Can you guess where this picture was taken?

I am minding my business, reading news online and I see this little icon...

Singapore Sights - The Pinnacle@Duxton building

On Monday I had to go to a hospital in the city for a MINOR checkup. Because I was in the neighborhood, I have treated myself to a half hour sightseeing: I have traveled to the top floor of the Pinnacle@Duxton building.

The building is fairly central, it is located close to Chinatown (North-East), the CBD (i.e. Central Business District, East), the harbor (South) and Sentosa Island (the pleasure island of Singapore, South-West).

The building is the tallest Award-Winning Residential Development, and consists of seven connected towers. This was Singapore's first 50-storey HDB (Housing Development Board, responsible for building public housing, HDB flat = public housing) building and it is still the world's tallest public housing building. It was constructed between 2005 and 2009. The world's two longest sky gardens of 500 meters are on the 26th and 50th floors.

Singapore Sights - Kampong Glam, second take & the Malay Istana

After the Gardens, I went to Kampong Glam, to pick up the dress I bought for CNY short for Chinese New Year :)

I was hungry, and this time I knew where to go. Zam Zam, a Muslim, i.e. halal place...

...very close to the heart of Kampong Glam.

Gardens by the Bay V - Supertree Grove

And finally the trees :)

The trees are up to 16-storeys high, twelve of them are at the Supertree Grove, but two clusters of 3 trees are located at the Golden and Silver Gardens.

I didn't know but research teaches you a lot of things: first, "11 Supertrees are embedded with environmentally sustainable functions like photovoltaic cells to harvest solar energy", second, Supertrees are planted with more than 200 species of bromeliads, orchids, ferns and tropical flowering climbers, of more than 162,900 plants...

 

Gardens by the Bay IV - Cloud Forest

The jaw-dropping conservatory:

The 35-meter mountain of the cool-moist tropical highland region, up close and personal.

Gardens by the Bay III - Succulents and cacti

This is for Zsolt. Still the Flower Dome: succulents and cacti.

Gardens by the Bay II - Flower Dome

Of the two conservatories, I have to confess, I liked the other more! But this one is impressive as well. It replicates the "cool-dry climate of Mediterranean regions like South Africa, California and parts of Spain and Italy" in a man-made, controlled environment.

 

Gardens by the Bay I

This post is only going to be a teaser. It is fairly late now that I am writing this, and I have spent a little over 5 hours there and made 600+ pictures :) I promise to share them with you, but in installments!

This is the underpass from the new Downtown MRT line to the Gardens.

As I came out, this view has greeted me.

Marina Bay Sands is the same MRT stop!

Quirky Singapore I - Singapore as seen by Singaporeans

No pictures today :)

I am a totally committed student in Singapore, so I am avidly following local news. It seems that beyond the SMRT fare hike and frequent MRT breakdowns, Singaporeans are struggling with / dealing with / debating some interesting / serious issues.

And the day was not yet over - Lau PA Sat

Around 5.30 we started to discuss with Wanti, where to go to eat. We talked about Chinese, Indian, Malay. She is Indonesian and recommended an interesting place, called Lau PA Sat, to eat saté. And I said, YES, PLEASE! 

(Apparently in Singapore, and/because in English, it is satay, but it is saté in the original.) 

It is located in the dead center of the business district, half-way between Merlion Park and Chinatown. The actual building, the "largest remaining Victorian filigree cast-iron structure in Southeast Asia", was formerly a wet market, called Telok Ayer market. Unfortunately it is under renovation, which is delayed because of the construction of a new MRT line. But clever Singaporeans don't let themselves miss a business opportunity just because the place for business is unavailable. They open up the street right next to it as an open-air restaurant after 7pm every night. Imagine this, it is a busy street during the day and a restaurant at night with a 15min transformation :)

There are compromises: plastic plates, plastic cups and plastic utensils - there is no running water to do the dishes.  But it must be very close to the original with all the hawker stalls, and the food.

The FOOD! It is very nice. Not at all like Dutch saté, much smaller meat cubes (Wanti ordered 15 pieces for us!), and the sauce is chunky, where the Dutch is smooth and sweet(ish) where the Dutch is more, uhm, I don't know :) but it is different and it is delicious!

In sum, another wonderful day!

Singapore Botanic Gardens - The National Orchid Garden

This is the only part of the Gardens which has an entrance fee, S$5. But if you are a student, and I am, it only costs S$1.

The most surprising thing about it? Most of it is open-air!

So here we go again.

Singapore Botanic Gardens

With my friend Wanti, we played hooky and went to the Botanic Gardens, "A Timeless Tropical Eden". It is open from 5am to midnight, and entrance is free. It is not an awfully large place, but you can easily spend 3-4 hours in there. The most imposing area, with special entrance and entrance fee, is the National Orchid Garden (in the next post).

It has various special gardens, like Eco Garden, Evolution Garden and Ginger Garden. It has climbers, bamboos, palms, ferns, cannonball trees and many other things I cannot even guess at. So without further ado... (But if you already think I went crazy, wait for the next post!)

Singapore Sights - Saturday afternoon in Kampong Glam and Little India

After my adventures in the jungle and Tree Top Walk, I went on a city tour:

Kampong Glam is the historic Malay district, and as such, also the center of the Muslim community in Singapore. The name Kampong Glam comes from kampong, village in Malay, and glam, the name of the Gelam tree. The Gelam tree is a very important tree, every part of it was used by the Malay: its leaves to make Cajeput oil, to be used as a substitute of Tiger Balm; the bark for caulking boats; the timber for the hulls and for firewood; the dried and ground fruit as black pepper substitute.

This area was allocated to the local Malay and Muslim immigrants from South East Asia in the Raffles Town Plan. But it was actually the seat of Malay royalty when Stamford Raffles arrived to the island in 1819. The former Istana, the palace of the Malay rulers, serves as the Malay Heritage Centre today.

Tree Top Walk

Today I have been to the jungle! I had to travel with public transportation for about 1.5 hours. And then I started out on one of the MacRitchie Trails, from the MacRitchie Reservoir Park.

First 2 weeks of school

The bad - 1st day, registration

You probably remember, I have arrived on 3rd January, Friday and my first day at NTU was on the following Monday. An almost complete disaster...

Playing tourist - the day tour

On Saturday we met at 10am to go on a whole day tour to visit Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam, the Malay-Muslim quarter. This time we had a tour guide, Dawn, a third generation Chinese-Singaporean. She regaled us with facts and stories about Singapore on the way to our first destination, Chinatown. Singapore measures 42kms (East-West) by 23kms (North-South) (according to Wikipedia, 49kmx25km), its area is 714 square kms. With 5.4m people, it is the third most densely populated area in the world after Monaco and Macao (I had to check because I actually understood Cannes!?). 1 out of 3 people is not local (i.e. only 2 out of 3 are residents). 85% of the population buys their first apartment from the government after an average waiting period of 3 years. And 95% of the population lives in high rises (so NTU students living on campus are lucky!). The origins of Singapore, go back to 1400,then called Temasek (sea town), when a Malay prince came to the island and saw a lion. Because lions are very auspicious (sokat ígérő, kedvező, szerencsés [előjel]), he named the area Singapura (lion city).

With Dawn we have started at the true origins of the city: we first stopped in Telok Ayer street (bay water, for the original shoreline) at Thian Hock Keng Temple (Temple of Heavenly Happiness), the oldest Fukien temple,

Playing tourist - the evening tour

Last week I went on two tours of the island: on a half-day evening tour on Friday evening and a day tour on Saturday. Both were organized for international students who are new to Singapore by the International Student Centre.

On Friday we met at 5.30 in Car Park F, but we only started out at 6pm - it is apparently a challenge to find places like that, and not everybody found it easy to find the meeting place :) We soon got into rush our traffic, so we only got to the business district at 7. But this hour on the bus was really useful to get to know some of the people sitting nearest. I have met Julia from Belarus, who has just arrived to start her PhD in nanotechnology, Sang from Vietnam and Ashish from India to study engineering, Ruta from India, a sociologist in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Adam from Slovakia and Minghao from China in the Interdisciplinary Graduate School, and last but definitely not least David from Indonesia, also in the School of Humanities, who is a linguist.

Clearly everybody was very impressive, but David stands out, because everybody could relate to the kind of amazing expertise that he has. He said he spoke 7 languages besides his mother tongue, Indonesian: English and German, so far ok, but also Russian (he could converse with Julia), Hindi (he could converse with Ashish and even write some), Arabic (on Saturday we had an Egyptian colleague, Ahmed, join us and they were talking just fine), Chinese and Japanese. But it turned out that he was being modest. He even new szervusz in Hungarian, and when he made me (he really had to force me :) imagine!) teach him some things in Hungarian, he remembered some basics. I was also very impressed with his pronunciation of nuances like a and á, but also ö and ü. He new some basic stuff in Dutch as well (Ik ben David and eet smakelijk...). My totally informed conclusion was that there must be very few languages he does not know at least a few words in :) WOW!

So we arrived at the business district at around 7pm, which is right beside Merlion Park. Therefore we have visited with the large and the small Merlion and took a lot of group pictures starting at about 7.15, right when the sun starts setting. (You probably saw this one on Facebook, if not I hope David forgives me for downloading and sharing! Sang, David, Ashish, Julia, Laetitia (from Switzerland) and guess who, and of course Merlion!)

Orientation for exchange students

This compulsory introduction was held in one of the lecture theaters on Friday. Lecture theaters are huge, with three big screens for the three sections of seats simultaneously. There are a minimum of 26 lecture theaters (26 is in front of the Business School).

I have learned interesting things about NTU: There are 33,000 students, of whom 8,500 are graduate students. 19% of undergrads and 64% of grad students are international. There are 6,200 staff of whom only one third is local...

Food and being united

Today was an interesting day. I guess I am stating the obvious all the time :)

My notional supervisor is sick and won't be available for the next month. So he sent my information on to an assistant professor, who contacted me already on Monday. We set up lunch for today. When I turned up at her office, Julia suggested we invite two more people. In sum, I had lunch with three assistant professors today. Julia, originally from Taiwan, PhD from the University of Georgia, Tianshu, from China, PhD from the University of Michigan, and Asad, from the UK, PhD from the Cranfield School of Management.

NTU

Nanyang Technological University. It is located on the Western side of the island. As far as I can see beyond the campus to the west there is jungle :) I saw some red signs this morning on the border with skulls. I'll have to investigate what it means: Don't wander off campus or don't go into the unmaintained part of the island?

It is hilly and lush green.

 

Visit to the City Center

I am in love with Singapore. It is hot, but it is beautiful and special. Once you get past stewing in your own juices (sorry) it is quite enjoyable with sea breeze and light rain...

I was talking to Eszter yesteday about where the city center was and she has found something called Downtown Core on the map. So I headed that way this morning :) First I took a bus (after ingeniously finding the shortcut, a close, between rows of houses that I also need to take to get to the university tomorrow) then one of the five local metro lines (called MRT, Mass Rapid Transit) to the city center. This metro is very secure with doors on the platforms as well as on the carriages. (I included 3 photos because you can see full doors and half doors and high rises in the background.)

 

 

1st day

It is hot.

Wikipedia tells me Singapore is only 137 kilometres north of the equator. Just so that you know :) WOW I am in the tropics.

The other thing that tells me this is the tropics is the bird call. I don't know how to describe it, but if you recall any movies shot in the tropics, this is what you hear from the jungle all the time!  

Arrival

I traveled from Hungary via Berlin and Abu Dhabi to Singapore. I left at 19.05 from Budapest and arrived at 22.15 in Singapore (the following day). Given the 7 hours time difference, this means 20 hours travel time.

I have read that the hand luggage has to be below 8kgs on Air Berlin!? They didn't bother in Hungary, but they did measure it in Berlin :) Air Berlin to Abu Dhabi was ok. The only airline so far (in my vast experience of intercontinental travel) that believes to minimize your jetlag is more important than keeping you constantly occupied and trying to sell you duty free items is United. Although the flight left at 10pm and took 5 hours, Air Berlin certainly was not like that - a pity. Even so, the seat was comfortable, and I could have slept except that I happened to sit next to a girl for whom her own seat was not big enough :(

Abu Dhabi airport was disorganized and slow. I follow the transfer desk sign, and follow it and follow it. And it disappears. I take a U turn after a while, and I still can't find it. I ask for directions, and I still can't find it :) When I finally do, I have to wait in line for about 45 minutes with only 5 people in front of me! With a 3 hour layover I didn't mind, I had the time and also, I only had to submit my luggage transfer slip, but there were people waiting with tighter connections without boarding passes! Then the free wifi didn't work on my laptop. And when I tried to log into my gmail account on the local computers, I was asked questions to verify my identity that I couldn't answer. And those questions had to have been my own. Way to go! :) At the gate there was only one call to board, and boarding went on for more than an hour. I have waited to the very end (don't ask me why) when the system broke :) so the last few people had to wait at least an extra half an hour. And the plane eventually took off an hour late.

What was surprising is that it wasn't hot. We arrived at 7am, at sunrise, and boarded at around 10am, and I had to wear my sweater!