Another great place I'd like to revisit was some marina in northern Singapore. Phil, my old friend from uni who I randomly bumped into here in Singapore, introduced me to wakeboarding. Unfortunately, at the time I thought I'd managed to loose my camera, so there's no pictorial proof (I've since then located my camera). That's a shame, because I actually managed to get up on the board and even learned the basics of swirving left and right. It was so ZEN, man! The whole secret of wakeboarding can be summarized in two tenets:
1. Don't try
2. Look cool
I mean, how ZEN isn't that. I'm planning to become a professional wakeboarder and then write a book called ZEN and wakeboarding. I've heard the one about zen and motorcycle maintenance sold pretty well, so I think there's a market out there.
But, so... yeah! ZEN. Whenever I tried anything, i would promptly fall into the water. And every time the instructure would drive the boat back to me and tell me: "Don't try". Just relax and look cool. And it was true. For instance, if I wanted to swirve to the right, through the waves made by the boat to get out on the right side of the boat, the secret lay in NOT looking at the difficult waves. Only by looking up into the distance and pretending there were no waves was I able to do it. Same thing with turning back into the wake of the boat. As soon as I looked down at the water and tried to figure out how to deal with the nasty waves, I'd fall right in. But if I pretended I was posing for a fashion shoot, looking out into the distance, even waving to people on the beach and saying: "ciao!" then there was no problem.
Also went to the night safari sunday night. By this time I had found my camera, but in order not to scare the animals, we couldn't use the flash, and so any attempt to take pictures (remember, this was the NIGHT safari) was pretty doomed.
But absolutely worth it. I'm becoming quite a fan of doing these tourist things. I mean, you've got to spend your day doing something, right? Instead of shopping or lazing about in a bookshop or reading the economist on your sofa at home, why not go to the Chinese Gardens? Take a cookery class? Or cycle through Ubin island? Even though I'm usually very very tired when i do these things, due to a rather demanding nightlife, it's kind of cool to spend that tiredness on weird tourist stuff.
My Autralian friend has finally made his blog public, open for all to see. Go check it out! Post lude adverts in his comments section! He's obviously going to get himself fired from his new job, from the sounds of it. great pics from the chinese new year celebrations in Australia. I was in Hong Kong and Singapore during the chinese new year, but somehow I missed it all.
But I do have pictures from Raffle's hotel. I met the same office geek there as last time (the guy in the cheap white, stripey shirt), but he's ok so that's cool. Pia (my german flatmate who you will know from blockbusters such as the German Girl Shrine on Ubin island) has her boyfriend visiting, so of course we had to introduce him, Andi, to the Singapore Sling. Invented in 1910 or maybe it was 1914, this is the source of this most sickly sweetish drink. I think you can tell from the colour it's not really intended for blokes. I'm hiding my beer as i'm taking this photo. And Andi took a loooooooooong time finishing his.
The second photo is of the fans in the ceiling of Long Bar, the bar where we had our slings. I just wanted to introduce you to the high class establishment version of a fan. yeah! opulance, baby, opulance!
