This picture is taken from this forum. Yeah I know it's heavily photoshopped and you can see the HDBs from afar, but one can imagine. So me and Jia Ling, filled with romantic notions of lalang fields and purple skies, equipped ourselves with my dad's camera and her school camera (since we got both our cameras stolen in KK), met at 7:30am and went all the way to Punggol to brave the elements.Actually it wasn't half bad. The weather was very fine, and because Punggol is mostly flat and empty land, the breeze was just fantastic. We trekked right across a lalang field - I was fine because I wore long pants and did not use my arms too much to fend off the lalangs, but Jia Ling got scratches all over - only to find out that there was a huge ass road just about 50 metres away from our haphazard zigzag lalang route. And Punggol is almost uninhabited (well - by Singaporean standards), which is a super plus point for anywhere in Singapore, as we were the only two crazy people taking syok sendiri pictures by the grassy bank of a pretty much empty road.
There's a house there called Matilda House which was erected since 1902 but now it's deserted, fenced up by the authorities for conservation purposes I guess. It's actually quite pretty if you ignore the ugly fences around. Also Punggol is near the sea, though we opted to go to the beach some other time because it was noon already and we were hungry. Then we took an LRT just for the heck of it, and had this aerial view of Punggol's many flat blocks of grass, which, with a sinking feeling in my heart I knew would be dominated by HDBs very soon. Why else would they build a huge (and I do mean HUGE) MRT building and the LRTs if they weren't expecting a large population? Sigh.
Afternoon we headed back to civilization - to Clarke Quay to have lunch. There's this Japanese food court at this place called Liang Court at Clarke Quay and I had a pretty decent Curry Don there, with a really nice Japanese fruity beer from the supermarket beside. Yum =) Then we met Jia Ling's friend Singaporean Irene and went to Chinatown. I know, Chinatown, on the weekend before Chinese New Year, in Singapore. You bet we saw all the population that we didn't see in Punggol that morning. You just have to know that I hate crowds but I'll do you guys a favour and refrain from whining about it. But Irene's a cool chick and I enjoyed spending time with her. She's on a mission to take pictures of all the cows that she can spot, bersempena the Bull's year. Her goal's 60. During the Year of the Boar she took 70+ pictures of pigs, with no repeats. She gets a kick out of making digital collages out of them.
I hung around with the girls till about 5pm, after which I headed to Bugis, another horribly crowded place where you literally get pushed around by the people if you don't walk at a decent pace. Met up with Yuen and Roman there. We went to Arab Street to have dinner, where people actually spoke Malay (yay!) when taking orders, but the place we were at had horrible service so I ended up not eating there. There were some people doing some reality TV shooting (something like The Amazing Race) for Suria Channel, which is a Malay channel, so we hung around and watched a guy puke his guts out while being forced to eat this platter of stuff. And they weren't even seriously gross stuff, I mean there was petai and kacang botol and some cow's tongue (cooked) and some other raw vegetables. Unpleasant but not quite my puke threshold yet - I think I draw the line at raw invertebrates. Before that line it should still be alright.
We walked around the Bugis area a bit, tried to catch a movie but there wasn't anything on, a board game cafe but it had closed down already, so we ended up going back home. I was pretty knackered anyway - I did a fair bit of walking the whole day and I had to wake up early for today morning, to walk the Southern Ridges with a bunch of Couchsurfers.
And so that was what I did this morning, woke up at 7am and went to Buona Vista MRT where I met the other 15+ people to do the 7km walk. It wasn't the whole trail, we missed the West Coast Park but I heard it wasn't anything too grand anyway. Met some really interesting people - a couple of Malaysians (Finally! Malaysians everywhere are so elusive to me, even in Singapore) , some Indian guys who gave me good tips of where to go to in India (Ganga River, Sikkim, Darjeeling, Goa) and where to avoid (Calcutta), some Germans (but of course), and some interesting Singaporeans and some others. Ahh. A walk like this is really great for meeting people because you're on the move all the time and you get to really mingle around doing casual conversation while walking and exchange talk partners after a while. Didn't really take in too much of the scenery because I was too busy talking all the time. Good excuse to go again! I don't think I've talked to so many strangers in a long while now.
Which is why after the walk and lunch I went to Jurong Point for some grocery shopping and said "have a good day" to the cashier who seemed pleasantly surprised. After that I waved to a cute baby who was as expressionless as it was cute, and said hi to a little boy at the bus stop who, after my friendly greeting, fled back to his mum's side and avoided my eyes. I appear to invoke indifference or fear in children.
Came back to Grad Hall, had a dribbly shower and took a good nap. Woke up around 6 and went to Canteen 11 for dinner. Then came back up and watched some trashy American movies. Milo Ventimiglia is gorgeous.
I'm glad to say I didn't do one bit of work this weekend. My legs are immersed in lactic acid though. La di da gonna chill out somemore and then go to bed.
