It’s time to finish my journey of 40,000 kilometers. I forgot to put a summary of Philippines to the last text, but I have to say it was one of the most interesting countries I’ve been to, where I definitely will return some day! People were reaaaalllyy friendly and the whole atmosphere was much less touristic or materialistic like for example in Thailand. I put below a few pics from our last plast that we stayed in Philippines, Talisay.
The local taxis - straight from the horror movies!
AAAWWWWWWW where are my thongs when I need them?!?
Singapore, in turn, was a totally another world. It was like stepping inside this one big facility, where everything was authorized by rules and penalties. For example, there was a penalty of 500SGD (around 275 euros) for eating in the subway. Obviously this released my inner rebel during our time there and somehow I felt necesary to broke the rules every now and then with some pretty hardcore stunts, like for example CHEWING GUM or DRINKING ICETEA IN THE SUBWAY STATION. Crazy stuff which made me almost shit in my pants, but then I remembered the penlties for it so I gathered myself.
On the positive side, everything functioned there like clockwork. The transportation worked like clockwork and everything seemed perfectly planned out for effectiveness. Even though Singapore is one of the most developped countries in Asia (besides Japan, Korea (and Hong Kong), there are still some great differences to the western world. That said, in my opinion Singapore represents best the Asian culture in the sense of authoritiveness and punctuality, without ignoring the importance of religion.
Every minute of me walking there in the clean streets of Singapore made me think that how would these people survive without rules guiding them in every matter. A little roundtrip through - for example - the central America could do wonders to them or just be the worst experience ever. Buhahaha.. I'm just laughing out loud while thinking of the case. But it wouldn't work the other way around. All the latinos would end up in jail within the first 24 hours.
Like in all of the Asian countries, religion was also a pretty funny phenomenon. Before saying any more I'd like to emphasize that the following text are only my thoughts about the buddhism that covers only 33% of the Singaporean population (Chinatown area). Compared to for example our religion in Finland, the local religion in Singapore a) plays a much bigger role, and b) is overly materialistic. To get a good life and a place in heaven, the rule was simple: The more you paid for the buddhas and the more you owned the beautiful statues of different buddhas, the better person you were and the closer to getting to heaven. For example, every single one of the 100,000 buddha statues were "on sale" so that they could be dedicated to you, of course for a prize. A dedication of a single buddha could be as high as 25,000 SGD, which converts to over 13,000 euros.
One thing that Singapore is also really famous for, is food. Singapore has a reputation of being the world's food capital. I couldn't agree more. There was food stores, food courts, little snack stalls and restaurants in literally everywhere, and they offered the biggest variety of food served in even more different ways. Even though I didn't always want to where the food was really from, it tasted almost invariably really delicious. Food was one of the things that I really missed when I came back to to Mexico.
We arrived to Singapore in our second attempt at around noon at the New Year’s Eve. The day wasn’t exactly the best of our trip, because it was raining like mad and I was feeling sick and sleeping pretty much the whole afternoon. I pretty much stayed in our hotelroom, which was probably one of the cheapest in the neighborhood, 30e/night. We still had a bit time to roam the local shops and restaurants, here's a few pics of that.
Meat... GRAAAAHH
Typical scene from a market
In the night I was feeling already better and finally rose from my wet bed (because of sweat!) at 9pm. We were going to meet Jette’s friends in a really nice club with a masquerade theme for the New Year’s Eve. Jette bought me this:
After making people laugh with my awesome mask we left to see the firework show just before midnight. It sure didn’t disappoint us. We among other 20,000 people saw millions of Singaporean dollars blown into air every minute for a total 10 minutes in the nicest firework show I’ve ever seen. It was also the crowdiest, it took us 30 minutes to get to the first taxi stop and another hour to drive us the 3 km distance home.
On the next day I still wasn’t feeling perfect, but we still decided to head out to skirt in the streets of Chinatown and Little India. Chinatown didn’t differ too much from the night-market scene in Hongkong, but Little India offered many new smells – which all weren’t necessarily good – and the absence of women in the streets. We visited a temple in Chinatown and went eat to Little India. Here's a few pics of that.
Sri Mariamman Temple - Chinatown
Incences in Sri Mariamman temple
One of the various statues inside Sri Mariamman temple
Kitchen knife art in Chinatown
Man eating in Little India. I was really lucky to capture the only female in the streets
On the second day of the rabbit's yearwe went to Marina Bay to see the mascot of Singapore - The Merliot Lion. We were also planning to go up to the Marina Sands Bay to the rooftop pool, but since it was only for hotel guests and only taking the ride up to the viewpoint would have costed around 15 euros/ person, we decided to skip it.
The Merliot Lion
Marina Sands Bay
View from Marina Bay
Next morning we moved to Jette's house to Commonwealth where she continues her studies for another semester. After moving the stuff we headed to eat the famous Singaporean chilicrab with her schoolmates and watched a freakishly weird movie afterwards.
Our next day was our last. We went to the Singapore national park do hang out. In the night we went to G-Max, which is kind of a human slingshot in Clark Quay, an popular place with a lot of nightclubs. The G-Max was SUPERBLY fun, thanks Jette for the present!
The next night was about saying goodbyes and preparing for my trip back to Mexico. My flight to Kuala Lumpur and onwards to Los Angeles and Guadalajara left the next morning at around 11 am and the leaving ambience wasn't obviously the best I've had. Everything has to come to its end sometime. The last three weeks had been again one of the best in my life, thank you Jette for your company and everything!
Hotel Fullerton at night
Clark Quay - The white towers of G-Max can be seen in the backround
Cya, soulmate!My trips didn't quite end here! I had still planned to travel in Central America for another three weeks with my dutch friend. To see how I survired to write this text, come back to read the next chapters of the blog! Thanks guys for reading, I hope you made it all the way to the end. A little sneak peak from my adventures from this on can be read at the beginning of the first chapter of this trip (Sorry my English readers, I decided to write it in Finnish!).
Cheers,
Kalle
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