So tonight is my almost last night here in Singapore. It is 23:17 at this writing moment, and tomorrow I am leaving for Chiang Mai together with a new travel partner Kristian the Tyrant (he is danish, I could not resist…) and Leo the man of Råge and boyfriend of my cousin Kristina.
It feels a little bit surreal speaking of the end to this semester, as it feels as though it has just begun. Time flew by faster than the rocketman Elton John was singing about, and all of a sudden Eric the kiwi and Lukas the austrian have left, together with many, many more exchange students. We are now down to two T’s of The Tuk-Tuk Troup: Tme and TSar(a). Tomorrow, she will stand as the champion T.
Zooming out a little bit, I have gotten to know more than TTTT, though, and I felt that yesterday when lots of exchange students gathered up for a farewell party at Canteen 2 on campus, followed by Altitude (highest skybar in Singapore and super expensive). The entrance cost S$35 (ca 22 EUR) which also gave you a “free” drink, and a tiger tap beer cost S$21.50 (ca 13.5 EUR). Over here, I played Yatzy with Susanna the swede on the floor below me, TSara and Sanne the dutch girl that we met in Melaka (the girls we went with to Cé La Vi). Across from the table were also Theresa the austrian girl (who gives extensive travel tips for Austria if you ever need it), her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend. Apparently, yatzy is not a known game to everyone!
Later that evening, we saw Diego the Spanish and Abigail the Brit, which felt like a short reunion with the group I hung out with in the beginning of the semester. Abigail even showed up later at Altitude, where we also met up with Max the German ETH guy. Having strolled around for a while at the club, we started seeing more and more familiar faces such as Joris the dutch chill guy and Fabio the Chilean guy I wrote a group project with in Energy Resources Management. Hatim the Borneo jungle trip guy was also in that group project, but he had left a couple of days earlier. See you in Canada sometime!
It was all in all a quite good night, even though it was way too expensive for a night out. Below are some pictures of the place and its view, and for future travellers, I could really recommend this place if you want to see the best of Singaporean Rooftop Clubs!
Today, I also went to Sentosa and downtown to eat some good restaurant food with Theresa the austrian and Max the german ETH guy. The day did not start out well, as I did not manage to ship my guitar back to Sweden, and had to figure out a plan B for getting rid of it whilst under time pressure to go to Sentosa preceded by dropping off my big suitcase at Yuen Theng the local Singaporean girl in my German class who was kind enough to let me store my suitcase at her place when I go around travelling in Thailand and Vietnam.
“Hold on… There was alot of things going on here. Could you break it down for me?” I take it you say now. Well, here it is. The breakdown of my stupid mistakes:
- I bought a guitar a few months ago and thought that I would be able to sell it before I go back to Sweden. I was even ready to lose S$100 for it, so I thought someone would be willing to pay for that price. Worst case scenario, I would just have to ship it back to Sweden.
- I did not manage to sell my guitar before the exam period, which made me order a shipping for it online. The shipping was going to take 50-100 work days (I am, by no means, in a hurry), and to me the game scenario was that I would either get the guitar back whole or damaged/not at all. If I got it back, good. If not, then I could claim insurance money for it = win-win. Either way, it would be better than giving it away because of no time to arrange anything else.
- Of course I ordered the shipping in a 10 minute hurry, as I, having just finished my exam and eaten lunch with TLukas the austrian guy, had to catch a time to my haircutter tightly followed by a meeting to get my Master Thesis job in place for the Spring. Of course, I ended up being late for the haircutter at Boon Lay, which made it impossible for me to stay and buy packaging from Yamaha for my guitar.
- I tried to deliver the guitar to a collector today as-is, and see if there was any possibility that he could wrap it in later, as I had no time to deal with. Of course, he could not accept it, and I had paid the shipment already, so I followed the courier’s advice, walked with the guitar 500 m to the campus’ post office to make them package my guitar with my shipment reference number, only to have them reject my proposal. My heart’s wallet chamber was no starting to tear up a little bit, mixed with a little bit of self hatred over bad decisions.
- I asked Yuen Theng the great local friend if she wanted a guitar for free. She said yes, but after having explained why she almost could not accept the gift, and we ended up with the deal that I would try to sell it online and if I get any buyer before I get back to Singapore, she will sell the guitar and collect the money for me to pick up when I get back to Singapore 21/12.
- I went to Yuen Theng and dropped off the guitar and the suitcase. She let me have a few last moments with my guitar and told me that if I come back to Singapore some years in the future, I can just pick up the guitar and bring it back home if I want to. She even gave me cookies when I left. Such a nice person! 6.1 P.S. she also gave me a view of the average Singaporean life. Studying and going to the mall. I had definitely sensed it before, but in this moment it felt as though studies and malls make up for 90% of an average student’s life here, and in the way she phrased it, it felt a bit sad. She was eager to go on exchange to an English speaking country such as USA in the future. According to her, Singapore does not have much to offer if you want to explore and do many activites.
- I took a grab to Sentosa and met up with Max and Theresa. Apparently, they had taken a cable car from the mainland there. We walked around for a bit, and I swam in the oily and warm water (there are a lot of freighters outside Singapore’s coast). It was not that impressive, and it felt as though our initial goal - to flavour our Singaporean experience with properly seeing Sentosa for the first time - had been lost. However…
- We decided to take a bus into the city and eat food at a random japanese restaurant. After having strolled around for 10 minutes, we decided to eat at Hamburg Steak Keisuke. This restaurant offered free flow salad and eggs, together with some fried burger meat, cheese, sauce, rice and miso soup. I do not know if it was the relatively low expectations we had for the place, or if this actually was as amazing as we thought it was, but this place created a sense of euphoria in me. For S$26 (including service charge), I got the above mentioned menu and a coke. Needless to say, I walked out of there quite full from having eaten fresh salad for the first time in half a year.
I am now very tired, and I have to go up early tomorrow. Therefore, I will leave the photos for then, and wish myself and you a good night!