We stand at half-mast today to commemmorate a Juurokucha bottle that I had bought back in Sapporo and had been reusing as one of my daily water bottles. I had planned to bring it all the way back to Canada with me (I have quite the incidental collection of Juurokucha bottles with slightly different labels). Alas, because I had been alternating bottles with a couple of airplane mineral water bottles and letting each bottle “rest” and air out on alternate days, the cleaning lady came into my room while I was gone today (she seems to do this once every 3 days here at my residence, which is fine), and, mistaking it as trash even though it was standing over at the mini-kitchen counter, tossed the bottle away. Not a big deal in the long run, but a tragic end to an innocent PET bottle nonetheless.

The other point of order I have is what to do with the rest of my trip. I’m definitely going to China, but the prices are still rather high right now. Originally I was going to stay until the 21st, but the plane tickets out here to anywhere in Japan/China/Hong Kong/Taiwan have been terrible until early next week. Staying until early/mid next week would allow me to secure a better ticket out. And well, at this point the weekend tickets are even more pricey anyway since they’re just 1-2 days away now and I still haven’t bought them. This way I can also go eat more and explore more of my homeland while here. The Chinese New Year celebrations, while interesting, also kind of put a dent in touristy things since so many places and restaurants were closed. Although who am I kidding anyway, all I do is visit malls and walk around neighbourhoods!

I’ve talked to my hotel who will let me extend my stay up until the 26th in my current room if I want to (but I have yet to go lock it in, so this could change), and my Singapore visitor’s pass is good until late March so that’s completely fine since I have no intention of staying that long anyway. The plane ticket is the one I need to align with my potentially extended hotel stay, and I should do that by the end of today (Feb 20 as of time of writing) if possible.

There’s another minor piece here to consider, and that’s that I do want to ship back some of my paper via boat as well as it gets heavy. I believe this will probably cost about $200 SGD/CAD but it’s definitely worth it to declutter myself before I head on to China and then probably a bit of Japan again, as the extra luggage weight fees when booking airline tickets are also heavy in a different sort of way. I’ll need to look into Singapore Post and its Speedpost Economy International, to see if I can have that delivered in a couple of months. I’ve never had to do this before so it will be an interesting experience.

Anyway, as for the events of the day itself, this will be a relatively short blog because a lot of my time today was split between two group outings, where much fun was had but not much tends to get reported on this blog. The first meeting of the day took place around lunch, down by Guoco Tower at Tanjong Pagar MRT Station. We couldn’t find where to meet each other at first, as the area was fairly large, so I spent some time watching some chickens until everyone else found me.

Four of us met up there — Zixiang, Huihan, Yiwen, and I. While we were ordering our lunches, Antonia also joined us. She was smart and had ordered her lunch from one of the stalls while on the way to join us, instead of waiting to order it in-person like the rest of us (except Yiwen, who had already eaten). This was because it turned out that the lack of in-person queues at the food stalls beneath Guoco Tower, where we chose to ate at, was deceptive as they all had lots of online orders too, and even though Zixiang, Huihan, and I all ordered from different stores, all our meals took over 20 minutes to be ready.

Mine was some Hor Fun from a store called Han’s, and it was okay. Just okay. And definitely not worth the $11 I paid for it.

But the company and the conversation definitely was, and we hung out for two hours here, chatting up a storm and just goofing off in general.

But soon enough everyone had to head back to work, and we all went our own separate ways.

It was raining again at this point, but that was fine by me since I was right by the train station anyway. I had also been in touch with Kezheng from Rosyth, who had been instrumental in reuniting our GEP cohort into the WhatsApp group recently, and we had arranged to meet up somewhere further east along the train line. He had suggested Paya Lebar (5 stations east of the central cluster) at first, but I had indicated that I was willing to go further east since I lived centrally and liked the entire Tampines (11 east) area anyway, and it turned out that Eastpoint, by Simei Station (10 east), was the most convenient location for him since he could get there without driving at all, so that’s where we picked instead!

We met up at the entrance to the mall there, although we walked by each other at first since we had not seen each other for so long. We had both already had lunch so this was more of a tea break thing, and we went to order some ice tea and curry puffs from a Toast Box restaurant in the mall, and then sat down to chat for another couple of hours.

This was a much more personal chat since it was a 1 on 1 meetup, and we chatted about life, our parents, our adventures, the changes in Singapore over the years (especially the rise of wild, free-range chickens everywhere), and more. It’s been so striking to me how so many people from our GEP cohort had gone overseas for study or work, though many of them eventually returned, and he was no different.

He also championed and suggested using a note-taking app called Obsidian over Microsoft OneNote, once I mentioned wanting to eventually move away from the latte, and I’m noting this down so I can go back and look at it once I’m back in Canada. He also is apparently a big plane fan and has a blog with a few plane-related stories recently written out, located here.

And although our classmate relationship predates Tigey, I convinced him to hold the little mudbag for a picture anyway.

I even followed him around the local Fairprice afterwards as he did some shopping, and we parted ways after that as he lugged his loot back on home.

From here, I took some time canvassing the rest of Eastpoint mall for brochures and interesting shops:

Before heading a couple stops further east on the train line myself, to Pasir Ris (12 east), skipping over Tampines which I’d already been to this trip. Kezheng had mentioned that a second mall that I’d seen to be under construction my last trip here had now actually opened, Pasir Ris Mall, so I wanted to go check it out. But on the way in, I saw that the flagship REIT mall in the area, White Sands, had an embedded public library in it, and I wanted to go check that out first before it closed.

The library itself was neat. It was located up on the fourth floor of the mall, and was large and spacious and even had nice (but either dirty or fogged up from the rain) windows to look down at the peons below through.

However, I was looking for the book exchange area like they had in the Toa Payoh library, and this one had none of that, so I was sad. They did have this board though, which reminded me of the scribble board outside of my University of Alberta‘s main library, so I catalogued the answers here too:

On the back of the board were some “official” sample answers:

But what do you mean bento boxes are a fictional food?????

After also spending an hour or two raiding this mall, I crossed over to the other mall, Pasir Ris Mall, which entailed walking along a looping covered walkway around the outside of the train station while rain poured outside. For some reason the “direct” route from the train station to the mall was still blocked off by construction. It turned out at this mall wasn’t terribly big, with two overground levels and two underground ones, with the latter two mostly filled with restaurants.

There were also these weird escalators I found in a corner of the mall leading down from the second floor, to a 1.5 floor, and then down to the ground floor.

I guess they didn’t know what else to do with that space. We were in the early evening by this point, so I tried some of the food in the mall too. There were multiple food courts in the mall, and I made the big mistake of not checking Google Review before I selected a stall called KL Jalan Alor Food Stall, in a food court called Malaysia Boleh. I had jumped on this because they sold Fried Hokkien Mee, my favourite dish. But their food cost $7, took 24 minutes to cook, and amounted to a mediocre, tasteless portion that took me 4 minutes to consume.

I was so angry at this that I gave them a 1-star review, and then did something I had never done before, I crossed back over to the other mall, and had second dinner there too! This time I picked a Chicken Rice stall manned by two Malay guys. Food was practically instant, cheaper, and tastier to boot!

After my meals and a bit more wandering, I headed home. As a footnote, now that the first couple days of Chinese New Year are over, I figured I should look out for some cheap snacks and try to eat some of that as well while I’m here. I started off with some Japanese almond cookies and some “Ding Dong Xiang Crabstick” while I was at the local Fairprice supermarket just outside my lodging.

It’s fine, I barely eat breakfast half the time anyway. I also finally purchased a small, portable umbrella from a store called Turtle’s. It has a cat motif on it, but doesn’t seem to be as wide (nor the ends as sloped downwards) as I like, however it does only take up a very small pawprint in my bag, which I definitely do like.