How to enjoy Sentosa for next to nothing

Most of us aren't that rich to jet around the world. So the next best thing we have is Sentosa! Sentosa is a great place to chill out with your friends. So long as the company is good, you will enjoy yourself even if you have to stay in a mosquito-infested area for 2 nights.

So what are the things you can do in Sentosa other than count the number of bites bestowed upon you? Lots! Too expensive? Fear not! I'll bring you on this magical trip around the island at next to nothing!

1. Grab tickets to heaven - $3
At $3 for the entrance, Sentosa has become considerably cheaper than when I was younger. I remember taking the cable car that cost quite a bit and wasn't really all that fun. Anyway cable cars are closed for repairs or something now so you can get there either by foot, private transport or by bus. The island guide is a must have because you can circle the free stuff to do in Sentosa. Basically there isn't much but again, great company is the antidote to all boredom poison.

Sentosa - For couples only?

2. Cheap lodging at the Hut - Fr $28/night
Freshen up at your hut after your long, tiring 20-minutes bus ride from Harborfront.

Collect keys to your home for the next 2 nights.

A cosy hut in the "woods" comes with a price. Donate your blood to the mosquitoes.

Though I had a buffer in the form of Don A.Q. , it was still not very fun to have those flying idiots buzzing near your ears. Anyway, they scheduled a fogging session in July so I guess we were too early.

There are BBQ pits all around the Kampungs where the rates start from $5/pit. The only catch is that you have to use the dirty common toilet. Bah! Don't act dainty! Rough it out man!

3. Hunt for snails - $0 + 10mg blood (Takes longer, my friend!)
Think this sounds boring? You're dead wrong! Snails are very interesting! Because they crawl so slowly yet they choose to "do things" in the middle of the pavement as if waiting for someone to step on them!

Snails "doing things".

I have no idea what they are doing. Maybe it's customary to exchange homes? Doesn't look very different to me. Or they trying to help one another change into slugs?

4. Take pictures of flowers - $0 + 0.5mg blood
Act like a shutterbug and go all over the island searching for brightly-colored smelly flowers.

Poor drenched flower. And their bits look weird.

Yellow bits are actually the male reproductive parts. Looks almost artificial right

I think this flower is called Ikea.

I saw some frangipani (?), those white ones that grow on trees and people often use to decorate their hair for the act beach-babe look? My friend wanted to buy some white hair accessories once and received a prompt scolding from her mother. Because chinese wear white in their hair only when the female's father or husband has passed away. Not very beach-babe after all!

5. Have a delicious meal at Delifrance - ~$10
There is something about the sea breeze that makes you gobble everything edible. The 3 Delifrance outlets in Sentosa are perfect for gobbling if there's only so much instant noodles you can handle. The pictures speak for themselves.

What a spread!

Sweet, succulent seafood d'siree. Mmmmmmmm...

Clear chicken broth with fantastic garlic bread.

Baked potato with egg mayo filling. Not mine, sadly.

Be a tart. A peach tart? Or...

A mixed fruit tart?

End off with coffee and its cute buttonly chocolate chip cookie.

Or stir in the 10th packet of sugar to make your stay sweeter. Aww...

With the free scenic view as the backdrop.

I know there are Delifrance outlets all over Singapore but the Sentosa ambience makes it special. :)

6. Go for one of those less-visited trails - $0 + 1mg blood
With almost everyone acting the beach babe and hunk, you can be pretty sure that you will have those old-times favourites all by yourself. You may discover treasures like these...

What do they symbolize?

Find yourself in a cannibal village where you see a lady in heels hunting for fallen durians. We did.

Take a rest on the forgotten bench and enjoy the view of the Caribbean that you imagined you own.

Or search for the shelter that has turned into a tree from years of neglect.

Discover the REAL reason why there's no more monorail.

7. Make friends with peacocks - $0 + 10 pecks
Remember, you are looking for peacocks that look like this

I didn't know they eat just about anything. So unfitting for such a regal creature. I wonder if the feathers are heavy on their asses. Heh heh...

And not the drab peahens (?).

Beware of peahens crossing.

Why would you need a peacock friend you say? To be at the heights of fashion of course. How else can you look like Nicole Kidman?

Doesn't look very comfortable to me. How do you clean the dress?

Don't like feathers on your chest? Take them to the ears!

Peacock earrings are just a tad itchy to have near your neck.

8. Collect brochures - $0
These are great if you are the kind who need to have something to read while you poop. Although the toilets are not very conducive for crapping...

All so Uniquely Singapore.

Some of them look rather interesting even for me, a Singaporean who has been on the soil for 22 years.

Fancy that! Charming Chinatown, Hard Knocks at Royal Selangor and even a Walking Guide around Joo Chiat.

9. Stage a shadow show - $0
Remember all the tricks you learnt when you were young? It's time to challenge your friends to see who can come up with the most kinds of shadow animals!

Thats a wolf howling at the moon. Lousy you if you cannot make it out. :P

10. Start a blog - $0 + 2mg blood
Yes! They do have Internet access on the island. There are even wireless surf zones if you care to lug your laptaops over (no power points though).

The Great Don A.Q. working on one of his ingenious works.

Yours truly trying very hard to blog with the blood-suckers buzzing around. Argh!

Mission abandoned.

Our Joint Post

Don A.Q.: So now I'm at Sentosa with the Feisty Bitch. It's a testament to how much the Internet has influenced our lives (and also to how much we're both addicted to blogging) that we're here at Sentosa together, in the middle of the night, and we decided to write this post together. Lest you think that she's boring, allow me to clarify that it was I who came up with this idea. And now, let's hear what she has to say.

Feisty Bitch: Hohoho! I'm having so much fun here! Great company is great company even though the weather may be sucky (it rained on both days). We have decided that we shall not neglect our loyal readers who check in on our blogs daily for the fantastic reads we provide. Some people may think there is nothing much to do at Sentosa but they are dead wrong. This is our 3rd time here! I will provide a more comprehensive post when I get the pictures up because believe it or not, pictures do paint a thousand words!

Don A.Q.: It has come to my attention that this Vietnamese (or Korean or Japanese, whatever) dude posted some shite on his blog that sort of condemned Singaporean bloggers for not blogging more about political issues or something despite there being like 10 million blogs written by Singaporeans or something. Seriously, I'm being vague because, like, who the fuck cares what he says, right? I'm only giving that asswipe a mention because in that post of his, he mentioned as negative examples my girlfriend, the Feisty Bitch's blog, and my online buddy, the Big Fuck's blog. The point I'm trying to drive home here is that I am pissed off because he did not mention my blog! Seriously, what does a guy have to do to get some disrespect around here? Talk about infantile? Hey, my blog is the most infantile of all! I even drew pictures with M$ Paint on some of my posts, for fuck's sake! JEEZ! I am pissed off. May a thousand boils grow on this mofo's behind. I hope he gets hit by a truck and dies. I hope he gets struck by lightning. Twice. I hope his dog bites his nads. Seriously, MY BLOG IS THE MOST FUCKING INFANTILE AND DUMB OF ALL SINGAPOREAN BLOGS! If any more of you foreign fuckers want to diss any Singaporean blogs, you'd better make sure that it's I Rock, You Suck that gets mentioned first, ok? Jesus Fucking H. Christ on a fucking pogo-stick. The nerve of some people.

Feisty Bitch: I have said my piece about the foreign dude but I realised there's so much more to add. Firstly, for someone who only knew of Singapore as the place that canes people for vandalism, he has a nerve asking locals to speak up about their political views. Ah well... Anyway, it's good to come to Sentosa with Adrian because he is my mosquito buffer. I think I've gotten zero bites while he is nursing a new bite now. Perhaps, the mosquito got tired of his cussing. But isn't he a sweet fucking loyal guy to stand up for me like that? Aww... He power!

Don A.Q. and Feisty Bitch: Due to the fact that the mosquitoes are literally eating Don A.Q. alive (and also due to the fact that we really have nothing more to say), we're signing off now. We'd like to end with a shout out to all our niggers who have been reading and plugging our fucking blogs all this time. These include Hejin, all the villains fine people in LEWD (see Don A.Q.'s sidebar), and diverse other people too insignificant to merit a mention (but whom we really appreciate anyway) <-- (yeah, right). Keep it real, y'all.

Really upgraded?

Want to guess what this is?

So nice sia.. Like some kind of sleek restaurant!

It's the deco of a hawker center! Hawker centers are no longer what they used to look like! Where have all the whitewashed walls with dirty fingerprints gone? What are these vertical lines doing here?

Pebble-like thing.

There are even nice stone structures. Is this related to some kind of feng-shui? I wonder if the red pail is part of the design also. And this can be found outside the toilets! Help you crap better?

If you are a snob and will only use resort-like toilets, fear not!

Check this out!

How chio can it get? I think this is even nicer than MY toilet. Still have plants and all. Do they absorb the "gas" emitted? Pooping in hawker centers doesn't seem so undesirable now!

MacDonald-like tables and chairs.

The color scheme thing that is going on in here is good. Can easily tell your friends where you are sitting. Good for me because I have many friends who like to play diva and arrive an hour after the meeting time. I'm quite diva-like in this sense also lah! Hahaha...

Don't like colorful furniture you say? Then this is the place for the minimalist in you...

Slick, black seats.

While all these renovations are supposed to be upgrades, I wonder if they are really for the better. I pretty enjoyed the old sights of tables that were chipped from many years of usage.

There's also the tiny mosaic tiles at its base and the fugly jade-like finishing...

Yep, the seat-less tables are for the handicapped.

I wonder if the food get tastier after the renovations but I'm sure they get more expensive. It is also quite nerve-wrecking when a hawker center is going to be upgraded. Will my favourite laksa remain? Where will the delicious yong tau foo move to? Somehow I have never really heard of foodcourt food being better than those in hawker centers. But on the day my younger cousin asked me why I HAD to bring him to a non-air-conditioned kopitiam for lunch, I knew that the future of hawker centers are threatened by the existence of cooler foodcourts with their homogenous cuisine. Bah!

There's also the old architecture of green zinc-plate covered roofs with decades of slime and grime stuck onto it...

I never knew dogs are not allowed in hawker centers.

Instead, the exterior of hawker centers now take on this kind of look...

Does new = colorful?

It's quite sad actually. Maybe it's because I am from a generation who had enjoyed ketchup-seasoned fishball noodles while sweating like a pig in a water-logged hawker center. Somehow, I think the food really did taste nicer then. Then again, maybe it did help that I did not have to pay for my meals back then... Haha... Although I yearned for the MacDonald's during those times, I think Mama was right to insist on bringing us to the good ol' hawker centers because fast food restaurants are pretty monotonous after a while.

The signboards also added more character to older hawker centers, which I think were uniquely Singapore.

Squint your eyes to see the distinctive signboards.

Sure, some of the newer places offer better ventilation but there is something cosy about eating in hawker center with the smell of oil in the air and wondering why there is no wind coming from the dirt-filled fans. Or is it just me? Muahahahahaha...

Maybe the only thing that really remained of the old hawker centers I knew of is the fact that elderly are still the ones who manned the toilets!

Old...

New...

Give me back my old roadside, wooden-table, wobbly-stools, neon-lighted hawker centers! (No, I'm not from that generation actually. :P)

*All pictures contributed by Serene! Thanks gal!

The "right" blog

It amuses me to no end when people bemoan the fact there is a lack of political views on blogs. Many complain about bloggers not being interesting because they do not provide intellectually stimulating pieces. I wonder why there is a prerequisite for a blog to offer some kind of social commentary before it can be consider note-worthy.

While it is not realistic to assume that your blog is your private sanctuary, it doesn’t mean that all bloggers have to write for an audience in mind. Maybe you do not appreciate the “boring” life of a 18-year-old NSman who keeps complaining about being “tekan”, but a large part of a blog’s appeal lies in its ability to let its readers take on the roles of voyeurs from the safety and comfort of their homes.

There is also a particular someone who accused local bloggers of posting a lot of photos on their sites as ruses to make up for their lack of eloquence. “Relying on the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words” is “to compensate that they can’t write worth shit”, said he. It would be splitting hair but the very definition of the word “adage” already means that there is some truth that a picture DOES paint more than a few words. If the gist of the author’s blog is already spoken in the photo, why is there a need for a lengthy shitful composition for the topic in mind?

Furthermore, one can gather a lot about the popular culture of a country through reading about the daily lives of its citizens. Ever heard of ethnographic research in a naturalistic setting? Explicit descriptions are not the ONLY way to learn more about pop culture. Besides, there are already books of authority covering this aspect of knowing.

If this blog is not as intellectual as you would like it, why not move on instead of whining about its inadequacies? (^-^)

Bent

I wonder when it happened but I think a lot of friends and myself have started to conform to societal rules.

When we were young, we did not care about making a nuisance of ourselves and had no qualms about throwing back our heads and laughing out loud. During the secondary school period, we didn't think twice about screeching like hyenas and kneeling on the floor at the lamest jokes. Of course we got shot down by disgruntled looks, but we nary gave a care.

Recently I was looking at the pictures we have taken earlier and wondered why we have developed softer laughter and are not that easily amused.

Welcome to adulthood. Bah!

Chinese wedding dinner checklist

Don't you think Chinese wedding dinners are never completed without a few must-haves? Today I attended one and I think it's time to compile the list of essentials so those planning for a Chinese wedding can have a comprehensive checklist!

1. Starting late
Never mind the fact that the invitation stated the commencement of the dinner to be 7.30pm! Be sure to initiate it well after 8pm. 9pm? Sure! No problem! Don't worry about your guests being hungry. If they are experienced, they will know better than to come with an empty stomach.

2. Wet tissues
This is for the benefit of eldery men. There must be something terribly alluring about the smell of packet wet tissues that many men like to use it to clean their faces and necks. Some even go as far as to wipe their chests with the fast-turning-yellow tissues. Must be that it provides the much-needed cooling down after all the alcohol.

3. The dishes
One Chinese wedding dinner is quite similar to the others in terms of the fare presented. It almost always commences with a

Cold dish (My personal favourite!)

Within this dish, there must be something fried, something cold (duh), something well-seasoned and something smelly (century eggs???)... Heh heh... But everything will taste good with the some fantastic chilli. So if you cannot afford expensive ingredients, at least provide the best chilli.

Shark fins. This picture shows a bird (I think chicken?) with the fins inside.

Remember to provide a truckload of vinegar (red is supposed to be better?) and unlimited pepper supply. Also off the fans (if any) for this dish. You don't want your guest sneezing everywhere from the pepper vapor.

Fish. Eh? Why this one don't have the silver plate with the solid fuel underneath? No kick.

Fishy is usually the angular pomfret with an arsenal of sour plums within it. Want to save money on drinks? Ask the kitchen not to use the usual LARGE amount of MSG for this dish. Gah!

Prawns.

You also don't want to be accused of being a miser right? Chinese leh. 面子 is extremely important. Make sure your guests get their ang paos worth! Prawns are must-haves! Please remove the black shits inside also.

Dessert.

Help keep traditional dishes alive! Like the oh-so-delicious Teochew yam paste for instance! These days, it's so darn hard to find good yam paste. Any recommendations? By the way, those they sell at the foodcourts are very expensive! About $3.50 per serving while most other hot desserts are only at $1.50 a pop.

According to psychological findings, people remember the first and the last things of a list the best. So with dessert being the last dish, give them something better than canned longans to remember the wedding dinner by!

4. Cheek-pinching elderlys
If you have kids, I recommend that you starve them about 2 weeks prior to the event to prevent them from suffering bruises from all the you're-oh-so-cute cheek pinching ceremonies that are prevalent at wedding dinners. Of course these elderlys mean well but I think they underestimate their strengths alot. Why else would there be so many...

5. Noisy children

There must have been something that make them wail the way they ALWAYS do at wedding dinners right? Non-stop. Some of these children will be running around and making a nuisance of themselves. If they fall, they will always get sympathy from nearby adults! Why? Life is so unfair.

***

Anyone wants to employ me as wedding planner???

Mr. Stiff Neck (and how he got his name)

Mr. Stiff Neck was telling me about the expensive car crash he was involved in. As expensive as a BMW. He probably will be telling it to me in my nightmare if he had not strapped on. And if he was in a car of lesser substance.

His pictorial description (left to right) of the crash.

Firstly, the car crashed on its back left (where Mr. Stiff neck was sitting). Then it proceeded to bang itself on the back right. And finally went head-on for the concrete wall.

The damage?

Just a BMW.

Destroyed beyond repair. How my heart will ache if that was my car. But my friend told me that he felt like a "Reset" button was pressed because he got off relatively lightly with some brusies and a stiff neck (duh).

Alive! It's alive! But only alive if belt on la! Don't mind it separating on your boobs or pressing onto your full tummy la. Fasten the damn thing!