Of Dragonboats and Durians

Several things happened while I was in Singapore, and here is an account of a few of those that I can remember. I should have taken more photos, but one just don't think about taking photos when one is in one's homeland, right? *smile*

Update: I just realised that Wolfgang has quite an impressive collection of photos on Singapore as part of his subjects. These include places/locations/sites that I myself has never seen. So, since I am blogging about SG, I thought I'd include a link to Wolfs' pictorial reviews of SG in his Panaroma-Pics and Fernweh.


August 9, 2007. That was when Singapore celebrated her 42nd year of independence. We locals simply call it our National Day, and then have fun rejoicing in the holidays. By rejoicing this year, I was asked to take part in the Punggol East Dragonboat race (Grassroots category)... well, actually, they needed one more person to fill up the last boat of 10 rowers (and a drummer, and a steerer) and persuaded me enough until I agreed :P To cut the long story short, our boat came in second place overall -- couldn't beat last year's champions (well, they had beautifully slim and charming secret weapons on board, ya know what I'm sayin' *grin*). No one bothered to take pictures of the runner-ups, and so I had to take a snapshot of the article in the local neighbourhood magazine just before leaving Singapore. We also decided later that night after dinner to rejoice by stuffing ourselves silly with Punggol's best durians (or, as Tobi and Marius called them Stinkfrucht).


The week before I left to return to Germany was simply a week of socializing. It seems that when I manage to escape Mom's foods/cakes/snacks, I land myself in places where more food are served. Although, from my voracious epitite, no one seemed to believe that I ran the Freiburg marathons *sigh* Anyway, here are four photos I remembered to take:


Oh, and here is one interesting fact with our family cat Gwenni (that's Gwen Steffani with four legs and a tail). She was extremely affectionate with me this time round, and always parked herself on my carpet in my room. And then, as if to get my attention, flips over on her back and meows softly to me to entice me to scratch her belly... Hahaha... silly cat! If she didn't leave so much cat fur around, I wouldn't have minded. So it's usually my brother who comes looking for her and brave enough to carry her out of my room without being scratched :P