Various Exciting Things

OK, so I realized that my lack of updates since I've been in Singapore puts me dangerously close to being on the list of people who start blogs and they're really interesting and then they give up 2 months later and never write anything again.  And those people annoy me, so I've resolved not to be one of them.  I think my trouble in updating my blog comes in several forms: being really busy with school, being really tired all the time because of this ridiculous tropical climate, and not doing huge amounts of touristy things because of the aforementioned business with school.  But,over the past few weeks I've done a lot of fun stuff, so here are some various exciting things that I've done.

I went to the Botanic Gardens in Singapore, which are really famous here and are the first place that people tell you to go when they learn you are a foreigner.  Most of the gardens were just very nice and tropical, but they had a few specialty gardens, the most exciting of which were the Orchid Garden and the Ginger Garden.  Orchids are really a big deal here and the gardeners at the Botanic Gardens spend a lot of money and time trying to create new hybrids with special qualities.  As a result, the orchids are really beautiful but really expensive (so don't touch!).  Here is the national orchid of Singapore, the Vanda Miss Joaquim, so named because it was discovered by Miss Agnes Joaquim in her backyard in 1893.

They also had a lot of orchids that were named after famous visitors and politicians to the Orchid Gardens.  Some were really random, and were named after people like the President of the Czech Republic in 1996 or something like that.  Here is the Nelson Mandela orchid:

 Another interesting garden was the Ginger Garden.  Apparently, ginger just looks like little sticks in the ground when it's growing (which is why I didn't feel compelled to take pictures).  I also learned that many plants are members of the ginger family, such as the banana tree.

Last weekend, I visited the Istana (meaning "palace" in Malay), the traditional home of the president.  The Istana is only open on public holidays and Sunday was Hari Raya Puasa, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.  The grounds themselves were very pretty (even though they were mostly a golf course) and parts of the actual palace was opened up but no pictures were allowed.  Inside it was quite ornate.  In one room, there was a display of official state gifts that had been given to Singapore from other countries.  Compared to all the other gifts, the ones from the U.S. looked pretty cheap!  Here is a picture of a statue of Queen Victoria that was a gift to Singapore:

Here's a sign that appears to be telling us not to pinch the fish.  My friend Clayton illustrates.

I talked about all the things that are outlawed and the ridiculous fines that go along with these offenses in one of my earlier entries.  In order to make the illegality of these offenses clear, there are lots of warning signs around Singapore.  Often, these signs don't contain text, only pictures (when you have four official languages, even short bits of text are cumbersome).  However, the pictures are sometimes quite confusing.  One example are the signs in the buses meant to illustrate "no spitting".  For several weeks after I got here, I thought that the person on the sign was throwing up, and assumed that throwing up on the bus was outlawed.  I got really concerned every time I got on the bus that I would all of a sudden become ill and throw up and be slapped with a ridiculous fine, until I figured out that the person was actually spitting instead.

A couple weeks ago, I went to the Asian Civilizations Museum, which is a museum that has exhibits about countries and cultures from all around Asia.  The museum had a good exhibit on the history of Singapore, which apparently involved a lot of opium smoking (and paraphernalia like these pipes):

Most of the museum, especially the portion on South Asia, made me feel like a total retard because it was about contries and cultures that I had never even heard of.  Very educational.  My favorite part of the museum was an exhibit on how the museum's collection came to be.  It talked about the adventurers and explorers employed by the museum in 19th and early 20th centuries to journey off on expeditions and live with native cultures and collect specimens.  Of course all the explorers were hearty British chaps with pith helmets; I like to imagine them using phrases like "Tally-ho" and "Bob's your uncle".  There were a lot of old-timey preseved animals, like these crocodiles (alligators?  I can never keep the two straight):

This is the only good picture I got because the guard came and told me I couldn't use flash, and my camera sucks without the flash.  What was really interesting was reading about the different explorers' methods for befriending and integrating themselves into the native cultures and the different way that they portrayed these cultures in their writings and reports.  In general, I thought this kind of meta-exhibit was a really neat idea because it's not something one normally thinks about when viewing objects in a museum.

The museum was located in downtown Singapore, so here's a bonus picture from the area.  The low buildings in this picture used to be used as warehouses and staging areas for goods about to be shipped.  They are called "godowns"; the origin of this word is debated.  Now, they mostly house trendy restaurants/bars/clubs and this area, Clarke Quay (pronounced "key" if you don't want to sound like a dumb American), is one of the trendy areas popular with tourists.

 
I think that's about it for now.  I'm putting my camera in my backpack in the hope that I will be motivated to take more pictures of my condo, my neighborhood, school, etc.  We'll see how that goes.