Tourist Fun! And, work.

On Monday night, my friend Holly was briefly in town, so we decided to do some tourist things that I haven't gotten a chance to do yet.  Holly also has a Fulbright fellowship, to teach English in Macau.  Macau has a pretty strong Portuguese influence, since it was a Portuguese possession until 1999.  It's also know as the "Las Vegas of China", so all in all sounds like a pretty interesting place.

Our first stop was the Merlion Fountain at the Esplanade.  The Esplanade is a new concert hall that is right down on the bay.  The Esplanade is of course modeled after Singapore's favorite fruit, the durian:

 
The merlion is, just like it sounds, an animal with the head of a lion and the body/tail of a fish.  There are actually many merlion statues around Singapore, since it is the official symbol of the Singapore Tourism Board.  Apparently, the fish part represents Singapore's ancient name of Temasek, meaning "sea town" in Javanese, from back when Singapore was just a tiny fishing village.  The lion head represents new Singapore, as the Malaysia name, Singapura, means "Lion City".  We went to see the original statue:

According to wikipedia, although the statue is made of concrete, the skin is made from porcelain plates and the eyes are made from small red teacups.  To our great disappointment, when we arrived at the statue, all we could see was scaffolding set up around it - they were in the process of restoring it and we couldn't see anything!  Luckily, there was a smaller replica statue just next to it, so we at least got to look at that one.  From reading wikipedia just now, it turns out the that Merlion was struck by lightening in February of this year.  Maybe that was what the construction was all about?  Eight months seems like a long time for repairs though... 

After that, we headed to the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel.  The Singapore Sling was invented there in sometime before 1910, and a lot of people still go there to order an original Singapore Sling.  The Raffles Hotel is super classy and gives you the feeling that you are still back in the British Colonial era.  Here is the front of the hotel:

The inside is full of beautiful little tropical courtyards and patios and really makes me wish that I was some turn of the century British expat, lounging around in a hammock drinking a Singapore Sling while waiting for my dashing British explorer husband to come back from a tiger hunting expedition.

Here we are with our drinks:

And here is the informational handout they had about the drink:

	SINGAPORE SLING
	The Singapore Sling was created at Raffles Hotel at the turn-of-the-century by Hainanese-Chinese bartender, Mr. Ngiam Tong Boon.
	In the Hotel's museum, visitors may view the safe in which Mr. Ngiam locked away his precious recipe books, as well as the Sling recipe hastily jotted on a bar-chit in 1936 by a visitor to the Hotel who asked the waiter for it.
	Originally, the Singapore Sling was meant as a woman's drink, hence the attractive pink colour. Today, it is very definately a drink enjoyed by all, without which any visit to Raffles Hotel is incomplete.
	Recipe 30ml Gin 15 ml Cherry Brandy 120 ml Pineapple Juice 15 ml Lime Juice 7.5 ml Cointreau 7.5 ml Dom Benedictine 10 ml Grenadine A Dash of Angostura Bitters Garnish with a slice of Pineapple and Cherry

Also, the Long Bar is one of those bars that gives you peanuts and lets you throw the shells on the floor.  I love bars that do that.

Another exciting thing that happened on Monday was that I finally met the professor I am working for, Dr. Tim White.  He is an Australian who was working here for some time and then moved back to Australia this summer, right before I arrived.  This is actually OK since I mostly work with the grad students anyways, but it was good to finally meet him.  He seemed happy with the progress that I have made, and had a couple good suggestions for solving the problems that we are still having.  That said, I really hope those suggestions work because I'm getting really frustrated with a very simple problem that I am having.  Basically, I'm making this iron oxide compound, but to make it I need to use a chemical called oleic acid (which is exactly how the name makes it sound - really oily).  However, once I've done the reaction, I need to wash the oleic acid away so that I can have a clean product.  As it turns out, this is really hard to do.  So, I've spent the last month just making samples of this stuff and trying different washing techniques and solvents to try to get the sample absolutely clean, but none of them have been entirely successful yet.  I've got one new method that I'm trying this week, and I'm pretty optimistic about this one.  The frustration is actually good, it's been motivating me to work really hard so that I can finally get this done and move on to something more exciting. 

Now I am off to work on completing my Halloween costume.  I'll put pictures up when I'm finished, but I'm pretty confident that it's going to be awesome!