I have started to write this while I listen to a playlist of ‘Two Steps from Hell‘, I warn you just in-case during my story I suddenly lose my head and start to fly and defeat dragons. The thing is that with this epic music telling reality seems a little bland: that we went from Kuta to Serangan with sleep in our eyes to wait for a boat that (oh, what a surprise) set sail late… that with the sleep…
For the second week of our Asian voyage we decided to explore the continent a little more and visit one of the nearby countries, but none was the size of Singapore, tiny and manageable for a week (except Brunei but I didn’t know of its existence yet), so we decided to focus on one island and nothing more and we chose Bali. My criteria were the size, proximity to Singapore, and the balance between culture and tropical paradise. Fergus’ criteria…
I have stupidly spent 5 minutes of my life trying to give a title to this post and I decided to give up and postpone it until I have had a coffee, once my neurons wake up and gain the ability to sum up in a sentence everything I want to talk about…. As some of you might have noticed, I haven’t updated the blog for a few weeks (for those of you who have followed this from the very…
I think that this entry really is going to be short, given that we spent practically all the morning “moving papers”: going to a luxurious police station (of the sort where they’re even allowed to have people), reporting the phone loss, counting all of the awards received by the personnel (it seems the police there are very much adored by the public, although what I’m not sure of is if that adoration is a totally voluntary feeling, wink wink), and…
If all goes according to plan, I’m going to make this a short entry. Firstly, because we saw fewer things than previous days, and secondly, because if I propose making it short it could be that, maybe, no promises, I won’t go over 1000 words this time and even my father will deign to read it, even though it doesn’t mention plant grafting once. We arose with calm and toast and we went to the botanic gardens, which are… well,…
I’m going to take a little break from the Singbalish trip to tell you that I’ve lost my mind (a little bit more) and that on the 8th December I’m going with my colleagues to sleep in the park. Here, in Edinburgh, where the average temperature in December is 5 C during the day and I prefer not to know during the night…where the sky spits water in all its different states an average of 191 days a year…And I’m not going…
Fourth day of eating and sweating in the island city-state of Singapore, as good a day as any other to visit our third ‘ethnic’ neighbourhood: Kampong Glam, a colourful Malaysian district (despite the fact that the first thing we saw when we got off the bus was a building embodying the style of Gotham’s Wayne Tower). We walked to the Masjid Sultan mosque, where the view was beautiful from outside but we weren’t allowed to enter because it was the…
As had become habitual, the stay started with coffee and Scottish jam on toast, something that grates on me a little due to being 11,000km from its origin, what the devil is that jam doing here, far away from its family and friends. Well maybe the thing is that it’s not as far from its community as I thought… mainly because we ended the morning in a Scottish café in the gardens of the Christian Cathedral of St Andrews (patron saint…
After another super exotic breakfast of coffee and toast, we started our day on the metro to avoid change (I would say that it’s the place where we’ve spent the most time this week overall). Destination: Chinatown, that as its own name indicates is a cute Chinese city but in Singapore. I think that I should explain a curious thing here (at least for me, and I’m in command): The Singaporean identity is a very recent concept, for centuries Singapore…
The first day, and after an exotic breakfast consisting of coffee and toast with Scottish jam, we took the bus to Haw Par Villa. Definitely a mini-point for the Singaporeans on the theme of transport: The bus and metro lines connect practically all of the city and are clean, cheap and efficient. When I say clean I’m not precisely referring to good for the environment but to the fact that they shine like an advert for kitchen cleaner. I suppose…