bit more adventurous. Some people decided to go to Sentosa (this little-er island off of the island of Singapore that you can access by cable-car) to swim at the beach while others decided to explore Little India. I've not done either of those two things yet, but I definately plan to before I leave.



Instead, I ventured off on my own (yes, by myself) to find Geylang Serai Malay Village (pictured above) on the east side of the island. Mostly I just wanted to try to navigate myself in a foreign country. There wasn't too much in the village -- just a lot of nice people, fruit, and funny knickknacks. Of course, I got abysmally lost once I got off the MRT at the Eunos stop and promptly walked in the WRONG direction, at which point I stopped at a Buddhist temple (the last picture on this page) and asked for directions. A very kind Monk took the time to tell me that I was on the right road, just walking the wrong way.




While I was in Geylang, I ate this wonderful thing called "paper prata." Basically prata is this dough that gets thrown around a bit like pizza dough, only it's much thinner. I eat it a lot for breakfast in the food court at PGP, but there it's thicker and generally filled with something like cheese or banana or pineapple, etc. In Geyland the prata was very thin and they folded it in the shape of a cone. The brown stuff you see is Hershey's chocolate syrup (as delicious in Singapore as it is in the United States!) The prata almost had the texture of a potato chip. I'm not sure if I've done a good enough job explaining this food, but if you think really thin pancakes (but more crispy than crepes), you get the gist.

Today I spent most of the day in class and the library, reading. But this evening the group of SEAS students went out to see a Chinese acrobatics show entitled "Les Sept Planches de la Ruse," or "The Seven Boards of Tricks." According to the playbill, the show was created in December 2007 in Dalian, China by a french director named Aurelien Bory. The title of the play refers to a "game from Chinese antiquity: qi quio ban, which quite literally means "seven boards of skills" (or tricks)." It goes on to explain that "qui quio ban is a solitary game comprised of seven geometrical elements: five triangles of three different sizes, a square, and a parallelogram that, when placed altogether in certain positions, form a big square." The performance used a REALLY BIG version of this game that the acrobats interacted with and controlled. In short: it was pretty awesome.

I'll keep everyone updated on any new adventures!

Lots of love,
Allie