Blogs from Jurong West, Singapore, Asia

So, here it is...my very first blog post...EVER!!! :) Yesssssss, just one week to go for the much anticipated Thailand trip. All the planning is almost over. The flights, the hotels, the tours and everything else in between is booked. The visas are ready and the INR is being converted to SGD and THB. Here's to an EPIC trip with some of the awesome-est people I have ever met. Our friendship started 8 years back in a small classroom in Chennai, and today, we are awaiting a badass trip to the Asian Party Capital - Thailand! Though only five, among the ten of us are going, we are gonna have a blast, miss the bitches who dint come and hope that they do come the next time around! Life is short, enjoy it while it lasts, ... read more

Singapore has turned land optimization into a fine art. With 5.08 million people living on 275 square miles, in just the past few years it’s become one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Not only this, but the country has a target to grow to 6.5 million people within the next decade. As they push towards this goal, urban planning and development becomes more important all the time. Today the country is proving the viability of sustainable land development concepts from floating structures where new buildings can be constructed to the use of deep caverns 130m under the sea floor to store hydro-carbon waste. However, of all of this what Singapore has perfected is to create a knowledge center for Greenfield urban development that minimizes energy consumption necessities. I’m not talking about solar ... read more

We left for Singapore (just a stopover for 1 night before heading over to Saigon) Monady afternoon and we made sure to give ourselves plenty of cushion time since we weren't exactly sure how to get back to the airport. TigerAirways was surprinsingly great service for the extremely inexpensive flights we got. Our original plan was to arrive @ singapore airport at 4 pm and just waste our day at the airport, sleep at the airport, eat at the airport, and then depart from the airport early Tuesday morning for saigon. Yhaska had other plans for us. He called his 2 Singpaorean friends to show us around the city a bit. An older, but extremely welcoming couple (seemed as though they were of Indian background) greeted us at the "Changi BUDGET Terminal" (we're students traveling on ... read more

We had discussed last night where we were going to go today. I really wanted to take them to Jurong Bird Park, which is a fabulous place to spend the day. F wanted to visit the Zoo; I have only been to the Night Safari Zoo, which is also a fun thing to do, so it was Singapore Zoo that we ended up going to. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go there but knowing that we were going to be spending the next 5 or 6 weeks looking at wildlife I wanted them to do something a little different. However, neither HB nor F knew where we were going. They never do, it is left to the day before we leave for the next country or, in some cases, until we are boarding the ... read more

Sorry it's been a little long since my last entry. I have been running around like crazy for the last couple of weeks doing all kinds of fun stuff. Some of that stuff was going to East Coast Park (a beach in Singapore), taking a trip to the Singapore Zoo, and last weekend I went to Batam, Indonesia to go cable skiing. EAST COAST PARK: The park is located on the East side of the island. It is approximately 4 km long (2.5 mi.) and it is decoarated with lovely palm trees, quiet ponds, and biking/rollerblading paths. It takes about 1 hr to get there using the public transportation, the MRT (the train) and then a quick bus. When we got there we walked to the water and the first thing that you notice is the ... read more

My Journey to Singapore took a total of 25 hours (I slept about 3-5 hrs of it). including two layovers; one in Detroit and the other at Narita, Tokyo. In Tokyo I had about two hours before my next flight, so I decided to explore the airport, which sounds really lame; but I found some cool stuff and I managed to get myself kicked out of a private lounge (I walked in thinking it was a normal bar). I saw calamari and some type of fish bagged up and hanging in a small store. I also bought myself my own beer for the first timewhile I was there. it was a Sapporo and it was great. The rest of the travel was relatively uneventful. I arrived in the airport and went through customs by literally walking ... read more

I don’t know why I thought that I would blend in here in Asia, nope, I stick out like a soar thumb in Vietnam and they can’t figure me out in Singapore or Malaysia so they try all the Asian languages they know. In Vietnam on the first day that we went to the market I was taller, whiter, shorter haired, and of course heaver than the majority of the people there at the market. I am happy to say that I did see some that where heavier then me but not many. I felt every single pair of eyes scooping me out and trying to figure where I was from. I would say that I was at least 2-3 inches taller than most of the people in Ho Chi Minh. Can you believe it! I’m ... read more