^.^ happy tree friends ^.^

Sunday, March 04, 2007

For the past two days I have been lugging my heavy (not really) laptop to this place called the California Coffee Cafe and using the wireless connection there...You get to log in to their wireless network for an hour and a half everytime you buy something. The weather has been nasty for both days; windy and rainy- so its really cold, so I can't go exploring, and have to sit indoors. I miss the Singaporean sun! Sunny weather is one of the things that I have always taken for granted- here if it rains you pretty much have to stay indoors for the rest of the day (yes, there is this invention called the umbrella but its too much of a hassle and no one can be bothered carrying it around). In fact, here's a whole list of things that we have but they don't:

1) The Sea
The other day in Hungarian Culture class the teacher was going on and on about how beautiful the sea is, how magical and mysterious and whatnot. She says in her time when travel opportunities were scarce it was a great privilege to go for summer holiday by the seaside, and she's only been once or twice. Also she theorizes that Hungary may have such a godforsaken history (I think the fengshui of this country must be really bad) because being landlocked drives you a little bit crazy. I told her my school (SAJC) used to be near the coast, and that we are an island surrounded by sea but nevertheless have our own godforsaken history (we surrendered in 3 days and also got our asses kicked out of the Malaysian Union), so we ended class agreeing that the hypothesis was wrong.

2)Rice (cookers)
I was having breakfast with Jacob, Silvio, Sasa and their landlord Carlo after sleeping over the night before, and we were talking about food. Carlo's Italian and he says he likes Chinese food in general because it is so healthy. HAHAHA...I don't know what kind of Chinese food he was thinking of, but Chinese food to me is chicken rice, char kway teow, vegetables drenched in oyster sauce and stuff like peking duck. He also says he likes rice the way Chinese people are able to make it. I found out then that none of the Europeans (except Silvio, whose girlfriend is Indonesian/Italian) have seen or heard of a rice cooker. Apparently they always labored under the misconception that Chinese people magically produce fluffy white cooked rice- which they cannot do because they have been trying to cook rice in a pot over a stove. Now Carlo wants to get a rice cooker.
Also, my American friends think Chinese food is exotic. Anything from the East, I discovered, is exotic to people here. There are so many things they haven't tried! A few of us (Ulrik the Danish, all the American girls, Bernd and Daniel the Germans and I) were on the topic of food (again) and comparing scary foods. I told them about trying some snake in Cambodia and they were all like, "Eew! What does it taste like?" and I said, "like Unagi" and it turns out they've never had Unagi before so the comparison made no sense. So I tried again and said, "Snake and unagi taste like stingray", and guess what, they've never tried stingray either (this is a lost cause). Incidentally, Ulrik won the scary food competition because he had bull's testicles or something. And I also succeeded in convincing Bernd that not all Chinese people eat dogs and cats.

3)Sunshine and tropical weather
No one here understands how it can be 30 degree celcius all year round in a country. It is now around 9 degrees here, and they agree that this is warm. The Germans especially keep joking that its already summer as far as they are concerned; when I ask them when spring will come they say it doesn't matter because to me spring will probably still feel like winter anyways.

What they have that we don't:

1) PDA (lots of it)
When I say PDA I mean Public Displays of Affection. There's so much of it going on around you here after a while you just learn to ignore it and kind of not stare. It's not really an Asian thing is it? I think it's only European, because the American girls were initially as uncomfortable as I was with it. We were at this food court and the couple sitting really close next to us were practically engaging in foreplay. It was hard to ignore because we were sitting in such close proximity to them it felt like we were in the same bedroom with them or something=/ After quite a long, long while, they left, no doubt to continue someplace else more comfortable, if not more private.
The Europeans themselves are oblivious to it. When we were recounting the food court incident to our other friends Daniel overheard us and for a while he stood there looking really confused. Then he went, "What are you talking about? A PDA is that little electronic hand-held device, is it not?"

2) Homeless drunkards
I've never really seen homeless people before, except on TV and in actual 3rd world countries I've been to. At first I thought they were just normal dirty, untidy people (and maybe a bit mad, because people who are dirty and untidy all look scary and crazy to me), and I always assumed they had accidentally thrown something away that they urgently needed to retrieve when I saw them rummaging through the trashcans. I didn't realize what they were till I saw a bunch of them sleeping in the metro stations curled up in dirty sheets, or just as they were. Jacob says that there are homeless people in Germany too, and that every winter some of them freeze and die, and you can always smell a homeless person because they are mostly drunk (it gives them the illusion of being warm). It seems as if Singapore's vice tax on alcohol may be a good thing, because we never have drunkards wreaking havoc in the streets, or slumped unattractively all over the place. It's too expensive to be an alcoholic in SG. I told Daniel, another German friend that we have no homeless people in Singapore and that it's probably illegal to be homeless too (you get arrested don't you?), which he found very funny. But I could tell that coming from a welfare state, he didn't want to lose out to a meritocractic one such as we, because out of the blue one day he said he had a discussion with the Germans and they decided altogether that SG must have homeless people only we don't see them.

3) Cheap alcohol/ nightlife
Everyone I meet swears that they will never come to SG when they hear how expensive the alcohol is. Here in Europe I discover that they don't believe that nightlife should cost anything at all, it is almost a right to them. As a result, they go out every night, something which (I think) not even the most avid clubber in SG can claim to do (too expensive!). They have very different definitions of day and night, because their day lasts till about 3 or 4am; once I got this message from Sasa, at 6pm, which read: What about a movie this afternoon? (at this point I thought vodafone had screwed up and sent my message a couple hours late, then...) Lets meet for coffee first at 6.30 and the movie starts at 7.45. See you!" (-_-') See what I mean?
The entrance fees to clubs are also either free, or about SGD$3.50 (in other words, peanuts). Which is nothing at all to us Singaporeans, but one of the days we had to walk all over the place just because they didn't feel like they should pay to get into a club. Like I said, nightlife is a RIGHT to them.

Sunday, March 04, 2007