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Personal Reflections

An idiot abroad examines his tiny tendrils of guilt

On most days, I’d reserve these thoughts for my private blog. I have been vacillating since New Year’s Eve whether to publish this publicly or not. Maybe you’ll understand why as you read on. This is a disjointed, admittedly incoherent account of my state of emotions at the close of 2010. Maybe it’ll mean something, to at least a few who read this.

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My stay outside India came to define 2010 for me. Sifting through my blog archives, I would say it is a continuation of what I mentioned towards the end of last year – but saying that would be undermining, in a way, what I have learned in 2010.

My decision to go to Singapore for a study exchange had a greater impact than I ever signed up for. The first half of 2010 – the second half of my first year at University of Surrey – had moments I am going to cherish throughout my life. I’m not saying this for the sake of saying it. This is not like those misused cases of using the word ‘literally’. I made friends at Surrey who are the sort who stick around for life – and with whom you’d want to stick around for life.

And then, I gave it all up to go Singapore.

Mind you, I don’t regret that decision. It showed me the value of what I had. What I walked away from. Singapore is that milestone I will look back to, as the place that made me fundamentally rethink friendships and relationships in my life. While I have enjoyed my cultural experience and made good friends in Singapore too, it made me realize how it isn’t the same.

I was sad in 2009 that I wasn’t as frequently in touch with my Indian friends as I would have liked to. In 2010, I found myself out of touch with my Indian friends as well as the friends I made in my first year at Surrey. I have looked on with a certain despondency as friendships that mattered a lot to me get reduced to Facebook’s loose definition of a ‘friend’. I have had relationships strained as meaningful communication lost its hold, stretched by space and time displacement.

Sometimes, I wonder how different things would have been had I not made the choices that I did.

Sometimes, I wonder how things will turn out to be once I am back in the UK – or even India. When I meet my friends there again, maybe in 2011 or in 2012 when we’re back in university after placement year, I wonder whether things will be same.

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…every being in the universe is tied to his birthplace by tiny invisible force tendrils composed of little quantum packets of guilt. If you travel far from your birthplace, these tendrils get stretched and distorted. This compares with an ancient Arcturan Proverb “However fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.”

– Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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I realize for the past half-decade, I have behaved as a social nomad. Changing school, taking a gap year, going to university and then deciding to do a year abroad – at each stage I had memorable experiences, but I know realize every time I did so, I wanted more. Many a kid who had parents with transferable jobs might have faced the same, but then, you sort of grow up knowing your primary school friends will drift apart, you are with family, and even then the displacements are a few years apart. I, on the other hand, have become part of vastly differing social circles in a span of less than five years.

(Someone suggested I do this because I am an only child; that an only child of a parent fishes for independence and uniqueness. I thought…it’d be the other way round? I don’t know. Freud probably has written about this.)

I fear that this urge to immerse myself in a new environment has come to define my way of living now. I assume this is what happens once you’ve learned BASE jumping or freehand rock climbing. After a while, it becomes the only way you get excited about life. After a while, it becomes the only way you can dream.

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Most of my friends in Singapore were exchange students; exchange students who usually stay for semester. I am not, I am one of the handful who chose to stay for the whole year. In addition to the obvious bonding among exchange students, I also made great Singaporean friends through my work at the TV station. All people who are excellent company to hang around with. Yet, the fleeting nature of our acquaintance came as a rude jolt to remind me at the end of the year that this really isn’t the same.

Singapore itself is diversely multi-ethnic; this is especially true of Nanyang Technological University. You’ll find native Singaporeans, Malays, Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, citizens of other neighbouring countries; then you have exchange students from every country imaginable – the UK, USA, practically every country of the European Union, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, Africa. And yet, despite all this diversity, there is no unity. I don’t know why, but everyone just defaults to staying in their comfort zone of hanging around with folks of the same background. Walk into any canteen, any library (we have seven), any lecture theatre – look up the composition of any group of students, and you will hardly ever find a mix of different ethnicities.

It isn’t for the lack of trying. My roommates in hostel – both exchange students from Scotland – mentioned how left-out they felt during lab sessions; their lab team consisted of Singaporeans who would reply in English when asked a question, but would default to Mandarin when conversing amongst themselves. I’m not singling out Singaporeans here because this is a behaviour I have seen repeated across the campus. When there’s a social gathering, you’ll only find Indians hanging around with Indians, Malays having a barbecue in the hostel lawns, and so on. This was a big change for me from Surrey; the composition of student population is very diverse there, still, people do not exclusively restrict their social circle to ‘their own kind’.

As the calendar flips to 2011, I find myself back to square one – (practically) with no friends. All my exchange friends are gone, most of my Singaporean are off on exchange themselves on exchange, and even among the Indian community there I am somewhat of an oddity. I don’t have the luxury of being a fresher, who are forced by circumstances to get together, and at the same time as year 2 or 3 student I find myself faced with peers who’ve already defined their friend circle.

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For most people, year-in reviews are an opportunity to look back at treasured and defining moments of the year gone by. These usually are memorable days – for good or bad reasons – like parties, events, funerals, get-togethers, achievements, speeches…but every time I look back at a year, the defining moments are always conversations. Conversations, conversations, conversations.

Standing around the university mailroom trying to find the worst movie trailer ever.

Conversations over takeaway dinners ranging from life in the UK to gossip from part-time jobs.

Spending four hours on a roadside near the Esplanade waterfront, ignoring thirst and an increasing mobilization of an ant colony…because at the time, only that chat was what seemed to matter.

Staying awake till 4am in the library preparing for an exam, and discussing crazy stuff we did when we were children. (The winner was a friend who dressed up as Superman, almost jumped off his balcony, and made his babysitter have a nervous breakdown in the process.)

Turning up 15 minutes late to a meeting with my work manager for a meeting, trying to forget I hadn’t even brushed my teeth.

Talking to people you have never met in real life over Twitter – and yet, feeling that you know more about each other than people you’ve met in real life.

Discussing the ridiculousness of the behaviour of ghosts in Thai soaps and somehow ending with the conversation steered onto the topic of psychiatric care.

All those times on Skype and phone grasping on to every syllable. Pretending as if distance didn’t really matter. And at one time, finding it impressive that Skype added typewriter sound effects to their software.

Arguing about Catholic faith, traffic shaping by ISPs to prevent file-sharing, and whether the US was justified in going to war in Afghanistan in the same conversation thread…while waiting for a pizza delivery.

(For someone whom conversations define so much, I’m bad at the technicalities of it. I always misjudge conversational pauses, perpetually stepping over other people’s words; I am mortified every time it happens, and I panic and screw up even more.)

To every single person mentioned (you know who you are!) and not mentioned here (only because of lack of space!): I know I can be a difficult friend at the best of times. I am as narcissistic, shy, arrogant, introverted as people can get. I take a long time to understand and trust people, and then let them into my inner social circle. But once I do get to know you, you mean a lot to me. More than I possibly ever let on. Each and every single conversation in 2010 – and earlier and beyond – I can replay in  memory. Each and every single conversation is what makes the journey worthwhile.

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They say travel broadens the mind. I think, however, that a friend I had a chat with recently put it the best: travel does broaden the mind, but only if you go in expecting it to be broadened. When you visit a country as a tourist or live abroad, it is deceptively easy to insulate yourself.

There was a TV series running for the past few months on Sky1 called An Idiot Abroad. The premise of the show is they send a British everyman Karl Pilkington around the globe to see the New Seven Wonders of World. It is a travel documentary like no other – because it doesn’t try to be a travel documentary. You don’t have an enthusiastic Lonely Planet traveller gung-ho about exploring new cultures. Instead, you have Pilkington, who thoroughly hates travelling and doesn’t bother much beyond his next lunch at a pub.

I realize that Karl Pilkington is a comedian / radio jockey by profession, and many of the situations in the show were specifically cooked up to cause his discomfort. But then…something changed. It isn’t scripted into the show nor is it ever explicitly announced, but as Pilkington progresses on his journey something is different. You can sense that he is a new man – not his cynical old self any more.

I plan to go backpacking in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam (and a few other countries, if I can) later this year. (I’ve ‘done’ Indonesia; want to go back there again though.) Somehow this came up during a conversation with an employee at our hostel office; I was nodding along, smiling politely to what he was saying – because I didn’t really understand what he was saying – when I realized he was talking about a relative whose leg got blown off by a landmine in Cambodia. Honestly, how do you react to situations like that?

These past few days I have been reading a book titled Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures. It is an account told through diary entries of Andrew Thomson, Ken Cain, and Heidi Postlewait – a narrative that spanning from 1993 to 2003 – as they work for the UN in Cambodia, Mogadishu (Somalia), Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Liberia. (The title of the book and its tagline is an exploitative ploy by the publisher, I guess, but content isn’t.) It’s a coming-of-age story of three Westerners as they see the good work they can and can’t do, working in some of the most impoverished and conflict-stricken parts of the world. Rich vacationers paying off macoutes, just so that they can have a merry time on ‘pristine’ beaches. Stories of faces half-chopped apart by an axe and thrown into the sea, just for speaking out against a dictatorial government. It makes for grim reading…but every once in a while, they recount an incident that truly makes you believe in altruism amongst the human race.

I feel as if I am walking towards a precipice – a precipice that allows a view of a thousand epiphanies. All I can see on the horizon now is the edge of precipice, and a tantalising glimpse of the enlightenment that awaits.

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When I go home people’ll ask me, “Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?” You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s it. That’s all it is.

– From Black Hawk Down

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I don’t have a new year resolution, merely a desire: to learn at least basic conversational Mandarin by the end of my stay in Singapore.

Wish you a happy new year, everyone. 🙂

Categories
Travel

A day out in Pulau Ubin, More Strange Signs (TM), and cautionary tales about Google Maps

Given the state of house addressing, using Google Maps to guide oneself around in India ends in tears. Singapore, though, is a well-planned city with a robust public transport system – and here Google Maps usually shines for a navigationally-challenged person like me.

Usually. Last week, I needed to go to a place called Pulau Ubin (more on that later). I whipped out my smartphone, asked Google Maps to show me the best route via public transport from my (then) current location (it can do that, that smart cookie!) to where I wanted to go. Pat came the reply: “no buses found, 41 minutes walking from current location to Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam.”

Hmmm.

Turns out that I was standing on the wrong side of the road; therefore, there were no buses heading the way I had to. So – like the proverbial chicken – I crossed the road…and all was m’kay.

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Pulau Ubin is Singapore’s last remaining kampung (village). For a country that was founded no more than 50 years ago, urbanization has been rapid in engulfing any semblance of rural settlement that might have been there. Pulau Ubin is the exception – it is a tiny island off the coast of Singapore, now maintained as a nature reserve. I had a friend from my university whom I used to work with vacationing in Singapore, and we (along with some travellers he met in Kuala Lumpur) decided to go mountain biking.

(insert random scenery shot of Pulau Ubin here)

To reach Pulau Ubin, one can take the MRT to Tanah Merah (on the Green Line) – if you’ve been here, then you might recollect this as the place where the MRT branches off to Changi Airport – and then catch a bus from there to Changi Village Ferry Terminal. At the ferry terminal, Singapore’s fetish for weird public signs continued to catch me off guard. For instance, this sign asking people not to wash their feet in the washbasin (complete with plagiarised stock photography of a foot being washed in a washbasin)…

You can't see it in this picture, but there was an istockphoto.com watermark on that image of a foot being washed.

…a comic strip explaining how and why people should dry their hands after visiting the toilet…

Captain Obvious is the superhero is this comic strip (sponsored by Harpic Toilet Cleaner)

…a bizarre ‘Beware of Glass’ notice on a free-standing pane of glass, that serves no apparent purpose…

…’2 crews’ (as opposed to ‘2 crew members‘) for every 12 passengers on our ‘bum boat’…

…right until we reached Pulau Ubin, where we were warned not to set up tents on the jetty.

Dangnamit. :(

It’s insane! Someone, somewhere has a job in Singapore to think of every single ‘undesirable’ situation and come up with pictorial representation warning the public not to do that. (For more on this, watch video blogger Natalie Tran’s vlog for Lonely Planet from Singapore.)

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The name ‘Pulau Ubin’ means ‘Granite Island’. Not surprising, because in the old days this island used to be a granite mine. Ever since it was converted to a nature reserve though, mining activities have been stopped. Pulau Ubin is now an idyllic resort for nature lovers, adventure seekers, and fat old bastards with moolah to spend at resorts on the island.

"I'm On A Bum Boat" - probably the shittiest possible Weird Al parody of the popular song. (This picture on the approach to Pulau Ubin jetty, seen far off in the centre of the picture here.)

The ferry ride from Changi Village Ferry Terminal is a short one – for about S$2.50, a ‘bum boat‘ will take you across the channel to Pulau Ubin in fifteen minutes. (You might have to wait a bit for enough people to gather at the departure jetty.) Not a lot of thought seemed to have gone into the naming a mode of transport as ‘bum boat’ and why tourists might find it funny; I’m assuming that the descendants of the creative geniuses who did so went to name a retail clothing chain ‘Wanko’.

(This joke is lost on most of my Indian readers. Urban Dictionary 'wanker', fellas.)

A short walk away from the jetty area, you’ll find shops renting out bicycles. (With signs that read “IS IT REALLY TRUE? $2 HIRE!” The answer is yes, it’s true, but only for children’s bicycles.) Prices are standard at every stall so there’s no point price hunting – decide the kind of bike you want and hire one. Standard rates hover around S$5 for the cheapest bikes going up to S$8, so there’s no need to haggle either for a couple of dollars. Bikes are rented out till 6pm in the evening.

Pulau Ubin: the only place in Singapore where a tin shack is called 'home'.

Although you can go to Pulau Ubin for hiking too, the place is primarily designed for mountain biking. There are varied difficulty levels for tracks and varied settings. Personally, I had never tried mountain biking before this, neither did most of the others in our group. The sections of the trail passing through jungle were excruciatingly hot and humid to negotiate, but they were interspersed with stretches of less steep trails every now and then to ease the pressure. The humidity can quickly sap your energy. Make sure that you buy enough bottles of water at the jetty base and keep rehydrating yourself!

One of the easiest stretches of the biking trail

Overall, the bike trail definitely is one intended for novices, with a few challenging stretches thrown in. The reward for taking on the challenging stretches is that you get to see granite quarries not reachable via the easier trails. Unfortunately, I had to drop out halfway through the trail. I sprained my right wrist quite badly recently; I was even forced to wear a wrist brace. I reckoned that since I had been wearing the wrist brace and popping painkillers it would be okay, but the pain become unbearable going on a particularly steep slope. I decided to drop out from the group and head back to base.

Hilarity ensued when I got distracted laughing at a road sign showing a tree branch falling on a cyclist, consequently took a wrong turn, and rode straight onto a beach on the far end of the island. I did make it back, eventually, after causing a crash among three bikers (and running away from the scene of the crime). The man we had hired our bikes from regarded me suspiciously when I returned the bike early and without my friends accompanying me. He started inspecting the bike and shouting things at me. I think he was accusing me of having pushed my friends off a cliff at a granite mine after forcing them to sign their wills over to me at gunpoint. Then again, my grasp of Chinese is weak, so maybe not.

Divested of my hired bicycle, I decided to explore the coast near the jetty while I awaited my friends’ return. Beaches on Pulau Ubin are little more than thin strips of sand, and the coastline is dotted with jagged rocks. I was lucky to catch the shift from low tide to high tide as I strolled along the beach; the change is as breathtaking as it is dramatic. The instant when softly lapping waves start smashing violently against the rocks is a sight to behold.

Beer bottles are always a good indicator of how popular a place is. Here's Pulau Ubin's proof.

We weren’t frisked or anything on the way out to Pulau Ubin, but on our return we were searched at the ferry terminal and our bags scanned with an X-ray machine. What undesirable material could we possibly bring back-lah from a granite island?! Durian?

(That reminds me of an urban legend about durians. The saying goes that if there’s a person sitting beneath a durian tree, a durian will never fall on his head.)

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There are a couple of seafood restaurants at Pulau Ubin, and it’s a great place to try out Singaporean seafood delicacies made from fresh catch from the sea. Our group didn’t eat there though as the prices seemed too ‘touristy’. Instead, we headed back by bum boat to Changi Village and proceeded to the hawker centre nearby. You get the same, fresh catch while getting cheaper prices – it’s a win-win.

I recommended my friend from Surrey to try out chilli crab – one of Singapore’s signature dishes. I myself had tried eating this once, only to find it way too messy and spicy for my tastebuds. Anyway, my friend orders the dish, and the hawker asks, “Which crab do you want?” There was a tiny steel box outside his stall, with barely 5cm deep water in which lived four crabs! My friend chose one, and then the hawker proceed to cook it behind the scenes.

I chose to have ‘seafood egg’ instead. From the picture shown in the menu, it seemed like oyster omelette that I’d eaten elsewhere. My guess is that the hawker literally translated the Chinese name for the dish to arrive at ‘seafood egg’ for ‘oyster omelette’. That’s what it eventually turned out to be, albeit a rendition that tasted more omelette than oyster. My friend, on the other hand, thoroughly seemed to enjoy attacking his chilli crab dish. Our other friends in the group ate chicken rice and char siew (pork) rice – staple foods here, so nothing interesting to write about.

The ‘seafood egg’ incident reminded me of a conversation I had with my friends during our trip to eat pig intestines. The largest trader of durians in Singapore is a company called ‘717 Trading’, which operates the Durian Mpire chain where I’d tried eating durian. ‘717’ seemed to be an awkward name for a company, so I asked my friends why it was so. They said the reason is that in Mandarin, ‘717’ phonetically sounds like ‘come eat here’. Instead of an in-your-face name like ‘Come Eat Here Trading’, the company chose a subtler ‘717 Trading’. Clever.

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I'm seriously, you guys. You must try chili crab - at least in dip form!

One thing that I did distinctly remember from the time I tried eating chilli crab though was how good the gravy was. Later, we had dinner at an Irish place near Marina Square called Durty Nelly’s. ‘Chilli crab dip with potato wedges’ is one unique item on their menu that you should try out, if you’re a vegetarian or otherwise not feeling courageous enough to try crab. The fiery taste is almost, but not quite, like salsa dip.

Outside Durty Nelly’s, there’s a swish hotel with this street sign…

…which makes me wonder: are such misunderstandings common in Singapore? Are people washing their feet in washbasins in hordes? Do public transport buses – the only double deckers buses in Singapore – suddenly swerve out of their fixed routes and into the parking lane of expensive hotels?

Must there be a sign for Life, the Universe, and Everything?

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With friends here, I finally got to do ‘touristy stuff’ around town. Going on the Singapore Flyer; searching for that perfect chilli crab and kaya toast breakfast; strolling around Arab Street, Chinatown, Little India, Esplanade and Marina Bay – we did it all. I had been to Sentosa beach resort earlier on an ‘Amazing Race’ style competition organized by The IET club over here, but that trip was a bit rushed. Finally, I got do the luge run and the skyride in a leisurely way. They are pretty lax about who they allow on these rides, you see. You need to be 110 millimetres tall to ride.

Note: For those of you bad at maths, that's 11cm.

To be fair, they did have a life-size cutout stating the actual limit, which is 110cm. What happened here, probably, is a pedantic printing press received an order for this poster and went, “But…in the picture here…it’s just 11cm! No time to ask our clients – change it to 110mm pronto!”

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I was so bored of canteen food that I spent the last few days eating out. One place that I got to check out was Fatboy’s Burger Bar at Mohammed Sultan Road (they have another branch at Upper Thomson Road, which I gather is the more popular branch), thanks to a 50% off voucher I got from the group buying deals website HungryDeals.sg. (I love these HungryDeals guys, simply because their mission statement is “trying to solve the ‘Where shall we have lunch?’ question phase of our civilization’. ;D )

It’s probably best that I don’t mention here that I had to walk a long way to reach the place. I was travelling by bus and tracking on Google Maps the stop I was supposed to get off at; the location update got delayed and I only realized two bus stops later that the place had passed by.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I ate lamb for the first time. I ordered their ‘Bolly Wooly’ burger – lamb burger with lettuce, tomatoes, mango chutney in a honey oat brown bun, with a large helping of thick cut fries. By default they do the patties medium rare, but I requested it to be done well-done instead. The lamb meat was so tender that I could almost picture the baby sheep that was killed to make this burger looking at a butcher with glistening eyes; the eyes pleading that its life not be ended cut short (literally) so soon.

A jolly good meal, I say! Only S$20.