slow train to tokyo

after a few days spent luxuriating in the ryokans, it was time to move on to the city. tokyo will always have a special place in my heart, and i've nothing but happy memories of my time there.

oh! hang on! there is one distressing (read: cringe-inducing) memory that my darling siblings never fail to remind me of. if you know them and successfully bribe them, you just might get the full story but otherwise i'm afraid i'm not about to kiss and tell. suffice to say, i've thankfully managed to 'reclaim' tokyo and restore my long-term love affair with the city.

stayed as long after check-out as we could, then made the 5h trek to tokyo on the slowest possible train. reached asakusa after dusk and my muscle memory kicked in as i navigated us to ginza. well, it wasn't so hard, really. ginza line to ginza then hibiya line to hibiya. all in a day's work ;)

it's such a cliche and i feel a little over-indulged for saying this but i love ginza. always have and always will. everything i could possibly want from tokyo is within that tiny area. and everything else, like fresh fresh fish, is a 10minute walk towards tsukiji.

this, incidentally, is also the last post on mysterymeatballs because i've run out of photo storage space. undeterred, the swede life is moving here with the rest of the tokyo posts. please move with me? :) it's been a good run but to quote dorothy, 'toto, something tells me we're not in stockholm anymore...'

teaser

the japanese have some really quirky habits, and i'd ordinarily be a wee bit apprehensive of what would tease them. but here's the hot spring at sanraku, and more photos to come :)

as with the other travelogues, do check back for a daily peek into japan for the next three weeks or so! this travelogue will be running for some time yet.

the drama pre-down under

so true to form, as i get to the check-in counter at changi airport, the clerk hits a speed bump.

turns out our travel agent was right. and i am indeed an overstayer and illegal immigrant.

the immigration muppet who let me out of australia almost 10 years ago failed to update the system. while i'd gotten an exit stamp, it was not reflected in the records and i became a statistic, one of the millions who entered the country and never left.

no amount of explanation would get me through, despite having a passport circa 2007 that was almost filled with stamps. i was faulted for not having a photocopy of my old passport. um, how'd i have known i was a immigration law flouting alien??? it was really quite ridiculous.

thankfully, i managed to talk my way through to the australian customs officer and over the phone we located my brother in their system who had entered and left australia the same time as i had, and with that piece of the puzzle solved, they must have retroactively registered my exit. some 10 years later, no less!

so much drama, so little time.

it didn't help that we got to the airport mere minutes before the check-in closed. most definitely not for the faint hearted!

will have daily posts on perth every morning for the next four days. stay tuned :)

taken literally

as one of my more witty friends quipped, "i love how your bar course = actual courses of food in actual bars / assorted dining establishments."

am increasingly enamoured with this 5 month interim between college and practice, where the responsibilities are light and the work is easy. it, very sadly, concludes an 18 month holiday that began last april after 3rd year finals. there were 3 months of inter-year 'summer' vacation, 6 monthson exchange in stockholm, a cruise-y final semester, 2 months of graduation trippin' and now the post-grad prep. course. so this exchange/travel blog of mine has been well-tended to. but for now, a brief hiatus since i'm back from PD.

next up: perth in a month (swedish reunion, woot woot!) then kuching, sarawak the month after. fingers crossed, another trip to the middle east in november and, possibly, pangkor laut during my study break. we'll see where the wind blows!

till then, thank you for your indulgence and so kindly being bothered with me and my travelogue.

saigon day 5

can't remember what this' called but i had so much of it, even when i wasn't hungry. oh the joys of excess and holiday binging :)

and then it was back home for good, or at least till wanderlust next gets the better of me!

thanks for being part of the journey.

edit: stay tuned for the hong kong post, and review of waku ghin (tetsuya-san's restaurant at marina bay sands)

saigon

while in aix, J (not to be confused with my host, J) made an interesting long-distance proposition.

"come to saigon."

"who what when where how"

"me, Y and our girlfriends."

"you're crazy."

"haiyah. you talk talk talk about your great SEA adventure. come la..."

"with not one but two couples???"

"friend friend. won't be weird, i promise."

"of course it won't be weird for you. you'll be too loved up to care even if it was."

"ok ok up to you.. don't say i bo jio."

*mumble grumble*

so there i was, sitting cross-legged on the futon in J's room, frantically trying to get access to a visa card to book my air tickets online. i very much liked how my eurotrip was dovetailing into a week in saigon :) the best way to get over prospective holiday hangover is to go on another right after! i must admit, continuing to suspend reality is one of my specialities. never mind that i'd been to saigon twice already (and wasn't particularly enamoured by the city), and to hoi ann earlier this year. was going purely for the company, and with the vague desire of acquiring a taste for vietnamese cuisine. anyhoos, i got around the double couple / 5th wheel problem by booking myself into a single in the same hotel. everybody had their space, everybody happy. also, J and Y are my oldest and dearest friends from school so if there was anyone i wouldn't be ostracised by, it'd be them.

was scheduled to arrive in singapore on the 17th, hang around for the weekend then on the 21st it was all systems go to ho chi minh!

for those in the know

am resuming have resumed posting at the reserve.
the travelogue continues here but swing by for what i've been up to back home!

the travelogue in motion

finally got organised and have written a daily post, albeit retrospectively, of my graduation eurotrip. the posts have been scheduled for 8:05am (GMT+8) every morning and there are 38 posts for europe in total. so if you check back daily, there'll be a fresh story. there's no fixed format, a photo or two and some reflection. if you'd like to know more (eg where did you find this?!) do leave a comment, it'll be nice to hear from you too.

currently in saigon with some friends for the week but the eurotrip travelogue has begun this morning and will continue to run for the next 5+ weeks. will be posting about saigon too once i've gathered my thoughts and am sufficiently decompressed. for now, i'm kicking back and finally letting my guard down. it's so good to be with my oldest and dearest friends from college, to be sheep-like and contentedly follow their lead. it's such a relief not to be solely responsible for my well-being, like i was in europe. they're great company and i'm grateful for the opportunity to prolong the self-indulgence and hedonism, this time in my own backyard.

(pushcart next to my hotel)

a holiday from the holiday

safely back home on 17th june at 0640h with 12h to spare before my grandfather's 88th birthday celebration that night. given a choice, i'd rather have stayed in europe till graduation day but sometimes i do things out of fear of later regret. plus, there's my grandmother's 84th on the 27th which i didn't want to miss either.

that said, it's been a crazy-packed 4 days back home and i feel like i need a holiday from the holiday. so i'm off to ho chi minh city for the week.

as this was intended as a travel blog, i do have a little project in the pipelines. it's shaping up to be a daily travelogue, albeit retrospectively and in 'real time'. so expect a post or two a day, detailing each day of the graduation trip. and maybe the saigon sojourn after, if the eurotrip writes well.

check back soon! and stay tuned :)

pre-holiday rush

edit: yay to xtra large photos!

test test. trying to see how big the picture can go!

streamlining my life

begins with a massive clean-up of my room.

it isn't even 4 years worth of junk but more like 14.

and hopefully after i've mercilessly tossed everything tomorrow, it'll look like something worthy of mention on http://mnmlist.com/

incidentally, the first thing i did was to unearth 8 volumes of diaries and decimate them. and then i went to town and furtively scattered the paper fragments in random bins.

the christmas crazy

house for tea after christmas lunch and before christmas dinner - braving the equatorial humidity head on!

(random patrons)

veggie chips at gordon grill for boxing day lunch

boxing day is over and it's been a hectic yet restful christmas. we've settled into a decent routine over the years and there's always the turkey lunch at uncle M's on christmas day. we'd dinner plans too and on boxing day we'd the family lunch at our usual haunt. a mad mad rush to be on time and appease the gramps because i had to have my hair cut! but we made it in the nick of time. went to town for the first time since coming home and ohmyword i didn't recognise anything! am pleased with the spoils though :) he's truly indulgent, and for that i'm grateful.

well, seeing how i'm safely esconed in the family fold, i think it's time for a curtain call. it's no longer the swede life, i'm no longer fending for myself in the jungle that is scandinavia. thanks for sharing the experience, i've had fun posting. it's been a good run and i'm happy to end this chapter on a high note.

so, goodbye and happy trails!

(p/s back to the old blog - email me for an invite if you're interested!)

speed of light

T-2 weeks to moot court

T-3 weeks to home

so in the space of two weeks, i'm somehow supposed to churn out a 15page memorial. and because i've wrangled an early exam date, i also have my final the day after the moot court. and then i meet the family in switzerland.

and then i go home for good.

on hiatus

check back in two weeks :)

and all too soon

it's that time of the year again and i need to choose my modules for next semester. what a timely reminder of my imminent departure/return. thank you J for the heads up, i would have verily missed the deadline if you hadn't mentioned subject registration. quick consult with S and i selected my electives. it gets faster every time, probably because i've a very limited interest range and by elimination i've done most of the modules i'd have wanted to anyway. if it was entirely up to me, i'd have done another semester of free-wheeling hippy modules. fun, fluffy stuff that makes me look forward to attending class. but because i know where i'm going and have some idea of what work they do, it'd be irresponsible to spend the last of my formal education wallowing in self-indulgence. so, i seem to have morphed into one of those, the student who only chose practical modules, and i'm trying to strike a balance between studying what i want and what i should. no point learning about basket-weaving now and then feeling like a liability from the first day of work onwards.

really shouldn't be getting nostalgic about it but i can't believe i'm in my final semester. where did the time go??? and it's also taken me 7 semesters to figure out that 1. laptops are evil and should be used sparingly 2. i am extremely Consistent when it comes to take-home exams. so when choosing my modules this time round, i decided to be kind to myself and finally arrange for a 3day week - the mythical being that i'd heard much about but never had a personal encounter with. the downside is that i'll most probably have four exams, but that too was intentional, in reaction to my realisation of how i absolutely Cannot do a take-home, because i lack Confidence in my Capabilities. in a strange way, it's the first semester where i'm not in a tearing hurry to finish the exams and disappear on an adventure. am a little ashamed to admit that early exam dates played a big part in my prior elective selection. this time, however, i'm wanting to savour and stretch out the last of my days as an undergraduate and somehow revising for four exams while everyone else is out partying will definitely slow time down. that's the plan!

so here goes! and i'm hoping that the electronic gods will be benevolent and grant me my electives of choice.

oh and take that back re: 3day week. it didn't strike me earlier but welcome to my life in stockholm :) don't think i can put my system through the trauma of attending class more than thrice weekly. it'd be too much of a reverse-culture shock.

dear inner circle

there's something at the tip of my fingers for you ;)

get me out of stocks

so i exaggerate. it's hardly a bad place to be. enjoying the exchange lifestyle and sullen swedishrants aside, i'm really glad to be in stockholm for a few months.

but it's been over a month since i got here and that insatiatiable wanderlust has begun to bubble up yet again. just in time for a parental visit (them) and a desperate, "can we please go somewhere???" (me) so the parentals obliged. they're not too hot on stocks either so it didn't take much convincing. in fact, i even had to persuade them to spend a day here for me to show them around my adopted home. they were quite happy to in-and-out of arlanda!

so they get in bright and early tomorrow morning and we're off to bergen 2h later. going to the fjords and i take all credit for organising a norway*in*a*nutshell at a fraction of the price (thanks, turt!) then we're making our way from bergen back to oslo by train, bus and boat. they leave from arlanda (atas airport for real airlines) wednesday afternoon and i leave from skavsta (budget airport) wednesday night :) just enough time for me to do laundry and re-pack.

will be in lisbon and porto till the following tuesday, which also means that for the next fortnight or so, i don't have to cook :) words cannot express how delighted the prospect makes me.

the blogging hiatus begins! photos and posts when i get back.

bye!

p/s if you're bored and/or indulgent in my absence (oh how i presume), you might want to skim the archives. go on, knock yourself out.

little commie

wasted a perfectly lovely day queueing to join the students' union. union membership is compulsory and i cannot comprehend why i have to pay good money before i'm allowed to take my exam. shouldn't that be regulated by the university??? why subject me, innocent and unaware exchange student, to the horror that is union membership? ok maybe i'm exaggerating a little but i come from a place where unions are frowned upon and strictly regulated if they're even allowed. yes, i'm not in singers anymore and if i wanted to stay out of a union i should never have come to stocks. but the idea of forcing every hapless kid on exchange or otherwise and extorting sgd96 from them is daylight robbery. this would only be a beneficial relationship (for me) if i happen to get into some medical mishap and require rescuing. which is highly unlikely. plus it might not even be covered, ironically.

but my main grouse is that the instruction was to register between 9am-1pm. as with most other things in stocks, there's a machine dispensing queue numbers. i get there at 1030 and take queue number 294. they were serving number 70. if you do the math, assuming they began at 9, it took them 90minutes to see 70 people. there were 224 more before it reached my turn. if the union registration people worked at a constant rate, it'd take more than three hours till it was my turn (this has all the makings of a bad problem sum)

and. it. did.

so i did what i do best (hog the nearest comfortable seat and stone) which happened to be in the bookshop. found a cushioned armchair and got ready for the long haul. which would've been relatively uneventful if the union hadn't decided that lunch was sacred and some overgrown hippy woman announced that they'd stop work prompty at one (!!!) regardless of whether there were still people with queue numbers in the queue. this was after they switched off the ticket machine at noon, mind you. which's extremely unfair to people who came after because they were supposed to stay open till one and that's presumably refers to the silly queue ticket machine too, doesn't it?

but thankfully our protests got through and overgrown hippy was convinced to let those with queue numbers up to 300 register and the rest had to go by next monday. which worked for me because my number was 294 but not for the other 200-odd people with numbers >300. and then overgrown hippy started yelling at us and telling us that we were holding up the union workers who now had to work overtime because it was already 1330 and they hadn't had lunch yet. so, it's my fault for following their instructions to the T and patiently waiting over 3h to register as a member of a union that i wouldn't ordinarily want to be part of. thanks.

not a positive start to my little commie existence and definitely unimpressed by this union that cannot work through lunch.

on the plus side though, i did meet some cool greeks while waiting my turn. and two pakistanis. and one japanese girl. so it wasn't a complete waste of time because we managed to communicate and commiserate and register our similar displeasure.

.

in other news, i came back to this lovely little surprise on my landing and it stank to high heavens :(

moving!

hello hello last post till friday or later because i'm finally moving to my permanent accommodation no more pokey hotel yaY! the only problem is i'll only get internet in my room on friday at earliest so i won't be able to update fo awhile. met the other two singaporean girls at the housing office this morning turns out we're all staying at the sam place, albeit in different blocks. M, our male counterpart too but he's too cool for school and only arriving next week. in the meanwhile though i do have his keys and have half a mind to sublet his room to renumerate myself for my key-collecting services (M! i hope you're reading this!!!). but i kid :) and while i largely disagree with racial stereotypes, the three girls are doing the most singaporean thing possible later. once we've cleaned our respective rooms, we're meeting up to go to ikea to indulge in perfect solutions for living or solutions for perfect living i forget which but is fun to mock them swedes and their odd slogans.

and i found the university! huff puff huff puff 30min brisk walk from the hotel with my trusty googlemap annd then brisk walk back after collecting my keys. going to call a cab then head to my new home soon! foresee it being a busy few days settling in buying groceries and detergents etc. how exciting i get to play house :)

bye for now!

baggage

not unsurprisingly, i'm limited by the weight limit.

if i'd my way, i'd gleefully cart my few worldly possessions to stocks with me. i'd painstakingly pack my entire wardrobe, the few pairs of footwear i use and all my books into my spanking new trunk and arrive in sweden looking a little like a snail with its home on its back. i'd bring oodles and oodles of clothes and not have to repeat an outfit or wear the same article twice. i'd also have an endless supply of home food comforts because it turns out that each box of prima mix that i've been so kindly gifted with weighs a ton.

BUT i was too cheap to spring for a student ticket back in january when i booked the flight and the ticket i bought only allows me 20kg check-in luggage.

this 20kg is, however, grossly insufficient. to my horror, once i put in the library of lonely planet books (europe on a shoestring, sweden, stockholm) and the hodge podge of other guidebooks i've managed to amass pre-departure (paris, anyone?), my suitcase was pushing 12kg.

so in an attempt to score myself some extra baggage allowance, i've been advised by people in the know to make my way down to the airline office and lay on the charm.

wish me luck!

edit: YES! 10kg MORE!!!