Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 3)

Day 3: Singapore to Taiwan

The way the scheduling worked out, it was cheapest for us to spend one day in Singapore, then go to Taiwan, return, and spend a few more days in Singapore before heading back to Japan. Having spent one day in Singapore, Taiwan was now on the menu.

Our flight was at the reasonable hour of just past noon, so we could sleep, eat another pretty good hotel breakfast, and then take the MRT out to the airport. This proved to be cheaper and probably faster than the bus we'd used coming in. This leg of our travels was with Singapore Airlines, which some frequent travelers we'd talked to had talked up as one of the best airlines in Asia. We found that they annoyingly limit the weight and size of carry-on luggage so that if you're carrying more than a handkerchief and pocket lint you have to check it. This meant that even though our bags would certainly fit under the seat or in the overhead bins, they made us check Ana's bag on the way to Taiwan and both bags on the way back. The overhead bins were about a quarter full going both ways. As the cherry on top, we'd lost a half-full container of sunscreen* that was just over the 100mL fluids limit (107mL) clearing security that we could have kept if we'd checked bags from the beginning rather than having gate agents grab them. Singapore Air did have the most legroom, best entertainment options, best food, and free Singapore Slings (the violently pink signature cocktail of Singapore), so overall they are the best airline we've flown, but not without an irritating quirk or two.

We landed outside Taipei around 4PM, quickly cleared customs and immigration, and then found ourselves in the airport with a somewhat less than clear idea how to get to our hotel. We had called the hotel previously and been given the oh-so-illuminating response of "take a bus". We had "hire a taxi" as our backup plan, but seeing that the airport had free wireless we booted up our laptops and asked the internet for guidance on how to get from the airport to the city. The internet replied with "take a bus", but included a few more details than the hotel, so we found the bus terminal and paid something like $3.50US each for the hour-long bus ride to Taipei Main Station, where all the bus, subway, and train lines meet. From there it didn't take a lot of doing to find the subway line that went closest to our destination and follow the street map loaded onto Ana's iPod to find the hotel itself. We didn't try taking pictures of things because it was too dark out by this point.

The lobby of the hotel was apparently under re-construction, and our hotel was sharing the lobby of another hotel on the third floor of the building. It was easy to find because it was the one entirely full of college students on spring break from NC State. Why they took spring break in Taiwan, we never found out. During check in, we found it mildly curious when they appeared quite relieved to determine that we were married (they asked). Anyhow, we picked up our keys and took the elevator up several floors to our room, where one of the biggest surprises of the trip awaited us.

Extremely round bed

Wallpapered-over huge window into the bathroom - this view is from the shower

This is the same wall from the other side.

The room we'd been given had clearly been built to serve in a love hotel. Several features supported this theory (see above pictures, also mirrors were in abundance), and the internet confirmed that love hotels are not uncommon in Taiwan.

After making this glorious and amusing discovery, we needed to get some food. The day of traveling had left us without the energy for a major adventure, so we headed across the street to Mos Burger, a local outpost of the Japanese burger chain. We were fully prepared to point to burgers on the picture menu and mime to be understood, and were therefore taken quite aback to be greeted by something like "Good evening, please take this English menu. What can we get for you tonight?" Which is pretty much more English than we've ever had in a restaurant in Japan not run by expats. We'd been told by a friend of ours that English is hard to come by in Taiwan but that was not what we experienced - on the whole there was a lot more and better English than we normally encounter in Japan, and it made a lot of things much easier and more pleasant than we expected. Anyhow, we burger'd up (they had Sprite, and a large in Taiwan is actually, you know, large, unlike in Japan) and headed back to the hotel to get some rest before a long and exciting next day that will be written about later.

* Sunscreen is difficult to find in Japan and completely overpriced because the target market for sunscreen in Japan is middle to upper class housewives who don't want to get freckles. They wear long skirts or pants and long sleeves with gloves, then cower under umbrellas any time the sun is out, year round, as well as purchasing tiny little bottles of designer sunscreen that's good for your face. I'm not sure what everybody else does to not get burned - stay at work while the sun is out? Could be. I think we paid nearly $30 for the 107mL high SPF bottle we finally found.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 2)

After our late-night arrival to the hotel we were quite prepared to sleep, but with only a few days in Singapore getting up and going was pretty important too. We set an alarm for 9AM and rose energized, or at least creepy looking in an energetic way.

Aaaaand good morning please don't hurt me.

I scared her off with this. The trick is looking as large and threatening as possible so they think they can't eat you.

Nascent cannibalism averted, we descended to breakfast on the first floor. Ana sampled the mediocre Western offerings (eggs and sausages and the like) while I dug into one of the best breakfasts I've had in years, that being spicy lo mein that I went back for seconds of. My guess is the cook eats the lo mein and not the other stuff. Singapore being about 80 degrees out at that time of day, they swung the doors of the lobby and dining area open to the street so we could enjoy the weather and sunlight with our food, which was quite nice. Chinatown is one of the low-cost areas of Singapore but that just means it's nice instead of tragically hip and expensive.

This would have been very good even without comparing it to what the Japanese serve for breakfast, but that helped. Let's not think about what the Japanese eat for breakfast.

Fed and equipped with a tourist map, we pretty much just wandered out to see what we could see. First we saw a lot of Chinatown, with converted row houses and a lot of street bazaar action, mostly selling touristy stuff, some of which was quite nice. I saw a carved stone rhino I wanted but it turned out to be $400US so I had to pass. Ana snagged a jade pendant but neglected to bargain for it - the shop owner gave her $2 off out of, I think, pity.

Converted row houses, generally painted in loud but not obnoxious colors

Statue in front of an enormous Chinese-style temple near the hotel

All the side streets have shops and stalls and vendors of various sorts.

We mostly kept walking, looking at the map, and aiming for the areas of greatest urban density. We walked through Chinatown to the Riverfront district, which is decidedly upscale and hip (and expensive). We noticed that we were definitely still bowing to any random person we made eye contact with, which isn't so much necessary in Singapore. We'll probably still be doing that after being home (US home) for three weeks.

It's wall-to-wall restaurants and clubs and whatnot on both sides of the river for a mile or so

One part of it even had very phallic umbrella things covering the streets so rain couldn't stop the party.

We walked north from the Riverfront to the real heart of Singapore, which is the Orchard Road shopping district. To put this in perspective, people fly from Tokyo to Singapore to shop on Orchard Road, and it isn't like it's a lot cheaper in Singapore either. If designer swag is your bag, you'll love Orchard Road because they have designer outlets the size of department stores, on both sides of the street and multiple stories up. We're not so much into that but the money and flash was plain to see. Lots of five and six story malls too. We were passed by a yellow Ferrari 360 Spyder (no picture).

Malls with entryways like this. We didn't take pictures of this district much because 1) Gucci doesn't do much for me and 2) we were primarily concerned with lunch.

Speaking of lunch, we toured a food court or two and passed a number of restaurants without making a decision. As you might expect, we'd seen many restaurants we wanted to try until it actually came time for lunch and then nothing looked quite right. Interestingly enough, we passed a restaurant advertising Hokoriku cusine, which is the region of Japan where Kanazawa is located. Somehow, we didn't feel the need to patronize their business. Also, in the food courts they had Japanese sections (in addition to Chinese and Indian and who-knows, looked better than most food courts I've ever been in) and in these Japanese sections they were yelling out "irashaimasae" in the same tone they do in Japan and were selling the same food.

I know when Ana tells me she's hungry and then doesn't pick a restaurant it means her sugar is so low she's not able to make decisions, so we dived into the next food court we came across and got her some inexpensive and surprisingly good fish and chips from a place called...

Figure they know their niche, right? Wasn't bad.

I got a mango smoothie (cost 2x her lunch) from a stall down the way. Probably the best I've had, tons of real, fresh mango chunks. Before y'all accuse me of anorexia, please recall that I ate three times as much breakfast as she did. Also, I stole several fishes and some chips to boot.

The food court where we ate lunch was pretty much entirely across the downtown area of Singapore from where we started. We hadn't, of course, seen everything, but as far as the action in downtown Singapore, we'd walked through the most happening ~60% probably, so we got a bit of a lookaround in. After refueling at Chippy we decided to start headed back in the direction of the hotel.

We checked in a Borders on Orchard Road and they wanted about $17-22US for small paperbacks. We passed. Also looked at some shoes, because Ana needs new work shoes, but didn't see anything she liked, though some of them cost less than the books. We inspected a grocery store (that being the true measure of civilization) and discovered that Singapore is much friendlier to Western tastes than Kanazawa. They had a few strange fruits but mostly it was closer to a grocery store in the US except smaller, and all the alcohol was really expensive, presumably due to taxation ($8 bottle of wine in US or Japan = $30 in Singapore). Also saw an "under-promise, over-deliver" tshirt; thought of you Nik.

We took the subway most of the way back to the hotel and found that Singapore's MRT is nicer even than the Tokyo Metro, which means it is our new best-subway-ever. It helps that the MRT is much, much smaller than the Metro, and is run by only one agency instead of about five competing companies like Tokyo, but it is super clean, super fast, and just makes sense. They also use re-usable plastic cards for single-trip tickets whereas Tokyo uses paper. The cards have a deposit on them so you have to go to the machine afterward to get your dollar back but it has to make more sense for cost and the environment than the tens of millions of paper tickets used in Tokyo every day. The platforms have walls on both sides and the doors only open when the train is present, so you can't fall into or toss litter on the tracks. It also helps them climate-control the stations because they're not trying to cool the tunnels.

Plus, no durians, or else. I'm pretty sure no fine means they just take you out back and shoot you.

Going from the MRT station near the hotel to the hotel itself was interesting, because the sky opened and it was raining like bejabbers. We covered most of the distance between the station and the hotel under the overhangs of row houses but could not avoid getting quite wet. Thankfully, it didn't start raining when we were walking all over the city before this.

Wet Yankees in a mirrored hotel elevator.

That big walk around the city had left us pretty beat, so we grabbed a couple hours of naptime while it rained. We were on vacation, after all. After the nappage we got slicked up a bit and went out to eat at a pretty fancy place we'd already made reservations at called Wild Rocket, which the New York Times recommended for modern Singaporean cuisine.

Sappiness on the elevator going back down.

Wild Rocket proved to be far from anything much but our directions took us there without worrying about it too much. We'd gotten reservations for right when they opened at 6:30 so they were pretty dead but the interior was modern / elegant / clean and the staff quite professional. We ordered the works, the big fixed menu with matched wines for less than $75US each, which proved to be a damn good deal that I would be happy to purchase again. If they were in Kanazawa we'd probably go monthly.

Menu picture is a little blurry but hit the big version on Flikr and you'll be able to read it.

I don't particularly care to run down the entire menu course by course (we took notes), but I'll mention some things that really caught our attention.

The rice noodles used for the pasta course had a wonderful chewy texture and firmness to them that we don't normally associate with rice noodles. They were quite thick and almost looked like oversize bean sprouts but when the day comes that we finally get Ana a stand mixer with pasta-making attachment we might try to duplicate those. Instead of being average rice noodles, they were typical noodles made with rice flour, and really, really good.

And the Parmesan chip was like drugs for our cheese-deprived selves.

The fish had a "dry sambal" on it that contained dried or roasted legumes or possibly nuts. Usually you don't get the earthy flavors paired so much with fish but the crunch and contrast worked well with the buttery bass. The beef was heavenly. Just perfect and with a good drizzle of sauce to the side.

Every dish had something interesting about it, and they sometimes emphasized subtle texture and flavor contrasts and sometimes outright decadence as in the beef.

The dessert course shown in the picture had a novel presentation, where they poured Prosecco over the whole thing before serving. I think the raspberry & black pepper sorbet we had at Burning Tree in Maine was better, but if we hadn't had that this would have been tops for end-of-meal refreshment.

I thought it should have been a Disney dessert.

After wrapping up our two plus hour fixed menu, Ana got a mint tea and I delved into their whiskey selection. We also figured out that in Singapore, making eye contact with a server does not indicate that you want them to come over and talk to you. This proved to be true in several restaurants later on, as well. They just stare back at you and look slightly confused. If you raise your hand a little, though, the message is conveyed. Anyway, the whiskey list turned out to be a little thin but I ordered something that turned out to be not bad and asked a few pesky questions that brought their sommelier over to talk scotch with me. I don't think he gets many people who are interested in talking whiskey so we chatted for a while before paying the entirely reasonable bill and heading back to the hotel via MRT. We'll pick up next time with Day 3 unless Ana posts something about making cakes in the meantime.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 1)

We've just got back from an 11-day journey around the Pacific. Okay, so it was a week or so ago. But here we go...

Originally, we were thinking about visiting Cambodia and Thailand, but the cost of the plane tickets versus the amount of time we would be able to spend there was just not working out. With some time spent on Expedia and pricing everyplace we could possibly go we settled on visiting Singapore and Taiwan, both for about three days each plus some travel days. We knew we couldn't do everything in that time but we'd get to do the things we really wanted to. The schedule worked out a little bit wonky for the cheap plane tickets, but hey, it was still worth doing. We wanted a day or two in Tokyo after we got back and then at least one full recovery day before returning to work, so we rounded out our itinerary with those. Our choice not to go with Thailand later looked prescient when the whole place erupted into riots and demonstrations about the time we would have arrived.

After learning some hard lessons about not traveling light (mostly involving carrying 25kg bags across Tokyo and up and down numerous flights of stairs) we resolved to fit our stuff into overhead-bin sized bags this time, which was easier than I thought once I decided that wearing the same pair of pants three days in a row might be OK. We managed to not forgot anything (we were surprised) and didn't have to check baggage on the two long flights.


Before leaving, one consideration was our plants. We had started some habanero pepper seeds and some other herbs which had all just sprouted when it came time to head out. Leaving them without water for nearly 2 weeks would not have been optimal. However, some research online told us that putting a plastic bag over the pots to act as a greenhouse and moisture-trapping membrane should work, so we wrapped them up.


We took the train across Japan (we're good at that by now) to leave from Tokyo's Narita airport. Some areas of Japan still have quite a bit of snow, more than western New York typically has at this time of year.


The amount of snow still on the ground and falling as we traveled through was quite impressive, but what was really startling was passing through a tunnel in a mountain from a snowy landscape to a spring scene that looked as if snow was a distant memory. I checked my watch and the transition was definitely less than 15 minutes. Wild.


While this leg of the journey was mostly smooth, there were a couple of obstacles. First, there was no way to get from the train station at Ueno in Tokyo to the Keisei line station that goes to the airport in the six scheduled minutes between trains. Impossible. Even if you ran up all the the escalators, through the station, and across the street down into the other station, you couldn't make it. We were able to use our fare tickets to get non-reserved seats on the next, slower train, without issue. Second, once we made it to the airport, our flight was scheduled to leave 20 minutes earlier than we for the ticket we'd booked and nobody at check-in thought to mention this. Last call for boarding happened while Ana was still waiting in line at immigration (I was already through), so I ran to the gate and told them we were both here and to please not leave. It looked to me like a few dozen people hadn't gotten the memo and the plane departed early but with both of us on it.

In view: Not the inside of Narita Airport, thankfully.

One amusing part of our flight to Singapore, our first stop, was the airline map showing us where the plane was in relation to our initial and final destinations. The code for Singapore's Changi airport is SIN. According to the travel map, we were flying right into SIN, with airspeed indicators and time to arrival all laid out in front of us. Narita to SIN is about a seven hour flight, spanning for us from early dinner time to past midnight.

Most people don't have to travel so far.

Right before touching down we saw the straights of Malacca through the window and they were just lit up by the volume of shipping and the lights of the cargo ships. At the time I thought they were party boats because of the lights but later, flying back from Taiwan in daylight, I saw that they were tankers and container ships, hundreds upon hundreds of them. We couldn't even try for a picture either time because we were close to landing and were not allowed to have portable electronic devices such as cameras going, but it was ships, packed densely into lines, going as far as you could see in either direction. We flew over 19 tankers once I was low enough to tell one kind of ship from another and that was just the part of the straight we flew over, out of a window on one side of the plane. I checked around and didn't find any pictures to do it justice on the internet. All I can say is, if you're flying into Singapore, look out the window and get an education on the scale of global trade. My jaw dropped.


After landing and clearing Immigration (long line) and Customs (you only got checked if you had something to declare) we purchased a ride on the hotel shuttle bus and made it to our hotel in Chinatown. Along the way they drove though some of the ritziest parts of the city and we saw them all lit up our first night in. We'd purchased a fairly inexpensive room at a cheapish hotel but by the time we got there we were quite ready to sleep. Our room didn't have windows which was actually very nice because we didn't get woken up by the sun and could sleep until the alarm went off the next morning, for our first real day in Singapore. Which is where we'll pick up with the next post.

Happy Easter!

While there were no chocolate bunnies, Peeps, kielbasa, or lamb-shaped cakes, there was an Easter basket:

Ana made it the night before from a kit out of her unlimited bag of low-end crafting projects. 

In the apparently creepy spirit of Easter, Ana recommends this creepy Muppet video:
(My research suggests that it is, in fact, super creepy.  You've been warned.)


We hope everybody had a good Easter!  Fry some Peeps in the microwave for us.

Also, we're typing up the first travel blog post right now at this very moment.  We swear, they're coming.  Watch the Muppets again.

Flowers and Flour

First off, an ikebana:


Secondly, Lee got me a birthday present! See, it has a bow, it's a present:


The flour here is...odd. I like to bake, and sometimes it just doesn't work. It seems to be lighter, closer to cake flour, or something.  Lee's boss says the flour is intended for making noodles, but the humidity also has dramatic effects. You also can't buy the flour in containers larger than 1 kg typically, and then you have to use twice as much flour to make up for the weirdness and buy a lot of 1kg packages.

Lee did a bit of research and found a type of flour that is supposed to be like American all-purpose flour. He found a place to get it online, for approximately the same cost as purchasing it in 1 kg increments from the local grocery store. So, he got me a 25 kg (about 55 lb) bag of flour:


I am ever so happy with my massive bag of flour, and is perfect - I got him fresh cilantro for his birthday.

Winter Light-Up (MORE Kenroku-en)

There was snow on the ground so we figured it would be a perfect time to go to the winter light-up at Kenroku-en, since there may or may not ever be another winter light-up with snow while we're here.


Again, there was music, soft romantic lighting, and some very pretty views, though it was much more crowded than the last time we went during the day.

We took a couple hundred shots to get the small handful of good ones, though some of these are still blurry. Take a look at the Flickr set to see them all!

I Fixed It!

You've all heard stories about overspecialized engineers - an electrical engineer who can't change a light bulb, the mechanical engineer who has no idea how to fix a car, and so on. Well, we are a bit more hands-on than some, as you'll recall from an earlier post. We've managed to fix another couple of items in the past few months, with a bit more finesse than the last one.

First off, my sewing machine. I used it quite a bit for the couch cover, after realizing I had insurmountable tension problems with the one I brought from the US and buying a new one. About 10" from the end on the final seam of the couch cover, it gave out on me. I finished it by hand, because there was no way I was going to give up that close to the end, but I was quite annoyed with the (new, expensive) machine.


It turns out that the problem was a set screw that wasn't set tightly enough, in the bowels of the machine. Lee assisted me with taking the case off, a much harder task than you might think, to get at the innards and fix the slipping set screw that was messing with the timing of the needle. It seems to be working well enough for now.  This picture does not capture the full drama of the disassembly; we had the whole case entirely open, but didn't take pictures during that stage.  The part was NOT casually accessible.

The second item you might not want to try to fix yourself that we dealt with was my laptop. The webcam started acting screwy, turning itself on and off as the case was opened or the screen tilted. It was no longer reliably working for video chatting, and this was a problem. We looked at quite a few tutorials, but as I tend to destroy electronics by looking at them funny (not being too facetious here) Lee took charge of this expedition.


After getting to all of the wires connected to the webcam, which happen to be below and/or behind every other component in the laptop (not kidding, the monitor panel came out and you could see through the main chassis because of the stuff I removed), we tested the connections to see where the problem was, and determined that one of the wires was in fact broken. This is likely due to the fact that the wire for the webcam runs through the hinge on the laptop and therefore has a bit more stress put on it than it likes. This should be fixed by buying a new wire, or stripping the wire, soldering the bits, and re-heat-shrinking it, but we had no solder. We substituted twisting the wire and adding and hot glue.


After gluing the wire together, we tested the connection some more with the computer still in pieces, because we were not going to open it back up once it was fully together again if it was at all avoidable. It did work (kind of creepy to use a laptop in pieces), so we taped the outside of the wire with some lovely red duct tape for heft and padding and managed to squeeze it back in to the case in the correct position.


Amazingly enough, no electronics or people were harmed and everything works (for now).  There was a slight bulge in the laptop control panel but Lee hit it and it went away.