This is not Jakarta
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007This IS Singapore. I stepped off my flight a bit early. I was enroute to Jakarta from Dubai and kept going over the scenario in my head. i arrive in Jakarta in a few hours and will be paying $60 for a 1 month visa. I will leave the airport and not be able to find a bus, train or taxi that will take me to the city center. People are leaving Jakarta right now. 350,000 people have been evacuated from their homes and there is a threat from diarrea and dysentary. I do not want dysentary. I spent some time at the airport in Dubai looking up the flood situation and things did not look good. The plee of my mom to really take a serious look at whether or not I should be there was helpful. She never told me not to go but she reminded me that I am good at making good decisions.
So now I sit in a 2 bedroom apartment in Singapore from the good will of an old friend of mine. I met Shawn through DJ’ing and the occasional… ok, regular, rave events back in 1999. He still DJs and I have since moved on to a different passion. He is working for EA Sports and was asked to move to Singapore for a job. Good thing he took it and good thing it was in Singapore becuase it gave me an escape route and a place to recover from a bit of jetlag. I arrived here 2 weeks earlier than I thought i would so I am going to leave and come back. I want to be here for Chinese New Year as well as a music festival. In the mean time I have to figure out what exactly I am doing. This is the first time during my trip that I don’t really have a plan. I can fly to the Philippenes or bus it to Malaysia. Or maybe try Indonesia again but fly to Bali instead of Jakarta. This freedom is actually kind of strange and I have found myself doing nothing today. Recovering yes but I can’t get over the overwhelming feeling of laziness.
Indonesia will have to wait. I am not prepared to pay the airfare it will take to go now and I missed my chance by getting off in Singapore. So, I guess all those Indonesia postcards I had up in my cubicle at work will have to go back up.
Singapore is an interesting city. I probably say that about everywhere I go and I may actually not mean it fully in this case. It is spotlessly clean and is dubbed the “Finest City in the World” That is a bit of a joke seeing as though you can be “fined” for just about anything here. Litering? Thats a fine. Try bringing drugs into the country? You will recieve the ultimate punishment of death. Spit? Thats a hefty fine. Chew gum? Nope, gum has been banned from the entire country. However; no open container laws. You can drink anywhere you want in the city at any time. Albeit, beer costs, at its cheapest, a hefty $6 for a bottle. Life traveling in Singapore is not nice for the budget traveler even though I am enjoying my time here. It only took me 12 hours in Asia to hit up my first karaoke bar. This wasn’t like at home. There is no crowd to sing in front of so you book a private room and you get served drinks and food while you sing your heart away in the privacy of you and your friends. It was Shawn, his girlfriend, her friend and myself and believe me we sang! After several hours of karaoke and at about 5am we decided to head to a club called Balcony to watch the Super Bowl. We ended up being about 2 hours early which was not good because we were all extremely tired. We ordered Mc Donald’s breakfast delivered on a motorcycle to the club. There were only a handful of people there. Right before the game started we decided it would be better to head back to his apartment and watch it instead. That was a bad idea because after the opening kick off for a touchdown by Devin Hester we both fell asleep. I woke up to the image of Tony Dungy hugging Peyton Manning and was satisfied enough to know the outcome and passed out again.
I am most likely going to head into Malaysia tomorrow. Crossing over should only take an hour or so and then I’ll probably make my way to Kuala Lumpur. I don’t expect the reader to believe anything I say anymore after I promised volcanos and beaches in Indonesia.
I have put all my photos on his computer so check back in a day for all my photos to be uploaded to my FLICKR account.
Joey