I hope life has been treating all of you well (-: It's crazy, how almost half of the June hols are gone!
Life for me, has been not too bad compared to a normal school day - it feels good to do things without THAT much pressure and too tight a deadline! Productivity in the first week has been good but the second week (this week!) has been terrible. Did nothing except laze around; the only meaningful thing was recceing with my Dwen An kids!
To those who don't know, I went to Taiwan in January (and came back in February actually haha) on a leadership trip (which I blogged about here) with three other girls from RG and four dudes from RI and the Taiwanese people that hosted us and made us feel so welcome there are coming to Singapore in July and it's our turn to host them. We have been planning our three-day programme and on Tuesday (June 11th), five of us went to recce the places of interest in Singapore that we were going to bring them to on the third day of their visit in Singapore.
Met them at 8.30am at Bugis MRT - well technically not all of them because Kenny overslept and Yijing had tuition so she only joined us at 11am so it was Ben, Jiaze and myself.
The first part of the tour that we planned was a cultural one and we had to go to places like Kampong Glam, Bugis, Little India and Chinatown (in that order). I don't have any photos from the cultural tour though, it was such a terrible experience but it got progressively better - Kampong Glam being the worst and Chinatown the best. It was pretty hilarious when we headed to Kampong Glam - perhaps we were there too early and practically nothing was open. Apart from the mosque, there weren't any interesting things at all, but no one was inside and the people outside were smoking shisha and getting high.
The weather was not being kind to us as well - we were seriously dying, dying from the sweltering heat. It was so bad that I even took out my umbrella to shield myself from the Sun's rays when I never usually take out my umbrella at all. Kampong Glam was such a moodkiller - we were so depressed we just sat at the Malay Heritage Centre for a while thinking about how terrible this tour was starting out but the entire situation was incredibly hilarious as well, so that was pretty fun.
We then proceeded to the Chinese temple at Bugis (oh and Kenny joined us then) before taking a bus to Little India. The weather was seriously terrible and we couldn't find the place with Henna services so we were getting pretty frustrated. Chinatown exceeded our expectations so much though, it was the ultimate tourist destination with many stalls set up selling souvenirs at reasonably cheap prices. We saw uncles playing chess which really showcased a bit of a Singaporean flavour, in my opinion. The Chinese temple there was really impressive as well (although I was caught in a pretty awkward situation).
Afterwards, we took an MRT to Habourfront to continue with the second half of our tour which was Sentosa! When we reached Habourfront station, we decided to sit in the carriage because we were dead tired from the Cultural Tour and since it was the last station, the train would stop there for a longer while. When the train started beeping, signalling that the doors were closing, we got up immediately and dashed towards the doors and the guys all managed to rush out of the train in time, but I didn't, leaving me stuck in the train heading back to Outram Park station. It was so hilarious when we were separated by a single glass door and I was laughing so much - the situation then was so absurd on so many levels. So yes I had to alight at the next stop and catch the next train back to Habourfront. At least they waited for me and by the time I reached, Yijing was with them already (:
We had a quick lunch at Macs at Vivocity before taking the Sentosa Express to Sentosa!
We were all in a better mood then (I think it was lunch and the atmosphere of Sentosa was much more lively compared to the culturally-rich areas) and headed to the Luge & Skyride which we wanted to bring the Taiwanese to. It was a virgin experience for the rest of them but I think I'm quite an experienced Luge driver, with at least four drives to my name hahaha.
It was a pretty fun experience but after that we were quite at a lost of what to do. We just walked around Sentosa for a while and Singapore's weather was once again, not helping us at all. I can't actually remember what we did exactly but it involved a lot of lethargic and unproductive discussions around the island.
We stopped at 7-11 to replenish the depleting liquids in our body.
Well, just know that we walked a lot - we probably walked around the entire island at least twice and it wasn't a good experience. But we became pretty familiar with the place, which is a good thing, I suppose. However, we were going nowhere in terms of productivity so we decided to leave Sentosa (which was a terrible idea) and headed to Starbucks at Vivocity.
There, we got down to serious business and drew out a proper route that we were going to take (at least, Ben did, with his trusty map reading skills from Scouting haha). We then realized we had to go back to Sentosa again to see if the route was alright and that meant having to pay the entrance fee again and more walking. Dragging ourselves, I thought we were quite determined to get things done which really heartened me (': To be honest, I think none of us wanted to do this again so we had to get things over and done with.
Instead of the Sentosa Express, we decided to take the Board Walk route and the view there was quite amazing (':
The lighting here :( :(
Yay yijing! :D
When we reached Sentosa, we tried out the route we planned out and I'm glad we tried it out because it did not work; there were dead ends and other weird nonsense. We realized we were walking in circles for the sake of using up more time. It was super funny because we got a little lost in the Nature trail (which reminded me a lot of trekking in the Dairy Farm Nature Reserve and then we started discussing in the middle of the dark, green forested area with crickets and weird animals around us.
We then walked to Palawan beach (it was the last destination of our route) and crossed the bridge to the two tall towers. By the time we were there, we were seriously so fatigued and didn't want to climb the stairs up to the tower but it was the last thing we had to do so we did (':
Shaky shaky shaky
When we reached the top, all of us practically plopped down, exhausted. The view from there was pretty breathtaking though - I guess that's a good point of Sentosa. Even if we have the most horrible experience ever, at least we can leave with beautiful photographs.
We re-drew our route and when that was done, started talking a lot of nonsense and discussing about the things that were happening in our schools (more of the people to be honest) and about JC life. I really really like it that we are all now fairly comfortable with each other, and this was so unlike when we first met at Changi Airport and the awkward formal conversations we had on Whatsapp.
Yay group photo (-:
It was a tiring day with me running away from many Superman lookalikes to avoid the awkward situations (I don't even know why so many people were wearing the shirt, perhaps because Man of Steel is hitting cinemas today) But we managed to get things done and spending time with them is actually pretty fun - reminds me of our carefree days in Taiwan at the start of the year before all the work and responsibilities came crashing down on us. Plus, I laughed. A lot. And that's always nice.
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