TCV: The Coolest Vacation
For Spring Recess, I am embarking on
The
Coolest
Vacation:
Thailand,
Cambodia, and
Vietnam. We leave for Thailand on Friday morning and will spend three days in Bangkok. In Thailand, our entire group of 9 will be together. We will split into half, where Michele, Jeff, Sascha, Rachel and I will then take a bus and speedboat to Sianookville, Cambodia. After three days on the beaches there, we will take another bus to Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. We should arrive Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning meet up with Jeremey, Julio, Jen and Alicia. Rachel is going to leave The Coolest Vacation, while we carry on to Vietnam. We'll arrive Friday afternoon and be there until Sunday!
The map above shows you South East Asia, incase you want to track where exactly I'm traveling. India and the Indian Ocean is to the left, China to the right and up. Singapore is that beautiful pink dot. The light pink is Malaysia and Indonesia, where I have already been, and the dark pink in my spring break trip.
CNY Home Visit
To celebrate the second day of Chinese New Year, the International Student Center set up a home visit for Michele and me.
Alez (left) and his parents (back row; center, right) welcomed us to their home to share a traditional meal for the new year! The family is from Hong Kong, and they moved to Singapore 10 years ago. Their apartment was beautiful, with 2 bedrooms, a computer room, living room, and dining room.
When we first arrived, we were offered tea and got to talk to Alez about the traditions. We gave his mom the mandarin oranges that we brough, although technically we bought the wrong ones.
When we sat down for dinner, we began by tossing raw fish salad, yusheng. The higher you toss the salad, the more luck you will have in the new year. The salad, although nothing like salad in the US, contained a lot of veggies so I figured I could eat around the fish. Yet, as we were eating, Alez told us that along with the pink pieces of fish there were also thin strips of jellyfish that resembled the bean sprouts. I struggled to swallow the bite in my mouth, and then decided that was enough salad for me.
The rest of the dishes were then brough out, and somehow throughout the afternoon I managed to eat delicious shrip and peapods, and then pig intestine and liver. This by far fills my adventurous quota for the semester.
After our meal, we sat down in the living room for dessert and talked about the education system in S'pore, traveling around Southeast Asia, and our life in the US. This afternoon was really one of the best times I've had here, because I learned so much about life and culture. It also makes me wish I had the opportunity to do a homestay, because they were all so welcoming and loving. I think Alez is going to take us around the island a bit more in the future, and he offered to cook us dinner in the hall one night!
Tomorrow is our last day off for the new year, and then I have 2 days of classes before spring recess! I cannot believe how quickly time is passing!
Gong Xi Fa Cai!
Happy New Year!!
It is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays, and today begins the year of the pig.
On the days before the New Year celebration, families begin a thorough cleaning process known as 'spring cleaning'. It is believed the cleaning the house sweeps away bad luck of the preceding year and makes the homes ready for good luck.
A reunion dinner is then held on New Year's Eve where members of
the family get together for celebration. The festivities are usually held in the home of the most senior member of the family. The rest of the week is spent visiting the houses of families and friends. All guests bring two mandarin oranges as an offering of prosperity.
We headed to Chinatown around 7 and arrived by 8:30 and were starving! After getting a little lost in the crowd, we lucked out and got a table near the food stalls. Michele and I shared a fruit salad dish and spring rolls, and later enjoyed coke floats and chocolate covered strawberries. Let's just say I was in heaven.
Michele, Alicia, Rachel and I shopped all evening, and were able to get great deals on traditional Chinese gifts, desserts and candies. The streets were very crowded
though, and it made getting around very difficult. I feel like I had a taste of Time Square here in Chinatown, and as fun as it was I don't know that I would particpate every year!
At midnight we were able to see fireworks, and we headed back to NTU around 2. Michele and I went to be early, although our friends stayed up through the next morning to bring extra prosperity to their lives.
Tanjung Pinang, Indonesia
Last weekend I traveled to Tanjung Pinang, the capital of the Bintan Islands in Indonesia. We took a 2 hour ferry from Singapore, and stayed in a cute hotel just steps away from the dock. Michele and I had our own room with AC, cable, and a non-western bathroom (read squatting to go to the bathroom and "flushing" by filling a bucket with water and pouring it down a hole.)
Indonesia uses Rupiah for currency, where 1 American dollar equals 9,075 Rupiah. So, pretty much, I was nearly a millionare for the weekend. I am not sure what the logic in using such a system was, since I had 100 Rupiah coins, but, that's how hit worked. Everything was very inexpensive, with liter bottles of water costing 33 cents and bags of candy at about 60.
On the trip was Michele and me, Jen, Alicia, Jeremy, Sascha, and our our friend Galen. Because
Tanjung Pinang is less developed and we were unsure of American sentiments, we stayed close for dinner. Although things were very inexpensive, choosing what to eat was hard since no one there spoke English and last I checked my Indonesian isn't too great. I honestly just picked a random number off the menu and hoped it would be edible, and to my great surprise it was. I ended up getting rice which was very spicy, but also good.
It must be a staple in Indonesian food, because it was served many times throughout the weekend. I also had a really nice glass of mango juice, freshly squeezed. Mmm. After dinner we just stayed in our hotel for the night, playing cards and chatting. It was really nice to just have an in night with everyone curled up on the boys bed.
The next morning we got up for breakfast, which was more rice, and a NEW food and possible staple in my diet. We had toast with kaya, a green jam made from coconut milk, pandan leaves, and sugar. I don't really know what to compare it to, but its sweet and very good. During breakfast we talked to Bobby, our tour guide facilitator, who informed us that we forgot to change our watches when arriving and it was actually an hour later than what we thought. Oops.
We took a boat out on the Snake River and visited a bunch of islands and temples all day on Saturday. It was really hot with very little shade, but thankfully we were all dressed pretty conservatively so avoided bad sunburns. After the tour we all got massages and then went
shopping. Even the boys! We were all very happy!
We stayed around our hotel again Saturday night, and left Indonesia around 1 the next afternoon. It was a short, but really nice weekend for our group!
NEWater
These bottles of water seem nice enough. Pretty labels, compact size. Cute name too! Pass me one, ok? That was pretty much my response to the case of water available to us on our cultural tour of Singapore our first week here. I enjoyed my bottled water in the heat, and didn't think too much more about it.
Until today.
NEWater is the product of Singapore's water-treatment system, and it is wastewater that has been purified through advanced synthetic membranes and reverse osmosis. Yes, that is what I just said. That refreshing bottle of NEWater and much of the tap water I'm drinking isn't gurgling from a mountain spring in Maine. Most recently, it was rushing from a toilet.
For decades, Singapore has been dependant on Malaysia and other nations for water. With NEWater, though, Singapore will not have to renew its 1961 Water Agreement when it expires in 2011, and by 2061, when the 1962 Agreement expires, the nation will be totally self-sufficient.
Now, I've been assured that it is completely safe and clean by the time it reaches my glass. NEWater meets all the drinking-water standards specified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization, so I guess it won't be hurting me too much any time soon. But, I don't really want to think about it again either.
Freedom of the Press
On the first day of my first class at Ithaca, my professor handed us a copy of the First Amendment and told us to memorize it.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
We always talk about the media being the Forth Estate and a check on the government in our country, but I never truly realized the privilege and the importance of journalistic freedom.
The media in Singapore is highly regulated. Censorship of local news is common, Internet access is regulated, and ownership of satellite dishes is not allowed. Singapore's Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, has criticized international media for trying to impose "their norms and their standards" on the small island. In July of 2006, he justified the government's control over journalism when he said Asian countries who got “the best financial results were those whose
media was less aggressive."
I guess what startled me the most was
this article in the AsiaWeek.com. The article quotes Says Eddie Kuo, the then dean of Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University, my university here.
According to Kuo, "There is this perception that we are so handcuffed that we cannot do a professional job. But look at our domestic coverage and decide whether or not we have been hiding vital information. Have we banished diversity of opinion on domestic politics?"
The prime minister in 2000, when this article was published, also defended the government's polilcy on journalism. Goh Chok Tong said, "Watchdog, meaning that they can investigate every matter, espousing views and setting their own agenda, I would not agree with that."
To think that students studying journalism here are taught that government censorship of the media is acceptable is just so different than everything I have been taught. I understand it is the law here, and all that people really know, but this nation is very developed in so many other ways. In my Media in America class we have discussed that there is freedom of the press in the US, but no one seems to feel the need to push for it.
Don't get me wrong, I am not big into political reporting myself right now. But to think that I couldn't here, that I could be fined or jailed just for publishing online (blogging this?) is a lot to wrap my mind around.
For Spring Recess, I am embarking on The Coolest Vacation: Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. We leave for Thailand on Friday morning and will spend three days in Bangkok. In Thailand, our entire group of 9 will be together. We will split into half, where Michele, Jeff, Sascha, Rachel and I will then take a bus and speedboat to Sianookville, Cambodia. After three days on the beaches there, we will take another bus to Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. We should arrive Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning meet up with Jeremey, Julio, Jen and Alicia. Rachel is going to leave The Coolest Vacation, while we carry on to Vietnam. We'll arrive Friday afternoon and be there until Sunday!
