Haw Par Villa and Orchard

Last Thursday I and Hallvard decided to take a break from the studies so we decided to go sightseeing here in Singapore. Our first stop in the heat and high humidity was Haw Par Villa, a closed down amusement park that is kept as a park/museum. What makes Haw Par Villa special today is it's numerous statues and the slightly grotesque nature of several of them.

Most of the more unsettling statues we found early in when we walked through the so called "Ten Gates of Hell" where people where judged and punished (if necessary) at the end of their lives, of course the righteous and good did not get punished but the focus was on the sinners who had to pass through the different Gates of Hell depending on their crimes and sins.

The focus was mainly on dismembering or disemboweling the sinners in different ways, below is one example of the punishments.

At the end of their torture they would drink a tea which would make them forget their past lives and let them be reborn in ignorant bliss.

But Stare-goat knows that there are less frightening statues as well!

All photos taken in a professional photographer stance of course!

After Haw Par Villa we went in to Orchard Road, Singapores no. 1 shopping district. Orchard Road is supposed to have a really amazing Christmas lights, unfortunately we where there during the day so we never really got to experience them.

In the evening we went for a Norwegian/Swedish Christmas-smorgasbord that ANSA (Association for Norwegian Students Abroad) in Singapore had arranged. Don't have any pictures from the evening, but it was a really nice evening with both good company and good food!

Live long and prosper!

Garfielding

Singapore is going into Christmas mode now. Jurong Point, the shopping mall that I go through every day, is now filled with Christmas decorations and Christmas music. And they have another theme embedded as well; Garfield although I don't what his connection to Christmas is. But who greets me every morning if not the cat himself!

But I think they forgot Jon when they gathered the Garfield family!

Just nailed my Chinese exam which is my fourth of five exams this semester. When I was sitting writing the last part of the exam, a dialogue with Chinese characters, one of the Chinese-teachers suddenly stops and says "That's really good! You haven't studied Chinese before?". I couldn't stop thinking about how weird and random it was but it felt like the exam went really well. Hen hao!

Last week I went to town and applied for an Indian visa and today I went collected it down in Bugis, so now I can spend six months in India if I want to!

Going there last week I realized how little of downtown Singapore that I've actually seen so now, when I have nine days until my next exam, I'm going into the city tomorrow with Hallvard!

But let's finish off with a food picture!

Stories of Home

Just came back from the cinema and The Adventures of Tintin, a nice movie but it was a bit boring when I in one of the initial scenes suddenly started to recognize the story and then remembered most of the plot. Cool movie anyway and pretty cool animations! But wouldn't it almost be cooler with a Spirou movie animated similarly?

Had kung-fu training this morning and Shifu wished to see some pictures from Sweden so I thought I could make a blogpost for my non-Swedish readers to see what Sweden looks like!

So this might be what some people think Sweden looks like and the last two winters it has looked like this outside. The picture is taken on my way home from the university in Linköping.

But Sweden is not just cold, after winter there is always spring and there is always that one special day when it suddenly gets warm enough for all scents to suddenly appear, coming from the cold and scentless winter you know that spring is here and the world will once again come to life and the ground suddenly bursts out with flowers.

It then slowly keeps getting warmer and sometime in May-June the more optimistic Swedes, like myself, start announcing that summer has arrived (this occurs about the same time as the temperature reaches 20 C). It's time for shorts and short sleeves!

The more hardened also starting bathing in the lakes at the beginning of the summer, it's a bit cold at times but very refreshing and it kind of feels like this:

But in general summer in Sweden is green, lush and very peaceful. Of course we have the occasional rain (or frequent rain as most people probably would call it).

Then in September it starts to get cold again, autumn comes with colorful leaves, rain and wind. Haven't found any good pictures displaying it but then it's probably also my least favorite season. So fast forwarding to November when the first snow often falls and then comes December with Christmas decorations,short, dark days and (hopefully) snow. And then comes the most important day of the year: my birthday! Okay, Christmas, but since my birthday is the 23 December it's rather close to being it.

And if you're lucky it's this white outside on Christmas Eve. Below is my sister posing in front of my parents house, and yes, Scandinavian women are hardcore enough to go in skirt when it's -10 C outside. Must be what's left from the Viking-women genes!

 Thought I could top this off with an old picture I found of me and my family. Miss you guys! But we'll see each other in just over a month!

Live long and prosper!

Examperiod!

Had the semester's last lecture today, one week until first exam and then then I have a pretty intense period of 4 exams, free just over a week and then the 2nd December I have number theory and then I leave for India!

I've been thinking about how my courses are going to get accredited since my classical mechanics and solid state physics are from 2nd year. I think the content of the classical mechanics is okay but I wonder if it's going to count as advanced points (which I need a certain number of) and my solids course only covers half the content of the corresponding one in Linköping, I can probably just take the more advanced solid state physics next semester but I feel that it's not just that interesting at the moment. I'd rather take more pure physics courses but we will see how I will solve it. And should I take the level 2 Chinese? Not sure, the level 1 is pretty fun but, as all language courses, it takes up a lot of focus since you have to work with often (although not for long most of the time). Hmmmm! Below is at the lunch after our last Chinese class with some of the classmates (tongxue) from the Chinese.

I also learned today that I'm going to be co-author of the paper we're going to present from our current research, feel a little bad about it though since I'm not going to be here in December when the others are talking about doing a more intense period, of course I can do some work when I'm away as well but it's not the same. One funny thing I managed to contribute with is using spectral analysis, which I learned from our signal processing courses in Linköping, to analyze the entanglement entropy dynamics of the systems we are working with, so I've contributed with something at least!

Thinking about how to bring everything around on my trip I've come to the conclusion that my Samsonite probably will be a bit clumsy so I probably need to buy a proper backpack. Anyone has any suggestions on what to get? I assume they don't have the same assortment down here so what brands are good and so on?

Haven't done that much proper photographing lately, gotta' get shootin' you know! It's a bit boring with all current pictures only being from the smartphone but I'm going to improve!

But let's finish with a picture of some Yong Tau Foo (it's like food stalls where you make your own soup by picking ingredients)

Au revoir!

Nimen hao!

After filming this Monday, putting it together yesterday and finalizing it this morning our Chinese oral project is finally ready! Unfortunately we didn't insert any subtitles but for those of you who doesn't speak Chinese it is mostly about studies, family, where we live, telephone numbers, cars and a strong passion for Star Wars. Enjoy!

 

The deadline for the project was today and we also had a quiz today: listening comprehension which went really, really (beyond bad) bad but it's only like 5-10 % of the final grade and I have higher hopes for the final exam. 

It's the last week of lectures and tutorials and next week our three week exam period starts, we also have a QMII group project and I have a bunch of tutorials tomorrow but after that it's just revising left! Feels pretty good!

I've booked tickets for December now! India in for the first weeks and then the 19th December I will be back in Pålsboda and Sweden for Christmas and New Year! I haven't booked the tickets back to Singapore yet but I'm waiting for reply about whether I'm going to be accepted to the IAS-CERN school which is being held in January.

Zaijien!

Om nom nom

 

Okay, so I know you guys home in Sweden are wondering a lot about what I actually eat down here. So for starters, I always eat out now a days because it costs about the same as making my own breakfast at home. But this is also due to the fact that we don't have a real kitchen at the hostel but only a fridge (and also a toaster and a water boiler now) so you're pretty limited in what you can do and then breakfast at home get's more expensive. For example: one liter of yogurt costs around 6 SGD which is over 30 SEK!

So now I usually go to school and get my breakfast at one of the canteens, usually the vegetarian place at Canteen B where I can practice my Chinese with the shop owner! So a usual breakfast can look something like this:

It consists of egg noodles with some sliced cabbage, a piece of tofu and two eggs. I accidentally started eating before taking the picture so the very deliciously fried and not so healthy curry puff (a kind of pirogi filled with boiled potato and curry) isn't shown in the picture but they usually look something like this:

Even though unhealthy they are really good, especially in the morning when they are fresh, crispy and warm. But don't worry, it's not something I eat every day! This morning I also topped off with some fruit afterwards.

Then we have lunch! I usually eat lunch at Canteen B as well but I try to vary myself since they have a pretty good assortment of food stalls there. One of the places I keep coming back to though is the Indian cuisine which is really good. Yesterday's lunch looked like this:

The Indian food has a lot of good stews both with and without meat, so this is a couple of vegetable stews, scrambled eggs with vegetables (or more like a chopped up omelet), mutton stew, some roti prata (which is fried bread, the Indians can make really good bread, naan is another favorite although Canteen B does not have the best naan). And then you always get a small bowl of curry when you buy bread. This is one of my more expensive lunches: 4.20 SGD which is about 23 SEK.

And then dinner can vary even more! This is not one of my common dinners (since it was the first time I tried it), I bumped into Annina and Hallvard at the canteen and they where looking for the place which sold something called steamboats. Eventually Annina found it and she and I got a set each. A steamboat looks something like this:

You get a bunch of raw food that you cook yourself in a small pot filled with bouillon, and the pot is being heated by a small but pretty wild burner. It was a bit "expensive" (being canteen food) at 6 SGD and maybe not the best tasting you can find but it was certainly one of the most exciting dishes I've eaten and you did get quite a lot of food (and a lot less hair on your hand due to the flames).

So that's a sneak peek into what I eat here in Singapore, I will try to post more pictures of what I eat in the future since the food is one of Singapore's real highlights.

So time for dinner perhaps?

Rapportive

Just handed in my last personal QMII assignment, it had some pretty confusing parts but think I got a decent answer in the end. The topic was eigenfunctions of hydrogen isotopes and then it was a lot about Bessel functions.

Tonight I have my first proper Wushu training session in almost two weeks since I was a bit under the weather last week, still have a mild cough but I don't think it will be a problem. The training sessions are usually not that intensive physically but they can be mentally with a lot of information and new things to learn.

Found a cool plug-in for Gmail today: Rapportive, or rather for the programs you use to open Gmail. It uses your different social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+) to look up information on the persons (and companies by retrieving information from their webpage) in the mail your currently have open and displays it on the right where there usually are ads instead. So if you're comfortable with everything connecting and like this kind of information streams then you should definitely check it out.

Yesterday I visited the Centris to discuss and plan the trip to India me, Hallvard and Per are planning to take in the beginning of December. We name-dropped some places of interest like New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Goa and Agra (the city where Taj Mahal is located), checked some travel advise and tried to find cheap flights. The cheap flights part is probably the most boring of them all, it would be so easy if you could just pick your flight from the one that seems best and most convenient without having to care about the price but hey, life would be pretty boring if everything was easy and you we're economically independent!

Anyway! When I got there Lina had just started baking cinnamon buns so when we started to feel ready (or rather, when the buns started to get ready) we put away the planning and sat down and ate some buns instead! Hallvard also made some Swedish coffee that he had brought with him from his trip home a few weeks ago. So coffee and cinnamon buns, can it get more Swedish? Well, it probably can in a ton of weird embarrassing dressed-up singing-children-songs kind of ways. But the buns were really good so thank you so much Lina!

The semester is starting to wrap up now, this week we have something called "e-learning" where all lectures are supposed to be done online and so on, it doesn't really seem to be the best concept but anyway you get calmer period before the start of the exam period in two weeks. Also, most lecturers usually put the less important topics now, the ones that might be interesting but aren't that important for the rest of the course.

Live long and prosper!