CNY market

Chinese New Year is getting closer and closer (feels like we have been waiting for this festivity forever... which is somehow true, considering that they started putting up CNY-decoration in late December).

One of the things that I like the most apart from the amazing traditional chinese music that they are playing EVERYWHERE at the moment (to which I always try to dance. An impossible task (for not even the locals can tell me how to do it) that usually ends with some very suspicious and creepy looking moves from my side in the middle any supermarket (by the way this is something that is much easier to achieve in Little India, were your body moves by itself to the catchy tunes. Just ask my embarassed friends!)) ... ok this sentence somehow got very long and confusing. Let's sum up: One of the things that I like the most apart from the amazing traditional chinese music (blablabla) are the sweets. I feel like there are hunderds of different types of sweets during this festive season and the bad thing is they only sell them in huge jars (that contain the same kind of sweet). So I either get fat, poor and diabetic or I won't be able to try them all... 

You can find sweets like these in the supermarkets or in little markets like this one:

(of course it's inside a mall, where else would it be?)

These are the jars I was talking about. This is the smallest size and it may not seem very big, but there are about 50 of the sweets inside and they tend to be not to healty (arthough really delicious, these ones are some peanut sweets and they are amazing!).

This is what these things actually look like. Nom, nom, nom...

Chinese Churro

On Friday I had dinner with some of my friends from work and I had the chance to try very cool asian dishes. I had a very delicious beef and fish porridge, but what caught my eye the most was this:

They call it fried dough and I could not find out where it comes from (although there is only one logical answer for this). You might not see anything special here unless you are spanish. Because this thing does not only look but also tastes EXACTLY like a churro. I am not kidding. Apparently what they do here is put small pieces into the porridge so that it gets softer and I have to say it is really good! 

Nevertheless growing up in a country where you dunk churros in molten chocolate made the experience of actually putting it into rice with fish and meat somehow strange...

Good ol' times!

There is an infinite number of malls here in Singapore and most of them are really new and facy. However now and then you can find some of the old ones that have not been renovated yet and they are quite unique as well. Let me show you:

As you can see there are no fancy lights or materials around here but it looks more interesting as well!

I am not sure what these guys were watching, but I found it funny that they would all stand there and just look at the monitors.

It is rare to find these malls and at places like Orchard road you will probably not come across one anymore. I must say I like both the new and the old ones. I notice I have not shown any pics of the super new ones, I shall do it some time!

Walking on thin ice

Today I finally went to the ice-rink that is in the midlle of the J-Cube Mall (I talked about it in one of my first posts). 

Uhhh those cheap plastic skates an only look fabulous on anyone!!! It was actually weird to skate with plastic boots, but unfortunately my skates are in Germany so I had to rent them. As you can see It was not really cold in the rink and people were even skating wearing nothing but a t-shirt. 

Ok, I know I look irresistible on this picture, but as little as I like it, it gives a good impression of how the rink is directly connected to the mall. The wall only goes halfway to the ceiling and is rather a protection for the hockey games than an isolation wall. So basically the rink is a the same temperature then the rest of the mall. What does that tell us about the air-conditioning in Singapore? Exactly. (I thought maybe it was not ice, but it felt and looked like real ice, so I am not sure how they managed to overcome the laws of physics here...). Good night!

Singapore Signs at Their Best 4

Yay! My favorite (and only) section of this blog! Get ready for the January edition of the best signs Singapore has to offer!

This is a poster in the MRT where they justify their work on the the railways. Although I am not a big fan of the spoiled girl in the comic I really like her expressions. Every single one of them is fantastic: the first one, where she is in love with the cake, then her way of jumping home after buying the awesome cake, the expression of shock on the MRT and finally her broken-hearted crying in the end. If all it takes to make this small girl happy is to change the entire rails of the Singaporean MRT, then who are we not to do it! 

WHAT?

(No, really. Can anyone tell me what they are trying to say on the sole of this high-hell shoe? ANYONE?!)

I found this sign especially amusing after having lived in the Studentenstadt for 3 years. There, we would buy our bikes intentionally old and ugly so noone would steal them because we had an average of a million stolen bikes a week (actual numbers). I am not kidding. Everyone there has had a bike stolen at some point. They even stole mine! They would have to put up one of these signs anouncing THREE stolen bikes every 45 minutes... And here they have had 3 stolen bikes IN A YEAR! Back in Munich this same sign would have been a sign of celebration. :D

Hahaha I really enjoy this one! What to do if your mobile phone falls into the rails? (After spending some time here I am pretty sure people would, indeed risk their lives to get their iPhone/Samsung back, so this sign was probably put up out of necessity... The end is not very clear, though. Apart from the angry look on the woman's face we cannot know whether the SMRT wants us to strip nacked and tie our clothes together in order to get our belongingss back or not. I mean, he is not eating or drinking, nor is he carrying any explosives or durians... Also the woman at the bottom seems pretty entertained and happy... I'll definitely keep this in mind if I ever drop anything

PS: This sing seems rather useless now, because all the stations I have been at so far have a glass barrier so there is no way you can either drop your phone or go down to the rails unless you manage to squeeze between the platform and the train when the doors are open...

I'll keep my eyes open for more of these! :) 

Marina Bay Sands Pool (almost)

One of my friends has this amazing pool on the top of his building with great views. It goes all along the condo so it is around 70 meters long and it ends directly at the edge of the building.

Going swimming is a great option if one of your friends has a pool. It's free, the weather is always right (unless it is raining apocaliptically) and you get to hang around with your pals and just relax. There is not much else to say about the pool, the views speak for themselves.

If this is not a good way of spending the Sunday afternoon, then I don't know what else is...

The Entertainment of a Retired SIngaporean

I have found a hobby for when I am retired. The other day I was walking back to work after lunch when I saw thos long poles with something hanging from them. Good thing I had my local friend with me who explained me what that was all about. 

No idea what those things are doing there? Well, apparently this is something found in the areas of old HDBs (those are the housing buildings offered by the government and most Singaporeans live in them) and it is a traditional activity among older people. Turns out they catch birds and put them into those cages (don't ask me how these old people manage to catch the birds, I was very surprised as well). "And what do they do then?" you might wonder. Well, they sit nearby and watch them. Really. That is what they do all day. Watch their birds:

Sometimes they also like to play chess, read the paper or just sit and listen to their birds. But as you can see it is very curious how all these old men are sitting or lying around not doing anything not even communicating with each other. Also the cagesr are pretty high so I am quite sure they can not really see them... I asked my friend why the cages were so high. He did not really know either. He just ansered "Because birds like to be high above the ground". It is a legintimate answer, yet 3 meters seem a bit ridiculous for a bird in my opinion...

The cages are super pretty, by the way. And the tiny water bowls inside are silver-colored so everything is pretty fancy. So much for the golden cage. 

I was really surprised of findind this piece of tradition so close to my super-modern working place. It gives a lot of inner peace... I should learn how to catch birds.

Around Singapore

I really need to start taking my camera with me again to take pictures of the city (it is such a crazy busy time at the moment!) because there are so many great things to see! Here are some consturctions that caught my eye these last weeks:

This is the entrance to an MRT station. Not bad, lah!

This is the Tanjong Pagar area. I love the palm trees everywhere!

This building is nothing super outstanding but I really like the letters of the sign. They make me feel like a gangster from the 30s. The digger in the front is especially pretty as well.

Hey! Look at the tall building in the ... wait a minute what is THAT? Yes, an UFO. Don't ask me how that can be a part of any building bit since that thing seemed pretty stationary to me during the last weeks I am assuming they are here in a peaceful mission...

Good night!

CNY at Chinatown

Turns out this Chinese New Year thin is pretty big here in Asia. The decoration is spreading all over Singapore, but the best, of course, can be found in Chinatown. I want to go with my camera there and take some pictures but here you have a few crappy ones to get a first impression. 

These paper pinnaples are very common and they can be really huge!

As you can see red and golden are the predominant colors everywhere!

You can never have enough chinese decoration. NEVER!

Erdinger Weissbräu

I dedicate this post to all my friends in Munich:

I don't think any more words are necessary.

Makar Sankranti

Today I went to Little India and was surprised to find a new decoration there (that was not dedicated to Chinese New Year). Apparently they are celebrating this festival called Makar Sankranti and the streets were filled with flowers and clay pots that were beautifully decorated. I apologize for the bad quality of the picture but it caught me by surprise and I only had my cellphone with me.

I'll let you know as soon as I find out more about this festivity! Good night!

Tapas bars, Tapas bars everywhere!

Singaporeans are crazy about tapas. I have honestly not seen that many tapas bars in one city very often and I come from Spain. Here is one that I really liked:

I don't recall the name of the place right now, but I know where I can find it in little india! It has a very nice terrace with beautiful furniture:

Haha, I liked this picture on the wall:

In case anyone should not know what I am talking about here is a Singaporean explanation of tapas. How bad can it be if it starts with "Is it what Dim Sum is to the Chinese and Sushi is to the Japanese"? 

Christmas? Not anymore!

At my workplace they removed the Christmas decoration on the 26th of December. The rest of Singapore followed within the next days and I soon understood why everyone was in such a hurry to get rid of everything. It was on the 1st of January when I saw the first decorations for CHINESE NEW YEAR. Just to give you an impression of how important this is over here, CNY starts on February 10th. They are worse than the westerners with the Christmas decoration!! Also I learned, that they celebrate this "new year" over the period of three days!! I have not had the chance to photograph many decorative elements yet, but you might get an idea just by looking at my local supermarket:

Don't get fooled by the snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, they yous indicate that that is the frozen section (winter was yesterday, people, now that is all over!). As you can see there are a lot of red ornaments as this is the tipical CNY color as well as gold. And don't think that the triangular boxes on the freezers are Christmas trees! They are CNY baskets! (Naturally)

Meanwhile they were playing chinese music in the background all of the time! :)

By the way, apparently even KitKat celebrates this occasion:

Looking forward to this festivity as well (although considering how much time there is left I may have to look forward for a while...). Good night!

StuSta made in Singapore

This weekend I visited what would be the equivalent of the Studentenstadt in Singapore. After living at the Stusta in Munich for three years I have to say this one is a little different (not to mention new, they are literally buiding it). Something tells me that this is probably a LITTLE cleaner than my old place (this is not a criticism I could not have been happier living among student rubbish and not caring at all about it for three years!!)

This lawn, for example, would be FULL of germans having barbacues. And full does not even begin to describe it... really.

As you can see everything is very new, the chairs are still in wrapping paper (might as well be some kind of permanent protection, but lets hope it's really only temporary...)

Buildings are pretty cool, although I have to say, the bunker-like appartments in the StuSta proved to be VERY practical for parties and other crazy events where this building would not have survived that well...

All in al it is very pretty and clean, which is something that I would not necessarily associate with students, but it seems to work here... :)

Cogsci Connects

Man those have been busy days for me! I spent most of the time at a conference (this one it was a serious one, not on the beach or anything...) about cognitive neuroscience that was really interesting!!

The speakers covered a broad spectrum of aspects within this field and I had the chance of meeting great cognition reserachers. This whole thing was organized by a 17 (yes, 17) year old girl, that somehow has already done everything in life (this includes singing in front of head of the states such as Obama, founding charity organization for indian children at 12 and doing an internship at the MIT). Suddenly my high-score on the solitary on my computer doesn't sound that cool anymore...

The conference included a concert on the first day:

To top it al off this whole thing was for free and neraby my working place. I am glad I had the opportunity to attend!

☾

We had an amazing full moon the other day!! It was really huge and looked pretty cool with the tall buildings:

On a side note this is me trying to spell my name with the moon:

And then just doing spirals after giving up that impossible task.

I am running out of pictures, so I better take some this weekend or I will have to prepare my excel sheets real soon... Good night!

P.S: I would like to thank my friend Stephane who sent me some of the pictures of NYE that I posted the last time (I forgot to do so in the last post!). Merci!

Happy New Year!

Happy New year everyone!

This is the first time that I celebrate New Years Eve outside of Europe and it was really amazing. This was my night:

I met some of my friends and we had dinner (very delicious chinese food (I am guessing here it was chinese...let's say asian to be on the safe side)). Since we did not want to spend a buckload of money on one night and our goal was to see the fireworks at Marina Bay we decided to go to Esplanade at Marina Bay and enjoy the free open-air live music.

The bands played some classics and it was fun to dance and sing along. The Marina Bay Sands was illuminated and so were the spheres floating on the water in front of it (I told you about them in some ealier post).

Here we have attention seeking Marina Bay Sands again. As if it was not ugly enough by itself it needs lights and lasers to make sure everybody has to look at it. Mind at all those people who can't stop watching in horror and disgust.

The skyline did not look very impressive either, as you can see...

We then somehow managed to sneak into an irish bar at Esplanade which was close to a miracle considering the immense crowd and the huge queues, and just as we got in a table got free so we even got a place to sit (at a time where people were not even allowed to go into Esplanade anymore because it was so full that the police had closed everything down). Next thing we know we got these awesome hats and masks from the Pub (they were handing them out to all customers - thumbs up, pub whose name we were not able to find out while we sat insinde because it is not written ANYWHERE!)

We had some serious trumpet fights going on with our neighbours from the other desk. Some patience the waitresses had...

Shortly before the countdown we found a cool spot to watch the fireworks and we prepared the grapes that I had been carrying around all evening. This is a spanish tradition that involves eating one grape with every of the 12 chimes at midnight. Since they don't do this here we had to improvise a bit, which means we ate two in advance and then ate the remaining 10 grapes during the countdown. The chimes in Spain are usually extra slow to keep the death-by-chocking rate as low as possible, which is something that cannot be said by the countdown in Singapore. Nevertheless we managed to eat the grapes at high speed so that is some good luck we are going to have in 2013.  

The fireworks were really AMAZING! They were huge, coordinated with music and lasted quite some time.

After the countdown we met the rest of our friends and we went to a club called the white rabbit:

It is a former church that has been transformed into a restaurant/bar (apparently I only go to buildings that have gone through this transformation...).  As you can imagine the place was pretty cool:

There was no entrance fee and the atmosphere was really nice (they had a great garden with a dancefloor). After they closed this place one of my friends and I decided to go to Boat Quay where we went to Home Club (where we stayed until it closed and we had to look for another club) and then to Asia One. After this we walked home (which is actually nice here in Singapore due to the comfortable temperature and the fact that one can walk around barefoot without having to be afraid of siringes or dog poop) and had some pasta before going to bed. Let's hope the rest of 2013 is as great as it has been so far!