I'm thinking about these kind of things right now. I'm in the middle of a self-discovery phase. Reading books about Zen buddhism, thinking about what I want out of life etc. Usually, you can get feel a bit frustrated or confused when you get too introspective. But I've discovered that if you combine it with touristing, it's actually quite pleasant. Yesterday (Saturday) I spent the afternoon walking through the Singapore botanic garden and then through the Chinatown next to the Central Business District.
ADDED PIC 17 February: I was in utter shock by what I found in the Botanic garden. Flowers everywhere. And so many of them were orchids they even called one part of the park "orchard gardens" and charged me $5 entry to see them all.
My Australian friend has pointed out the absurdity of the idea of a Chinatown in an ethnically chinese city. The neighbourhood is a left-over from the colonial times when the British segregated the immigrant working populations into ethnically defined sections. The chinese then took over the city, but the neighbourhood remained and lately they've realized that it can serve as a tourist attraction. It's a bit weird. It's actually mostly new houses, but built to be identical to the old houses they replace. So it's somewhere halfway between authenticity and Disneypark.
Among the most exciting things about my life here is that I can order in Mandarin! It's so exciting, and the people working in the shops are friendly and help me if I don't know a word. Today I ordered fish in black-bean sauce, TWO bowls of rice and some green tea. All in mandarin! Why does it matter that I ordered two bowls? Because you get one with your food. So when you want to have two, you ask them to "add one bowl". I think it's pretty cool to be able to say add in a foreign languange.
I ordered this particular dish in Ubin. Ubin is an island on the northern coast of Singapore. It's like being transported maybe 30, 50 years back. It's a reasonably big little island, it takes about 30-40 minutes to cycle from one end to the other. Yet there are only between 100-200 people living there. There's a genuine little village there that seems to live primarily on renting out bicycles to tourists. Someone claimed there was a beach on this island, and I spent a couple of hours cycling all over the island before realizing that someone had lied. However, it was an absolutely wonderful day, cycling through forests/jungles. I found a shrine dedicated to a German girl. She was a catholic German about 60 years ago that died falling off a cliff. Some buddhist monks found her and gave her a buddhist burial. Sometime since then she's gone from being a ghost that haunts the area to become a goddess in the Daoist religion. BIZARRE! Singaporeans travel to this island and offer her food and stuff, hoping to get her support. This was made even more bizarre by the fact that I was travelling this island with my german flatmate and some german friends of her.Anyways, when we finally left the island, when we returned to the ferry terminal back on singapore island, we saw that just there next to the terminal was an excellent beach!!! So we did get a couple of hours lazing about in the end.
I'm also making some progress with my German and Japanese. Just hope I don't push my flatmates' patience too much. But here are some useful sentances:
Kareshi iru?
Watashi wa ima ie ni kaeru. Sonna ni tou kunai.
Uchi ni kitai?
Hast du einen Freund?
Ich gehe jetzt nach Hause. Es ist hier in die Nahe.
Moechtest du mitkommen?
Excellent!
