The hottest movie in Singapore right now:

Little India

So I went to Little India yesterday night to hang out with a MIT girl Diane who is also here this summer. Oh my god Little India... the pictures only do partial justice. On Sundays, everyone in Little India apparently just loiters around outside doing nothing. Imagine the super super crowded, local dirty areas of China -- and replace everyone with really dark South Indian men. We had been walking around for ten minutes before we realized that, hey... all the Indians here are men, what the hell... the male to female ratio was like 40:1. We kept wondering why: are all their wives back home in India? are they locked up in the house? are they all unmarried? We had no clue.

We walked around, ate dinner, and walked around more, people-watching until night fall and then my jetlag hit me.

A temple in Little India:

(hehe, it reminds me of my math research last term... I wonder what the fractal dimensions of this temple are?... :-P)

Er, ignore my weird expression in this picture, I was trying not to laugh! haha it was so hard to clear out a space to take a picture.

We sort of wanted to go in, but we couldn't figure out if socks were allowed in the temple because looking at the shoes, everyone was wearing sandals haha. We tried to ask a guy next to us, but he couldn't understand what we were saying, so we were making these really weird motions for "sock" and pointing into the temple, haha.

The temple is really pretty at night:


Around the streets of Little India, lots of nightmarkets, little shops, and random whatnots:

Sooo crowded -- hey at least it wasn't really smelly, unlike China. Dirty parts of Singapore are still much much cleaner than dirty China...

We went to a Little India Methodist Church, peeked into the door, and giggled when we saw that they still took off their shoes for the Christian service :-)

Okay, time to pack my suitcase and check out of the hotel to my actual apartment! I start work tomorrow, and I don't know if my apartment has Internet connection or not yet, so we'll see how soon I can update again :-)

Flight 2: Savannah --> Singapore

Well, hello Singapore!
The flights over (26 hours total) were nothing much to talk about, I survived. However, I never want to arrive at 2am in a foreign country utterly alone and lost ever again. Recipe for distress, disaster, and getting ripped off.

I'm living at the Orchard Grand Court Hotel for three days, right by the center of town. Here's my hotel room:

Views from my hotel room window! Prettyyyyy

Updates on what I've been doing later...

Flight 1: Boston --> Savannah

My plane in Boston got delayed after we boarded because of some mechanical error, so I missed my connection in Washingtion DC, Dulles Airport by four minutes, grrr. This was around 9pm, so the next United flight to Savannah wasn't until noon the next day. They shoved me a new ticket, hotel and meal vouchers and left me to bewilderedly find my way. When I finally arrived at 11pm, the hotel itself was really nice, the Hyatt Dulles:

This was my room!

The lounge bar

The restaurant

The Pool

The Garden