a month already!!!!

Hard to believe that i have been in singapore for officially an entire month as of today! time has seriously flown by!!!

Updating this blog weekly i run the risk of writing way too much (and some of you may already think that i have been doing little to curb this tendancy), but here goes yet another attempt:

Firstly - a big shout out to Megan - your gift of a flickr account upgrade was absolutely wonderful and is saving me tons of time uploading my pics! I'm having a great time exploring my new 'pro' account! THANK YOU!

On Wednesday this week i went and saw the Indian president, APJ Abdul Kalam speak in the annual Singapore Lecture. He was to speak on the 'evolution of enlightened societies' - a very vague topic at best-- and the talk proved similar -- he essentially spoke of ties between india and singapore and of future economic plans including education, information sharing and a focus on the service industry... it was typical political fare, some nice, broad ideas and smooth evasion of the more critical questions posed by the audience....

Thursday i recommitted to my swimming aspirations- but managed to buy a pair of utterly useless cheap goggles that fill with water after half of a lap of the pool -- i should have known that goggles purchased in a random grocery store would not be useful, even if they were flourescent green... :(

On Friday night, i went out with the canadian contingent: suyin, claire, tanya and anna (plus jo, who is bajan-british but i digress) - we ate at this great indonesian restaurant in the Suntec Towers (home to the worlds largest water fountain-- sorry too focused on food to take pics!) we then went to kareokee (a first for me). It was in the National University of Singapore grad club- and was pretty swanky - the only problem was that the machine sang with you which seems to defeat the whole purpose of kareokee, no? I have since been informed that there are many venues that dont suffer this same ailment- unfortunately their songs are generally not in english!

Saturday went out with my 'law buddy', marc (who is top left in the above picture) - we met up with 4 of his friends from the equivalent of his highschool days (junior college here) and went around the city visiting each of their houses for the chinese new year! It was a lot of fun, seeing the city, eating too much, playing cards and hanging out! I also learned a couple more rather interesting things:
1. a local delicacy is called 'birds nest' - which is essentially bird saliva! the stuff i saw was opaque yellow with pieces of rock sugar in it... apparently it is sweet, sometimes drank, good for your health and skin -- but quite expensive (about 20 cnd for a small jar) -- from what i could understand, it is harvested by rinsing bird's nests (they use saliva to make their nests)... i didnt have the gall to try this- sorry guys!
2. to buy a car here, you need a certificate that costs $20,000 on top of the price of the car- imagine! certainly makes multiple cars cost prohibitive!
3. about 80% of the population lives in government owned housing complexes (i have some pics of these on fickr) - people can 'own' their places, but the buildings are ultimately owned by the govt and under their control -- they are often in clusters of identical buildings- makes it hard to find your way around!!

I also went to a parade downtown for chinese new year (have also posted pics of this). Dad, you would be happy to note there was even a group performing from angola! -- some found this contrived, but i admit i was largely entertained!)

Finally- today i went to Pulau Ubin - a Singapore island which has been left in its 'natural state' (read: not like the artifical paradise that was Sentosa)... It was fun to take a bum boat over to the island and the highlight was spending the afternoon biking around the island's many obscure and poorly marked trails... as you can see from the pics, it was less than scenic, but nonetheless very fun to go around! If you check out my pictures, there is one where a large fence runs through the water - thats because right accross from us was Malaysia!! the coast guard was actively patroling the area around the little island we were on - i'd guess to keep people out, not in!

i'll prob post my pics tomorrow - (monday) should you be interested... heading to Hong Kong to meet Vlad and Jenn on Thursday- should be a fun week!

thanks for reading :)