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!)
And this one is from and with Julia:
Just so that you also see some of my pictures at dusk from the Marina Bay area:
Then we got on a junk, and have "sailed" up the Singapore river (length: 2.5 km!) to Clarke Quay.
We were to have dinner on our own. Given that the place is fairly expensive and there was a lot of us, we started to search for cheaper options and started to break into smaller and smaller groups. Because some of us, namely David and Ashish and myself, were not interested in eating in cheap but non-local Burger King, we went across the main road to a little Chinese place and ordered Salad Chicken Rice, on the other side of Clarke Quay. First we were brought some soup, made of soy beans and chicken feet. Ashish was not really interested in eating it :) Assuming from its name our main course was supposed to include some salad, but only had three pieces of vegetables, less than you would get as garnish in Hungary or the Netherlands :) After dinner we started back to the meeting place, somewhere on the other other side of Clarke Quay. (This is again a picture I borrowed from David, which he took on the way.)
We arrived at 9.20, the designated meeting time, because we were told the bus would leave at 9.30 sharp, assuming that whoever was not there wanted to spend some more time in the city. And this is when our saga started. The bus was nowhere. Ashish called a friend (Amit) who was in another subgroup with one of the organizers. The organizer suggested we walk back exactly where we started (the first other side of Clarke Quay, at Burger King) to meet him, then with him we walked back to the meeting place (the other other side of Clarke Quay). So we walked round and round Clarke Quay and meanwhile missed the bus completely :) To crown it all, we were blamed by the other subgroup for them missing the bus. Anyway, we agreed it was an adventure, and took public transportation to finally get home around 11pm.
