where we bathe. it looks quite muddy but the water is very clear and VERY cold.
darling and i at the first waterfall
and at some point along the way
everybody in the water!
the third waterfall, the biggest of the ones we visited. where we arki students started talking about a possibility of a Falling Waters being built here, complete with helipad and runway for access..lardeedardeedar...
on the day that we left we had lunch at A&W. whoaaaaa. extinct fast food chain in Sgp. so we were all happy monkeys. bring on the curly fries and root beer floats!
Mikey is thrilled with his root beer float!
are you hungry yet??
i was quite paralysed for two days after the trek (i.e. tuesday and wednesday) so activity only resumed wednesday night. went for dinner with dear at Sushi Tei. yayyy! my favourite =) however Mike is very disgusted by raw seafood and the one sided conversation went like this:
'i used to have eyes!!'
'that's my twin on the other plate!'
'i used to have 52 names!!'
yeah something like that. it was a running commentary that went on as the conveyer belt moved along. yep. that's my boyfriend.
'i'm so tired from working and paying for your underwear and humungous appetite!!!'
after dinner i went to join my arki friends for a night of mambo-ing. we were attempting to learn the mambo hand signs but ended up making our own ones.
so last night i went over to dear's house for dinner. i had been craving for Nasi Briyani since monday night when we were stuck in the Johor traffic jam, so dear and his dad went to get Nasi Briyani for dinner. so schweett! it was just delicious..really really.. haha. as usual i overate la what's new. but Mike didn't seem to have eaten enough..
pig trotter anyone?
-at this point i leave for my holiday exchange programme, and stay in a neighbouring country for 15 days-
it was an eye opening trip. for me it was more unpleasant than enjoyable, as i got to experience first hand the general poor attitude of our dear neightbours. for the first 6 days we stayed at a university hostel, and on the 3rd day of our stay, 2 of the girls' rooms got broken into, INCLUDING MINE. the interesting thing is, the theif stole weird stuff. she took my Pantene shampoo, ignoring my Bodyshop shower gel. she took my star earrings and i am very pissed about that because Mike paid for it. she took a necklace i bought the day before and never got to wear it. she also took a pair of shades i bought the day before and only wore for 2 hours. she fucking took took my pencilcase which contains a whole load of expensive stationery including a 256MB thumbdrive. she ate my Meiji chocolates in my room and dropped some on the floor, and leaving one of the empty boxes on my table. she took my room mate's slippers and phone charger and opened her contact lense case (for fuck).
from the other room she took another pencil case with twice the amount of expensive stationery, and 5 tshirts of total worth $95. the funny thing is she left my Island Shop spaghetti top and tube top alone, which these 2 alone add up to 140RM and are new. and so from the stuff she stole we concluded she was a girl with size 5 feet and only wears clothes which cover more skin. uh huh. probably using a Samsung phone or has a boyfriend using one, never ate Meiji chocolates before and doesn't shop cos she left all the brand names alone.
so we took it up to the hostel administration and the way they handled this matter was most impressive. under stress they slow down (even more than normal) and look very stressed, all the while effectively solving nothing. and after 3 days of prodding and angry complaints from us all (there were 16 of us), they said they found my necklace.
hooray!
the next thing they did was hand over this envelope which was damn heavy. and opening it we saw..waaalaaa!
some random Indian style gold bracelets.
fuck lah. they sit around in their offices all day long doing nothing and can't even solve an internal theft case. even when we insisted on checking the contractors and the cleaners (who were most likely the ones who opened all the doors of the rooms on our floor and ransacked our place), all the stories they told were different.
besides this disgusting incident, they allow construction workers to come up to our floor to 'repair the toilet'. it was a game of hide and seek. we girls would lock the emergency stairwell door and lock them out from our floor and refuse to open when they banged on the door, and they would come up and unlock it. and we would lock it once we see it unlocked, and this repeated itself umpteen times. one morning when we were all in our shorts 2 suspicious characters came up and walked towards the toilet. when i asked what were they doing here they just muttered some stuff in their language, then stood around smoking outside our toilets, chatting and laughing as if we were some flesh parade. i hope they crash and die soon.
anw, i hope the bloody arsehole who took my pen knife falls down and the knife stabs her in her liver. i hope my shampoo goes into her eyes and make them sting.
as if that was not enough, in the other state we went to my professor was robbed. in the middle of a road junction. she just left a senior who was walking with her to go back to her hotel, a 5 min walk away from ours, when a robber on a bike snatched her bag. she fell and her elbow has 2 line fractures. Prof Chan is 50+ years old and the person who did this to her will have his bike explode and reduce him to a bunch of ashes.
the hotel we students stayed in was a 120+ yr old colonial bungalow. nice enough, friendly elderly staff around. with a black sheep amongst them. my luggage lock number combination changed quite a few times during my stay there while i was out. luckily for me the sneaky idiot didn't succeed.
the most interesting part was, we stayed next to the red light district, among drug addicts, robber and theives. in the day while walking on the lanes, i saw discarded packaging of needles and syringes, thieves who sold their second hand loot and dark, dark lanes which even guys shouldn't venture into at night. at night prostitutes would loiter outside our hotel waiting for business, and they are not women. i heard a caucasian man offer 50RM. it's really quite sad.
as if all the drama wasn't enough, the coffeeshop that we were doing measured drawing in had a money plant. and the lady boss accused me and my roommate of breaking her money plant. whatever la. long story. and one of the other uni's girls lost her camera when she put in on a car boot and the car drove away.
anyhow i was most happy to return to Singapore last Sunday. here, we take safety for granted but now i don't. i feel blessed that i don't live in a place with no law and order. it's extremely disturbing.