Back from Peru

After a long jaunt in the land of espanol and alpaccas, i'm back in chicago where it's

1. cold
2. expensive
3. home.

But of course i return with grand stories of Peru, where I saw lots of interesting things and interesting people and eating loads of good food. There are way too many stories to tell, so let's break it up into little bite sized chunks......starting with the food.

Peruvian food differs greatly depending on which part of the country you're in, but i always found something to love. For starters, the desserts were really amazing.




And quite cheap too, most of the meals we ate were sub US$10. That green creme brulee (made from coca leaves, of cocaine fame) cost around US$3. The white mousse is made from lucuma, which is a sort of tropical fruit which tastes a bit like a blander passionfruit.

The main courses too were pretty unique, and were either of new hitherto untasted animals, or existing ones in new combinations with different herbs and spices.



Chicken curry with pineapples and other sweet fruit. Very curious. Very nice.



Lobster soup!!!!! Enough said.

But wait! what's that in the other dish behind the lobster? hmm. None other than one of the typical peruvian foods:



Guinea pig.




Nice and fluffy, run around the kitchen eating greens, taste good when roasted in a sort of fatty chicken with a skin resembling pork sort of way. If you get over the guilt.

If you get over the guilt of that, there's of course always alpacca.



Nice and fluffy, hair makes good coats, tastes good with garlic and supposedly quite healthy. Alpacca is to beef what Ostrich is to chicken.



And then of course...



naaaaaah. never.

uno jugo de papaya con leche, gracias

I can't find the greater than less than signs on the keyboard!!! which is really irritating, so you guys can link yourselves manually to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisco_sour

which is basically a vodka lime, only zestier. Now yours for a US$3 pittance with the aid of exchange rates.

No i'm not turning into an alcoholic, and my trip in Peru is quite healthy. Really!

Still no photos. THis time around i remember to bring my SD card reader and my SD card to the shop, but the com doesn{t have a working USB drive. Not fated.

greetings from peru!

I´m currently backpacking around Peru and posting from a computer in a restaurant in Nasca, home to the world-famous Nasca Lines (¿never heard of them? shame on you!). Most unfortunately my camera is spoilt and i have no photos. =( The shutter won´tn close so all my photos come out super horribly overexposed. Managed to get lots of nice photos of kids and random photos from the road before that though. But the pain! A holiday with so few photos! Thank Goodness for Adela´s cam that we´re now toting around for photos, although memory conservation has become an issue.

Mail will be checked every few days, and hopefully next time i´ll pop by with a SD card reader and upload some photos that i already have.

Merry Christmas to all!

Social Psych Cont'd

In a tongue-in-cheek experiment i just thought up, i'm going to try and write a program to analyse chunks of text and calculate the ratio of words like "I" and "me" to sentences, as well as the ratio of words like "us" and "we".

Thus written, I can see if 1 year of immersion in individualistic american culture has done anything to influence my (online) psyche. Wonder if there'll be a statistically significant effect or if there's too much noise in the different sort of sentences in diff styled posts i have....

Social Psych

When someone "loves you for a long, long time," explained the wise, old Skin Horse to the Velveteen Rabbit,

"not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It dosn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Where am I?

It's snowing again, and this time the temp is low enough to maintain the snow covered everything.

So. Pictures from parts of campus you rarely see:



A cup of milo for the first person to guess where it is!

And in other news, ze russian squirrel mob erases a stray dog. But this time there were human witnesses. They must be getting sloppy.

Read the story on BBC news (thanks aya)

Giving Thanks

For the 2 lovely housemates of mine, together with whom a great party was planned and a great feast was created.





For the multitudes of friends for whom the feast was for in the first place, and who helped out with contributions of chicken wings, cheese (with parsley), pecan pies, absolutely amazing cakes, much chocolatety heaven, and of course copious amounts of good quality social lubricant.



And for the beautiful house which i'm living in now, which despite all its teething problems, is an utterly amazing place to live.

HP and the GOF

Well so yesterday a whole bunch of HP fans and semi-fans headed off to watch HP-GOF on the opening day (what other day is there to watch?) and being the Singaporeans we were, we were of course the first in the line into the cinema.

Movie itself was quite spectacular, opening effects were awing, and they managed to carry the main plot of the book across in 157 minutes with some cuts (the book is fat!!) and still insert a little bit of fanservice fodder for all the shippers. Loved the mood of the movie, loved the sets and the effects, and I seriously can't wait for the last book to come out now.

Lost

So last night we decided to watch the first 8 episodes of lost over at the Windermere household, with their awesome TV and sound system. Jeremy cooked up a mean pasta, and we settled in for 4 hours of intriguing characterization and suspense. To those concerned: yes i'm finally watching lost.

Love the language they use, and the philosophies and themes behind the show. The whole premise is kinda survivor meets Lord of the Flies, and you just wonder when the power dynamics will break down and everyone will start killing each other with the various sharp pointy things they have.

End result: can't wait for the next DVD on friday courtesy of Netflix.

Lucca's in Lincoln Park

Dinner today:

Lucca's
2834 N. Southport Ave., Chicago, (773) 477-2565.
(closed monday)

Decided to be a bit more adventurous and we wandered over to Lincoln Park with Christian, and after a 30+ minute drive (slight jam on I-90, it's saturday evening after all) managed to find our way to Lucca's, a Mediterranean/Italianish place nestled in a residential neighbourhood (we thought we took a wrong turn, mapquest led us down a street or two of quiet houses). This humble establishment has absolutely wonderful service, the waiter zipped by 2 seconds after i closed my menu to take our orders, and another 2 seconds after we took the last piece of bread from the basket, it was taken away and brought back, filled, with alarming rapidity. Cool stuff.

The bread itself was nice and warm, and served with olive oil with a bit of grated parmesan and pepper in it, which is the first time i've ever tried that combination, but it tastes REALLY good.

Lucca's serves a combination of seafood, pastas and regular meat/steak dishes. The 4 of us shared half a dozen escargots ($8), which were richly flavored with oil and herbs (no cheese though) and quite delectable. I had a halibut for an entree ($20):



Unfortunately once again i was too eager to dig into the dish, so the fish is half-demolished and the bed of spinach looks like the bed of someone who woke up at 9:35 for a 9:30 Social Psych class.

The fish itself wasn't spectacularly fresh (although it was pretty good by inland Chicago standards) but it was served in a garlicky sauce on a bed of spinach which I think was the highlight of the dish. Sort of like the sauce they serve at chinese wedding dinners for the steamed grouper, only more complex with various undertones i couldn't identify (random herbs?) which just made me wanna drink up all the sauce right there and then.

Loved it very much, but that's possibly partly due to the whole fish-deprivation since i've gotten to Chicago, I do believe that's the first fresh-ish fish/seafood i've had in 7 weeks. My two housemates probably thought similarly: they got a tilapia (a bit too salty) and a mahi mahi (which i thought was really nice and firm).

Funky fish species aside, this restaurant provides a nice relaxed atmosphere with very efficient service and good food, albeit slightly on the pricier side. An interesting place to visit if you want a change.

Patch's hierarchy of home needs

with apologies to maslow.

So you have a house. Start with the basic needs:
1. Exclusion (usually in the form of keys and a lockable door)
2. Electricity
3. Water
4. An Internet Connection (of course!)

Then you move on to slightly less essential items:
1. Furniture
2. Heating (well you -could- just go around the house all day in a jacket)
3. Cooking ability (gas!!) and a stocked fridge

And even higher up now:
1. Appliances
2. Cutlery for abovementioned cooking ability

Finally:
1. Decor (in the budget-sensitive case: posters!)

Today i put up posters in my room.

it's fall alright...

The sign reads:
No Parking
Fire Lane
Violators
towed at
owner's risk.

toilet wall graffiti

U of C toilet walls are full of random graffiti which come in various poetic and philosophical flavors. Today's choice pick:

"Immortality would suck."

and a bit further down:

"so would a colonoscopy."

deep.

The continuing saga of the infrastructure of the house

It's been a good couple of days, we've finally moved in to the most gorgeous place in hyde park. The SBC guy came too, and he was all patient and friendly and we chatted about lousy contractoring and switchboards and wiring and he was all nice and didn't charge me a single cent for hooking up the phoneline. I paid him a couple of compliments and gifted polite niceness upon him.

So now i have internet.

But for some reason the gas company doesn't see to want to hook up my home with gas. This probably involves something like 2 minutes of work turning a valve in the basement, but over the course of 6 weeks, they have absolutely refused to do so. First the internet system refuses to believe that my address exists, then the callcentre (mired behind a regular minefield of electronic answering systems) finally lets us make an appointment after being on hold for longer than the gestation period of a small mammal (thank you wanyun).

I wait on the fated day for their call, they come, they go. no news at all.

I call and raise hell, but the machine bears it all with the patience of a disembodied voice who'll be there for all eternity. I make another appointment, and i tell them to call me 30 minutes before they get here so i can prepare for them.

I wait for their call. they come, they go. I pop down to run an errand, and on the way back see this note on my door saying "sorry, but we missed you." and goes on to inform me of how they need access to the place to turn the gas on. Like, what the heck. I bet they're running low on funds so they're hiring small kids to go around on their bikes and stealthily stick these green sorry notes on all the doors they're supposed to go to.

And so we still have no gas supply in our apartment, and the next scheduled date is next monday. So one more week of not cooking our own food. So we went out and bought lots of microwave dinners. Brian would be proud of us!

Daylight Savings

So for that one magical day in the year, you realise that your day has 25 hours. This is what you've been waiting for. The dream of many, to have more time in a day for no extra cost! (until a few months later anyway, sorta like a no downpayment purchase of furniture)

So what do you do?

Sleep an hour longer.

What else would you do with the time anyway?

Pride before the fall

A blazing red tree outside of Cobb, stark against the remaining green leaves. It's fall again. Somehow i don't take half as many photos as last year though, a more jaded approach to life? Or simply because i don't feel the incessant need to chronicle everything anymore, even though beauty still abounds where i look.

Step back and take time to smell the roses? Certainly. Especially when i still have no permanent house and thus no internet. grr.

more pictures

From jap curry version 1.

House brand:


Plus ingredients equals:


Yay for manually imported food packs!

Ginseng Root Beer

Seen in the Div school coffeeshop:



Only 75 cents! Doesn't taste very much of ginseng though. Think root beer with a little bit of a herbal aftertaste. Supposedly it had 200mg of ginseng in it. 200mg of ginseng water, more like.

In other news due to forseen circumstances our move in date has been delayed, and thus so has my date of proper return to the internet. Somehow i should be more irked by that than i am. I hope i can extend my current lease, else it's gonna be living room dwelling for a week.

New move in date: Oct 26th.

internet!

So i just spent 40 minutes on the phone today talking to this SBC representative trying to sign up for a phone line + ADSL. Had to do this coz the online form refused to acknowledge that my house existed. So phone call.

Whereupon she tried to pimp everything to me in super subversive and cunning methods.

"do you want your phone number to be listed on our directories?"
"no."
"ok. do you want to automatically bar 1900 numbers?"
"wait, go back, is an unlisted phone number free?"
"no it's $2.99 a month."
"i'll take the listed number then."

eventually after some wheedling and mild dispute over the concept of "cheapest plan", i manage to get a super ultra basic plan for $29.95 with a phone and internet. but boy is it exhausting to weave through a minefield of hidden costs for 40 minutes.

And in other news, Jacq came down from Madison to visit, although it was kinda a cop out coz i didn't really have much time since i was away shopping and spending lotsa money. Still, i hope she had fun, and yes, i did spend a lot of money. But a gap long-sleeved Tshirt for $6.50? and a 7 piece knife set for $15? woooo.

Oh so i'll get my net up and running (hopefully) on the 20th of October. They will mail my equipment over, thus saving me the $200 setup charge that a technician will cost.


I need to work as a technician.

random photo

Ikea hangers, they descend from the heavens and multiply in boxes when people aren't looking. no wonder they can sell them for so cheap.

Saying nothing at all

The rain is falling on Chicago now, which means a few things:

1. it has suddenly become @#$*ing bitingly cold
2. our car is being washed for free!

It's truly turning to fall now, the day before yesterday it was like 90 degrees farenheit [(90 - 32) * (5/9) = 30+ degrees celcius] and suddenly it's into the single digits. Without the net at home, there's no weather report other than "how long it takes for my feet to feel cold after getting out of bed and onto the freezing floors", so of course the weather chooses this time to change rapidly.

At any rate, life has been good and this quarter looks to be a nice enjoyable one... part of me feels i should take harder classes than the ones which i'm slacking off on right now, but welllllllllll... nah.

Photos should be uploaded, but i'm on a shared computer in the library away from all my pics and so my captive audience shall just have to remain captive with bated breath.

Tomorrow we're going shopping. In a rented bus. Far away. For the whole day.

Somehow that is actually sounding appealing.

Oh right and so i also got my driver's license last week, and due to some strange metric/imperial conversion problem, i am actually now grossly underweight. They should have counter staff conduct logical checks on people who pull random numbers out of the air. But so now i can drive a bit more legally than before (well a bit more legally a few months from now after my tourist driver's license allowance thing expires) and i finally get my state ID. yay.

Net deprivation

Hullo world!

I'm sitting in Brian's house using his generous free wireless internet (comes with laptop) and smelling the wonderous scents of the steak that he and jiahui are cooking. Everyone's having lots of fun cooking now that we're all moved in to our apartments and places (pictures up when i get my laptop to a place with net)







Doesn't look that good, you say? Baby steps, man, baby steps.

We've also tried our hand at our own cooking, and so far it's 3 pasta dishes and risotto and some breakfast foods. Not too shabby for 1 week.

Also we now have a theme song for moving house: Volare by the Gipsy kings. Whilst i might otherwise share in the joy, i can but provide a link to a page of lyrics:

Vooooooolare!

But that still doesn't quite do it justice. To appreciate the full beauty of the song: the chorus goes like this:

ahem.

VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOlaaaaaare, Ohhhhhhhh oh,
CAnnnnntaaaaaare, oooooh oh oh oh.
Nel blu.... di pinto di blu.
Felice..di stare lassu.

then it goes off into even more random spanish staccato words. Si.

I am alive

And very well thank you. But the past week has been really busy, and i have no net at my house (horrors!). But i've regained my lost luggage, and almost regained my lost voice, and my body clock is set to a very comfortable wake up at 8am time.

Would post longer but have class.... I'll write a nice long protracted post another time.

At the Boundarylines

of the end of my summer life in Singapore with my Singaporean persona and the beginning of year 2 in Chicago. What have i done this summer?

Neglected once again to fulfil that list of "things to do this summer", that's what.

Nevertheless, i'm quite excited about this new chapter of my life, what with the whole living out and all. And in classic google earth style, this is the place i'm going to be staying at for the next month:



It's only about 4 blocks from the center of campus, so location is simply prime.

I wonder who this last housemate of mine is, though, thus far all i know is that it's a "quiet girl" which probably means she's a chainsmoking drug addict who stays in her room the whole time. But also probably means she'll get along perfectly fine with us. Hope she doesn't read this for any reason whatsoever.

Raffles Hotel Rum and Raisin Snowskin Mooncake

DAMN NICE!!

Good call on the part of my beloved housemates on buying this.

1. My marginal utility on mooncakes decreases very fast, but snow skin mooncakes are an exception. This is also the first snowskin mooncake i've eaten this year (previous box disappeared before i could get to them).
2. It's rum and raisin!
3. It's got this cute yolk made up of a white choc outer eggshell, and a rum and raisin centre, with a chocolate chip inner core. yum. Quite cute too. I thought it was a quail's egg with shell.

Thank you!!!!!

Tunisia Day 5

We lost the bid to Sweden. =(

People aren't as disappointed as i expected, but still everyone believed we stood a pretty good chance. Nevertheless the Singaporeans put up a good fight and came in 2nd among the 4 countries, despite only starting canvassing in february this year. Sweden started 2 years ago and they had the whole European bloc behind them, so well.

Saw a mosaic museum and roman ruins (very much ruined and gone) and the barest of remnants of an aquaduct system running 120+km (!!) from springs in the mountains to carthage. Quite amazing considering how the water flowed only through force of gravity, so they had to engineer the whole system based on that.

Today made it pointedly clear how Tunisian culture isn't stereotypically "African" at all but a mishmash of Roman, Byzantine Catholic, Arab Muslim and indigenious Barber (yes Barber, they're like desert people) cultures. Saw lotsa mosaic and statue depictions of roman gods and goddesses and the muses and suchnot. Got quite excited about it, thanks to all those classic Greek texts. There was a mosaic of Orpheus charming wild animals with his lyre, and one of Virgil flanked by 2 muses while he was writing his Aenid. Also one of Poseidon in his chariot pulled by 4 sea horses. I quite enjoy museums now.

Spent more time being made to trawl shops (that's why i hate tour groups) and wondering why the exact same goods can be sold all over Tunisia, and how there must be some hidden pact among them to sell things at $45 and then go down to $5 about 10 steps later after you walk away. Didn't find anything worth buying, but the Americans somehow seem to buy something everywhere, it's people like them that fuel the desire for tour guides to stop at touristy shops. I thus have not spent any money at all buying anything from shops that isn't water or camera pass money ($1 to take photos per day per city). Which i guess makes this the third consecutive vacation which i haven't spent any (significant) money in shops. hmmm. There just wasn't anything worthwhile to buy, the Tunisian Dinar being stronger than the S$ and all.

Tunisia day 4

Lazy waking up, buffet breakfast of interesting things whose names i do not know, interesting attempt to try and order sunny side up egg to french-speaking cook (*point point* "same."). Walk on beach, observation of geographical trends and change from deposition of sediment to clear water with no sedimentation at all over 30m. Note of samll round fibrous husks which deposit in the millions (lemmings ride them across the waves and get off and scamper away when people aren't looking) enough to form a little short prolonged hump of sorts across a bit of the beach. Skipped lunch coz lazing around room.

Henced to see roman colosseum (sic?) 2 hours drive away. Talked to American lady on bus who lived in Chicago and told me all about the tax differences of living in santa fe, new Mexico, as opposed to a condo east of lake shore drive (yes people, THOSE condos.). Heard a bit from someone else about Wicked and how zhai it is and how insanely cute and whackable the good witch is. Nice old ladies.

Colosseum is abso-fricking-lutely humongous. 3 levels, dating back to 200ish AD, and about maybe 50-60% intact, after preservation and restoration.



Most of the arches are still there along 60% of the perimeter, and it's like 128m long by something else wide, and each arch is about the height of 3 x (my mum's height). Amazing feat, building it in 8 years like they did. Walked around, got the nice picture of tunisian houses from a height that i wanted all along. Met a taiwanese scout with whom i conversed with a bit in chinese, then a tunisian scout came along and i talked a bit to him in french, which i think was the first practical time i had use of this whole faux trilingual thing. Cool beans. Am starting to really enjoy this whole international thing, as i was walking around i kept bumping into friends i've made over the last few days, the thai girls and saudi guys and the lady from saint vincent and the grenadines ("it's in the carribean. *stately nod*"). So many familiar faces, even after just 4 days or so! Even if i can't quite match their names to the faces (it's easier than chinese names, and ironically the other 2 singaporean ladies have really hard to remember names!).

Ate dinner along the side of the colosseum, which was a sort of box set centrally distributed a la National Day Parade rehearsals. In fact, the whole eating in the wings of a stadium from a box was so reminiscent i quite enjoyed it, despite the aggressive flies (they did provide like half a french loaf hard enough to whack them with), the food actually was pretty good (compared to the other provided dinners so far), although some other people didn't like it, i think i loved it because my benchmark was NDP food, which is super cmi.

Forced my parents to be antisocial while i caught the sunset from a cool vantage point (literally, the arches had this whole bernoulli effect with the wind.....nevermind.) and as usual no single photo can do justice to the magnificent juxtaposition of nature's beautiful sun setting to the architectural marvel that is this colosseum, so of course i took about 30 photos. Here's one of the nicer ones:



Then joined the rest of the contingent for the cultural show thing, and i am beginning to make a bit of headway into appreciating tunisian cultural music (hooray for music 101). Actually quite enjoyable. The Coloseum is magnificent in the night (due to the artificial lights they put in here and there and the bottom up red lighting which illuminates the arches) but we left before long to catch the 2 hour bus back (police escorted in a convoy, damn funny.)

Back to hotel after making a water run. Heard big commotion in central open foyer area, turns out there's a sort of dance party going on. So. Dance lor. Then noticed that the Singaporeans who just finished a meeting were looking from a window... paiseh. And they came out to join me. Now here we're talking people from maybe mid-late 20s to their 50sish, and we took over the whole dance floor, and someone took over the bongos, and we had a regular wild old time. My dad danced too, despite food poisoning from above horrible food. Go dad! Only now the water i bought isn't enough.

Tunisia Day 3

Woke up once again at the healthy holiday time of 6:30am, to try and change and wash up and lock up and find breakfast place which opens at 7 to catch bus at 7:15. The ang mors are probably wondering who this crazy singaporeans are who rush in, sit, stuff themselves with food, da-bao more food, and scoot.

Sunrise however is damn gorgeous. photos once again can't really do it justice, but:



Note presence of date palms and fir trees. This part of Tunisia gets Mediterranean kind of climate.

Aside: I've now heard the Crazy frog remix of the Axel Foley theme about 5 times, and dragostea din tei once. Weird.

Saw mosque. Oldest one in Tunisia and probably Africa too, since the Arabs brought islam into Africa and set up mosque in this city first.

Interesting people 4:
More kids who pose happily for a camera when asked.



Check it out! he's wearing a teenage mutant ninja turtles shirt!


Saw mausoleum (sic). Lots of lovely arches. They look all archy only they bend back on themselves so they look a bit more like an omega than a letter n. And ceremonial procession with ululating happy family surrounding a boy all decked out in all finery whom tour guide said was probably about to get circumsized. He didn't look too happy about it.



Also saw wedding bride decked out all in white and with hennas on her hands and things doing pre-wedding holy absolutions. She didn't look too happy about it either.

Also seen: Salt farms. One bloody humongous mountain of salt. like, think salted vegetables and salted eggs and salted fish and salted salt. As tall as a house mountain of salt. That'd be one interesting katamari ingredient.



At this point if some of you are wondering what Tunisian cities look like in general, come look for me and i'll give you a slideshow. It's a general feeling which seeing a few pictures in isolation will probably misrepresent. Much pity that i had such problems adjusting the spot meter for the light, the sun was really damn bloody intense. Went somewhere today where the temperature was 36 degrees celcius, and it felt like standing on top of a hot black asphalt road in the middle of the day, except the temperature is achieved without the road (felt the ground and it was cool).

Tunisia Day 2.5-2.999999

Don't wish to bore with gory holiday details, so this'll be short and less of a travelogue and more of interesting observations and pictures.

Interesting observation 1:
Saudis take more photos than jap tourists on speed. Really. Observe:



What actually happened was that we were on this pirate-themed ship on which one of the pirates was trying to carry two large sized guys while walking on broken glass. Largely irrelevant. Was just amused by the amount of photos the i've seen the saudis take over the few days.

Interesting observation 2:
While sitting at the same table, the saudis while eating watermelon wedges spit out the seeds onto their hands and then transfer to the plate. The singaporeans spit onto forks or directly onto the plate. The Swede tried to minimise hand contact with the watermelon and cut it up with his fork and ate from there.

Pirate ship trip was fun, and we saw a pod of live wild dolphins!!! then we came back for a cultural show of sorts which lasted until we couldn't tahan anymore at 10 plus and a dinner after that where the tunisians tried in vain to feed 1000 people the exact same food served at the cocktail reception the previous night, only in lesser quantities and more overcooked. Ate more fruits. They're good here.

Istanbul Day 3 - Tunisia day 2.5

No internet access. sad. withdrawal. Pain.

Took river ferry down the bosphorous to near the mouth of the black sea. $7.50 per person. Ate lunch at a very charming little fishing village where i once again wondered about product differentiation. $14 for some deep fried mussels and calamari and grilled sea bass. Also tried some dordora and another fish i cannot remember. argh. The fish are all really fresh and probably come from the same trawler. Eyes all glisteny and blood still dripping. yum.

Very quaint houses in the area, walked around and met a girl who looked at me and went "pictura?" whereupon i took out my camera and she posed very sweetly for me:

Interesting people 3:



also seen: a pink house.



with its own well, which you can imagine or ask me for the photo.

Oh yes, and for those of you who think Turkish ice cream is made of goat's milk and comes with a man in a funny little had who ji xiaos you with his sticky ice cream on a stick and hits a bell while taunting you, this is what turkish ice cream really looks like:




Anyway we had a nice dinner and i had a dessert which was basically baked wheat bits on ice cream with cinnamon. not unlike apple pie, but tasted of wheat. nice stuff. iicknick or something. can't remember.

Oh yes and outside our hotel lobby window was a (very) partial view of Turkey vs Denmark World cup qualifier. (2-2).

Anyway the reason i can't remember is because i'm in tunisia now, and i've been busy over the past few day with:

Tunisia Day 1-2.5:

The hotel from hell

But first a digression. Now. to put things in perspective, we woke up real early to leave our nice fluffy istanbul hotel at 8am, to catch a flight at 10:30. plenty of time, since the typical istanbul traffic was nonpresent on a sunday morning. perfect. Reach airport, walk through security scanners at the front door, enter main area. Look for turkey air counter. FWAH. mother long line. Look closer, only 2 counters are open for 1 flight to tunisia. ok. get in line. wait. wait wait wait. People try to cut queue. manouvre cunningly to prevent it. Must be in the turkish blood to cut queues, happens in traffic everywhere. Suspect they do it more for the thrill of the competition rather than to actually get anywhere faster, since they end up getting cut anyway.

And there were about 7 bulky guys with super bulky bags. about 6 of them. each. Which were practically all the same design, and taped a few times around so they didn't burst. wtf. their excess baggage charge will be more than the ticket. But everyone had many many bags. wtf. like machaam bringing home the whole carpet shop liddat. Ok. not my problem. stand in line. So then the checkin counter refused to let one guy put his bags in, because he was rather overweight (his bags, not him) and he refused to pay the excess baggage fee. so he just stood there and tried to put his bags on the luggage belt. and she refused to move it. so, standstill. and then the others came and started to argue and make a scene. wonderful. Repeat. Guys who had already checked in and gotten their tickets cut queue and came in with more bags. The airport usher people didn't know what to do with them. Repeat. It was about 30 minutes before the flight when we eventually got our boarding pass.

rush. alamak. immigration got long queue too. wait. The guy at the booth seems to be scrutinising the passport photos of people to make sure everyone's nose hairs are exactly in the same place as in the photo. Get through. 7 minutes left. walk/jog pulling luggages to gate. get there with 1.5 minutes to spare. voila. Phew. Of course there's no hand luggage space in the plane, but it's only a short flight. ok. no bones broken, everything good. Get to tunisia.

Walk to the visa counter toting list of approved visa entrants which includes our names. proceed to wait 1.5 hours for visa. oh well. Poor fellow scout traveller has been on the road/sky for about 24 hours from Singapore and hasn't slept very well. Pakistanis all seem very chirrupy. Get out of immigration. luggage has been taken off circulation.

Find luggage. Board shuttle bus that has been prepared. Wait while they try to take a headcount of the various countries while speaking in a language nobody really seems to understand except the saudis. Take 1 hour bus to Hammamet to hotel. Good. a bath and a bed. Unload luggage. Go to lobby area. Organiser comes after us saying we need to go register in the main conference area first. And we can't leave our luggage in the hotel first, and no she will not take no for an answer. After a bit we decide she's serious. Lug luggage back to bus. By this time it's earning its name. Take bus to conference area. Messy messy. see people. fake smiles. messy messy. Find out they don't actually use computers to do all the paperwork and crossreferencing is a problem. What ho. Find kind singaporean who ferries us back to the hotel. Finally back in hotel 3 hours after touchdown.

Good. stand at counter and realise that the bookings have been subcontracted out to a 3rd party organisation, and we have to speak to them to get our keys to the rooms. But please fill out this form anyway.

Hotel 1 Tan family 0

The guy will be here soon. Fill out form. Guy arrives. Who still doesn't want to give us our rooms. cannot seem to speak much english. Try to converse to hotel people in french. Realise that the rooms are ready but they will not deal with us. Grr.

Hotel 2 Tan family 0

While waiting talk to a few other people who're around, one guy complains that his room has no TV and no safe (so what?) and no lights (oh.). Someone else tells us not to expect too much, her cupboard didn't seem to be complete and was missing the clothes rail thing where you put hangers on. hmm.

Mum pesters organiser person until his boss comes. 5 minutes. 5 minutes. ok. we wait. No avail. Pester pester. make noise. badger badger. they try and put us in a suite with 2 other strangers. No dice, buddy. We pre-booked our rooms, where the hell are they? Badger badger. finally get room. good.

Hotel 2 Tan family 1

It's about 6 hours after we touched down at the airport. Go to room. 2 beds instead of the 3 promised. 2 bath towels. One of which is used. sigh. Get pally with porter (Jamil) with a few Euro$s. Help carry down bedframe and mattress from upstairs storeroom.

Hotel 2 Tan family 2

Badger him for bedhseets. 1 minute. 1 minute. Finally get bedsheets. badger him for pillows and towels which he forgot to get. By which time it is almost time to go for dinner reception thing. Ok. He promises it'll be there along with blanket and towels. good. Decide to follow him and ensure presence of towels.

Hotel 2 Tan family 3

Downstairs mum has cornered a housekeeping lady and after a bit of french i explain how we need 4 pillows (including 3 for these other singaporeans who didn't manage to get rooms at all and are sharing beds with other people) and 4 blankets and things. Jamil brings nice fluffy warm towels. Good.

Hotel 2 Tan family 4

Housekeeping manager lady tries to take towels back. Hang on and snarl at her. She explains she'll put it in the room with the pillows. oh, ok. let go.

Go for dinner. Sit in at meeting making self useful by preparing promotional material. Not enough chairs, but that's ok. Return back to room.

hmm. pillow is present, no towels, and 1 bedsheet instead of where a blanket should be. Where are the towels?!

Housekeeper manager lady seems to have duped us and stolen back the towels we had in our hands.

Hotel 3 Tan family 4 3

Meanwhile loud music is playing from downstairs where they seem to be creating an outdoor disco. Choice of music: random techno eurotrash. Intriguing. Peek out window, 2 old ang mors are dancing. hmm. Cool that they organise things for the guests, except it's damn loud and we're tired and wanna shower. Share towel.

Hotel 4 Tan family 3

Eventually go to sleep when disco ends. Wake up and go for breakfast, after badgering them for towels again (12 o 'clock! in your room!) Not a single clean table in sight in the cafe, which was 75% empty. Hmm. Find one. Dodge behind counter and open drawer and get utensils, too tired to deal with any more service personel. No plates at the buffet breakfast counter, proceed to load up soup bowl with food. Go back, eat. Notice they're clearing up the buffet (our fault for being lazy pigs and waking up at ungodly hour of 9am). Go hurriedly grab more food before they can clear it away. Come back and notice they've cleared away my initial batch of food. like bloody hell, there are 30 other tables to clean up, leave mine alone! whatever. sit down. Try to eat. Notice they've cleared away utensils too. argh.

Hotel 5 Tan family 3

Head to beach 300m away for a bit (ou est la mer?) , parasail (whee) on a whim, which was kinda cool since you can see the whole of hammamet from about 20m (?) in the sky. quite a rush. Get a call. Singaporean delegation has managed to find another hotel which can fit all of us, we're checking out of this one at 12 noon, daily checkout time. Which is good news, except how it's 11:45 now. hm. Hurry back to hotel, pack pack pack pack pack pack get out.

Hotel -1 Tan family -1

phew.

and now we have a new hotel, and i'm sitting here on the bed typing, and we have towels AND pillows. win.

I only took 9 photos the first day.

Istanbul day 2

(couldn't get any net connection over in istanbul/tunisia after the first day, so i'll post all my notepadded blogs up one by one in the order they were supposed to have been read. later ones coming as soon as i get the photos in order! And i'm using my own server instead of the geocities one, coz it's a lot easier to ftp big files over now.)

Morning: wake up leisurely at holiday timing of 8:50am. Feel it is too early. Slack a bit. Wake up again at 9am.

Head to blue mosque. Reach at 1030am (traffic is a bitch, see below). Realise mosque closes at 1130am for friday prayers and remains closed the rest of the day. Chiong through mosque with ad hoc guide who wants to "improving the english" and later wills us to "come see my carpet shop, 2 minutes. 2 minutes." Anyway. Mosque is truly fabulous in an objective secular kind of way, the inner chambers fit about 3200 people (80 prayer mats by 40 prayer mats) and there's an outer courtyard which probably fits another few thousand. One thing which struck me, the huge volumes of people which move in and out 5 times a day have smoothed the marble floors, and thresholds of doorways are much lower in the centre than at the sides which must've been much closer to their original heights.



This mosque has a sign which says "everyone" in arabic, meaning it's open to everyone of all religions, but of course some level of decorum is still appreciated, hence:

interesting people 2:
Ang mor guy made to don blue cloth over his shorts because he's not well covered enough.



Afterwhich, lunch at a small cafe. Walked in, looked at the counter, and lo and behold!

interesting food 2:



Kemal pas(h)a, a turkish dessert, which would look suspiciously familiar to the 2L people who go deepavali visiting to our favourite indian's house. Tried one later and it turned out to be a sort of cakeish thing soaked in syrup. No where near as sweet as the one (well, half of one) of the other round orange ball whose name i can't remember. But that personal excitement was dwarfed by my family's awe at the pre-meal bread which they gave us:



holy mother of naan! It's a turkish bread not unlike naan, and by the time the picture was taken it had deflated somewhat. It was HUGE. You could be full on one of those alone. Combined with the beyti i had, which was a sort of baked pita-calzone, like minced beef pita with veg and cheese wrapped in pita and peppered with sesame seeds and baked.



Couldn't finish that either.

Interesting cultural pic:



Streetside vendors of corn and this ringed chewy pretzel-like bread, only less salty. 1 YTL stands for 1 million turkish lira.

Also, a streetside vendor was selling these Arabically calligraphed plates with various set pieces on display, one of which i thought might amuse a certain cross-section of my readers:




Then on to Hagia Sophia (ayasophia), a cathedral first built in 300ish AD, which was then burnt down, rebuilt, taken over by the ottomans, converted into a mosque, then restored and converted to a secular museum. Right across the street from the blue mosque. Think 1 huge cathedral next to 1 huge mosque. Must've been a wonderful cathedral in its time, apparently it was the 'most awe-inspiring' in the catholic world when it was built. Kinda a bit odd to see a church skeleton filled with arabic and mosque-like decor, but i then realised that if not for the Ottoman muslims who came and took it over and kept the structure alive with their repairs and restoration, the building probably wouldn't have survived that long. Kinda symbolic in a religion united for the greater (cultural) good kind of way.

But the Christian mosaics inside were plastered over with ....er, plaster, and they're still under restoration and will be for a long while. This is one of them in half of its former glory:



A Shop outside seemed to be very apologetic to their competitors for their continued presence in the market:



Then to topkapi palace, a sort of mini muslim museum which was completely wasted on me. The views of the bosphorous river were nice but not really worth posting. imagine a nice big water body with houses at the side rising up from the riverbank on hills. Got there by taxi, and i have photographic evidence of how attached to their horn those horny taxi drivers can be:



Dinner by the riverside, think clarke quay with ECP restaurants. tried raki which was a sort of alcoholic drink (45%) which kinda tasted like a mix between vodka and medicine and smelt like methyl alcohol. Pity it wasn't honey raki.

Interesting dinner compatriots:

There was a table of hongkongers at the table behind us, and whilst we were there a little privately hired boat drove by on the river and made a lot of noise (boat party!). Whereupon some guy at the table called the waiter over and went "can you find me a boat? we want to take a boat to Istanbul. Taxi take us all over the place." Which, to his credit, was true, the taxis DID take you all over the (unintended) place. The poor waiter went "eh...ah....." as he figured out the english and realised what it meant. "you try! you try!" and the helpless waiter scampered off to try.

He came back a bit later. "river taksi, four hundred dollar." "okay, okay, get him to come at about...uh...... 1030!"

!!!!!!.

what can i say? different holiday budgets.

Touchdown in Istanbul

First thoughts:

1. The traffic lights have countdown timers and the drivers honk within 500 milliseconds of the light changing green

2. Istanbul is really green and a blend of old and new.

3. Taksi drivers drive like maniacs with nothing to lose

4. Pedestrians cross the road like they have nothing to lose

5. The hawkers are amazingly nice even when they try to get you to buy their wares and you refuse

The food establishments are really ingenious too.

Dinner: on the 5th floor terrace of a tiny dimensioned restaurant each floor of which seats about 18 people. It overlooks one of the mosques (actually the Hagia Sophia Museum) which we appreciated all through sunset.


Unfortunately i forgot to take a picture of it before i started eating.... Yes those are fries. Looks like anatolia didn't get it too far wrong. er. They're really creative and inventive when it comes to food, and seem to like doing things like stuffing vegetables with..... even more vegetables. Which is good. Yes good. Stop gagging, Brian.

price: about 13.50 million liras for that lamb shish kebab with turkish bread (naan!) and fries and all those assorted veggies and rice. 1 S$ is about 0.8 million liras. million just adds a whole new perspective to things. A bottle of water? yes please. How much? ok. here you go. 1 MEE-LIOHN DOLLARS. HA HA HA HA HA. *lightning strike thunder crash*

Sights:
The grand bazaar.

Full of shops selling exactly the same things. Wonder how product differentiation occurs? They hawk at you, and go "Korea? Japan? China? Singapoor?" or say things like "kohnyecheewah" which is very admirable. Some of them have rather impecacable english too. Why can't Singaporean sales people be as adaptive? Not desperate enough for survival i guess. There were literally 30 to 40 shops per class of item (clothes, leather goods, porcelain wares, gold jewellery) and they all looked exactly the same. Real wonder how the shops inside manage to survive. The place looks a bit like a map set in a soukh from hitman2. High ceilings with small windows on top, and i'm really grateful it's the beginning of fall instead of in the middle of summer. The weather is quite beautiful and almost chicago-fallesque, around mid 20 degrees celcius. Tomorrow it goes down to 18, and we packed for desert weather, erk.


The mosques are really quite pretty, and amazingly majestic. tomorrow we shall actually get there early enough to go -into- the mosque.

The turkish people are really nice. I think they must see a lot of tourists.

There're tourist police, and loads of taksis. They don't all have drivers who speak english, and some of them seem to take you for a ride (figuratively) but still loads of them.

Wacky cultural difference 1:
Their little men in the pedestrian crossing signs wear hats!


I'm going to have to figure out how to post these things so i don't overflow my geocities bandwidth too fast. At any rate i won't be posting too terribly often, possibly online once more tomorrow and then not again till tunisia.

Oh and security is really tight at the hotel. They screen the undercarriage and boot of the cars coming in, and put everyone thru a metal detector and bags thru Xray things. gee. Also passed the site of the HSBC bombings not too long ago, it just looks like a block or two of bare concrete with no paint and stuff. Like seeing the skeleton of a building in the middle of other buildings which are all dressed up in their formal wear. Sobering.