Peter Goes to Asia

Colin's taking a nap so I'm trying my hand at this new-fangled blogging thing since, hey, everyone's all picture deprived. I took off right after exams to visit Colin and we wandered Asia together. We went to Malaysia on December 16th, made our way to Kuala Lumpur, flew from KL to Chiang Mai in Thailand, took a boat to Luang Prabang in Laos, made our way down (and up...and down...and up...and down) winding mountain roads to Phonsevan and Vientiane, crossed the border back into Thailand, took a train to Bangkok and flew back to Singapore on the 5th of January. Three weeks went by really quickly, and we saw only a small part of even the places we went to--let along the rest. We didn't even make it to Vietnam, since time refused to slow down. Nonetheless it was a lot of fun and--exciting though winter in Edmonton is--it's nice to get away.

We took a lot of pictures, way too many to put in a single blog post. So let's start with our first days together in Singapore. I left Edmonton the morning of December 12 and arrived in Singapore the evening of December 13 (my clothes, of course, took until the very early morning of the 15th to arrive).

The runway in Edmonton--the last time I saw snow:

My flight from Edmonton actually left late. There was fog in San Francisco and so the little budget plane from Edmonton got to wait for the bigger planes to land. Fortunately my pilot was belligerent and argued his way up in the priority list. I spent all of about 15 minutes in San Fran running across the airport. My next stop was Tokyo, where I had about a 45 minute break. To me, the first-time traveller, the Tokyo airport was awesome. I spent my time walking around wide-mouthed and touristy at all the neat things to see (the payphones are so different! the bathrooms are so clean! et cetera). Finally though I was on my way to Singapore.

My flight got in quite late, so this is the morning after at Colin's residence at NUS. It's a nice campus, and we got to wander a bit of it as Colin had to go fight the evil registrar. Some things are universal, and evil university bureaucracy is one of them.

Palm trees really exist!

We set off that evening to see the town. Singapore is very clean and modern--almost pathologically so. Some pictures from downtown as we set off to find some eats:

That's me enjoying chendal, a Singapore dessert that Colin has come to enjoy a great deal. It's not bad, but I don't quite share Colin's love of it:

We then went to see the merlion, one of Singapore's kookiest landmarks. The lion city, surrounded by water, is represented by this bizarre fish-lion-water-spewing thing. I'm not remotely sure what to make of it.

And, being touristy, we visited Raffles Hotel to eat peanuts and get ourselves Singapore Slung:
Since we were going to head off travelling, Colin opened his Christmas presents on the 15th, which made him (insufferably) chipper. Fortunately he's cute:

Awesome cookies from Colin's grandma, which (well, the ones we didn't eat right away) sustained us through Malaysia. Since she wasn't there to be thanked, Colin thanked the cookie tins instead:

We also put our tourist hats on and visited Orchard Road. Think Whyte Avenue on steroids and you've gotten about halfway to Orchard. It's glitzy, ritzy and filled with nought but the finest shopping experiences--obviously it's Colin's favourite spot in Singapore. At least it's shiny.

Being cheap, though, we didn't actually eat or shop on Orchard. Fortunately cheap food was nearby, and we concluded our brief first days in Singapore in typical Peter-and-Colin fashion, eating.

We set off for Malaysia the next morning. We (meaning Colin, I hope) will post more pictures soon.