More pictures

Singapore's Port, River tour, thats the Durian

Way cool Donut Shop

Silat Demonstration

Singapore 1

Hey folks,

I guess it’s about time for an email. So if you haven’t realized by now, I am no longer in South America, I am now in Southeast Asia, on a little bitty island, that is also a city, and a country called Singapore. Welcome all Chile friends to my update list by the way, tell me if you have a different email address. I hope you somewhat enjoy these things.

I never wrote an email update about our trip to Buenos Aires and Colonia, Uruguay. To sum up the trip as quickly as I can: Buenos Aires is a marvelous city, and Colonia’s colonial elegance and small cobblestone-paved town feeling along with big stone walls, bridges and cannons was an awesome summer experience, apart from the horrible bout of food poisoning.

Yeah so now I’m in 1st world Asia. Singapore is a lovely country. It reminds me a lot of Honolulu. The freeways are all magnificently landscaped, everything is super tropical, giant Plumeria trees, palm trees, mosquitos, everything.

I actually arrived the night of new years, and headed off to Kuala Lumpur on the third, so I will tell you a little about that. The bus ride to Kuala Lumpur from Singapore is only about 6 hours including stops. We stayed in a 5 star hotel (not my personal choice, I prefer cheap hostels), but its ok, we got a really good deal. We did the whole tourist thing, seeing temples, the Kuala Lumpur Petrano Towers (tallest twin towers in the world), shopping for cheap knock-off hand bags, and visiting the Batu Caves, which was definitely the best part of our trip.

The Batu Caves are these giant caves just outside of Kuala Lumpur, which have been converted into Hindu holy sites. We saw the temples, and also took a tour of the Dark Cave. There were tons of monkeys running around, as well as tons of bats in the cave. I got to feed a monkey a banana. He just grabbed it out of my hand.

Ok so fast-forward to Singapore. Singapore is an interesting place. It’s basically a conglomerate of 4 different cultures, (mostly Chinese, which is awesome since I will be here for Chinese New Years!), ok Chinese, Malay, Indian and British. Singaporeans are really proud of their country. Everyone knows about the really strict government rules, like how you can’t chew gum, and how you can’t bring a Durian (really smelly fruit) onto the MRT, but you often don’t here about some of the cool stuff the government does, like making it really easy to own a house. Something like 80% of the flats built in Singapore are government sponsored/associated, sorry I don’t know details. 70 something percent of Singaporeans own their own houses. Singapore is also very clean, I would say more so than San Diego for sure. The first week, we toured lots of Singapore, and the island Sentosa with our EAP group. We went to Kampong Glam, the Malay town, saw a demonstration of Silat (Malaysian form of Martial Arts), toured Little India (I got to try on a sarong (worn traditionally by Malaysian and Indonesian women), and another girl got to try on a sari. We also took a boat tour of the Singapore River, ate at an Indonesian place, where I tried Stingray. It tastes like fish sticks, but with a grittier texture. Ok so I’m skipping a lot of things we did, there are too many to list. Um we also went to the Night Safari at the Singapore Zoo, which was way awesome. I’ve never been that close to animals before, and seen them so active. There is also a Bat grove in the zoo, so you walk around and all these Bats fly over your head. There we also saw a demonstration of Indonesian fire dancers. They seemed to do something very close to the tinicling (Filipino dance with bamboo sticks, hard to explain). It might have been the same thing, I don’t know.

Yesterday we went to Sentosa Island. We took the sky chairs to the island (which is way cool because you go over ocean), and lugged down the hill. We got some free time at the beach, and me and my friend Nicole decided to go swimming even though we didn’t bring swimsuits, but its ok, it was so hot out, we dried off fast. We saw a technically awesome but sadly corny night show, complete with giant fire balls, water effects and holograms.

So Singapore is incredibly hot, and sweaty and the thunder/lighting/rain storms are incredibly huge and scary and very frequent. I’m starting classes this week, and they all seem very challenging. I have Chinese class tomorrow. Ok that’s about all. I don’t think I’ll get to go on as many excursions as I did in Chile, but we will see. I really miss you all. I pray everyone is doing well. I’m still trying to figure out my address, so I’ll get that to you soon. Um that’s all. OK bye bye.
God Bless,

Kiana