Ramblings About My Life..

Chow and Paul's Visit To JB! (Day Two)

A gloomy morning, replete with grey skies and a slight drizzle greeted us as we awoke to the second day of Paul and Tze Chow's visit to the "homeland" of the Johorians - the southern city of Johor Bahru. And before the sleep was completely rubbed from our eyes, we found ourselves making our way to Yih Seong's place, where we were supposed to meet up and head for breakfast before beginning our sojourn into Singapore. As for me, I still can't believe how on Earth I managed to drag myself away from my bed at the crack of dawn when I had only five hours of sleep the night before - perhaps the prospects of a delicious and filling breakfast is deemed more attractive than my bed by some unconscious thought process in my mind! As it were, we met at Yih Seong's house at around 8am before we headed off, with Yih Seong leading the way, to our breakfast of Kuey Teow Kia (actually, I'm not exactly sure as to the spelling of the noodles that we were supposed to eat - but this is a close enough approximation, I guess). However, when we reached there, we discovered to our dismay that the stall was closed! Spirits sank and morale flagged at the thought of no breakfast before our trip to Singapore, until Yih Seong suggested another restaurant for us to fill our stomachs, a restaurant nearby serving dim sum! Spirits raised and morale shot up to a hundred percent (maybe even more) as we made our way to the restaurant crammed like sardines in Jeremy's car. The fact that Tze Chow raised a ruckus the entire way to the restaurant is pretty much evidence of the aforesaid statement - but as I was sitting on one of his legs, perhaps he might be complaining due to the pain! Hahaha... So sorry, Tze Chow! When we reached there, we immediately ordered the food and began eating ravenously. The dim sum was rather delicious and the yellow-coloured vermicelli we ordered was rather unique, with a strong hint of lemongrass which made for a very interesting dish. In fact, we even ordered seconds! Ah, yes... Steaming hot dim sum is the perfect panacea for gloomy mornings! After our bellies were filled, we made our way back to Yih Seong's house, called a couple of cabs and made our way to the Customs and Immigration Complex in Teams Alpha and Beta, as divided by our expedition leader, Patrick. When both Teams had reached the Customs and Immigration Complex with every man accounted for, we made our way past the immigration counters and proceeded to take a bus across the Causeway to Singapore.

Upon arrival on Singapore soil, we then made our way to the immigration counters once more to have our passports stamped. While waiting, Patrick kept making Silent Scope-esque jokes by saying how everyone would get sniped if we did something drastic or if the immigration officers found something wrong with our passports.. Haha... When everyone got through fine, we regrouped at the bus stop and took a bus to Kranji MRT Station. Once there, some of us reloaded our EZ-link cards whereas the some of the others, who didn't have an EZ-link card, bought one. It being our first time there, we were slightly lost as to how to proceed to our first stop, the Singapore Zoological Gardens. We wandered around aimlessly until Patrick and Yih Seong went to enquire about the details in getting from where we were to our destination. They came back armed with the neccessary information and we weren't lost anymore! Hurray! We were just starting to get embarrassed! Hahaha... According to their information, we were supposed to take a cab (in our case, two cabs) from the taxi stand straight to the Singapore Zoological Gardens - and we did just that. However, while waiting, we had a surprise! Guess who we would meet in Singapore - it was none other than Kenneth Wong! Yih Seong recognized him straightaway, but me being a person who can't really remember people well, I took some time to recognize him. After asking each other what we were doing there (I notice that people who always meet unexpectedly just have to ask this question), we went our separate ways.The cabs arrived and we split into two teams again. On our way to the Singapore Zoo, Patrick managed to get a cab driver who was rather disgruntled with the Singaporean government. What was supposed to be a peaceful, five minute drive to our destination became a one-way political critique, with the cab driver giving a very heated speech about the things that he thinks are wrong with the Singaporean government and Patrick being our human sacrifice - he had to entertain the driver by replying at times and nodding his head and saying mmm most of the time! Hahaha... When we finally reached the Singapore Zoological Gardens, all of us exhaled a sigh of relief as we alighted from the cab. We were finally free from the "rebel taxi driver", a name I think that is particularly suited for our taxi driver! Patrick commented that he always had bad luck with taxi drivers as they seem to like him a lot - I wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing...

We then met up with the others and proceeded to buy the tickets and after that, we made our way into the zoo! Goodness knows that it's been ages since I last visited a zoo - and the fact that we were the oldest blokes wandering around made us feel rather embarrassed! All around us, there were small kids with their parents, shrieking with joy at the prospects of seeing several bored-looking animals living out their boring lives cooped up in an artifical enclosure. The kids shrieked. The animals stared impassionately back - most probably thinking, what's the whole fuss all about, mate? Our self-consciousness lasted only until we met another group of people at roughly the same age as us - internally, all of us were heaving a sigh of relief and thinking phew, at least we're not the only teenagers here! After overcoming the initial awkwardness, Patrick and Yih Seong were designated Official Navigators whereas Paul and myself were designated Official Photographers. And so, our long day at the zoo began. At first, we were rather lost and kept going around in circles, but once our Navigators got the hang of navigating, so to speak, we were on our way! We went to almost all the animal exhibits - we managed to cover the reptiles (we were slightly awed by the sight of a humongous crocodile), went to visit the insect world (some comments about Sand King surfaced when we saw a scorpion), managed to check out our fellow primates (we aikkked when we saw a pair of monkeys dating), nearly had mud spattered on us by a giant tortoise who had nerfarious plans involving large feet and muddy ground, were spooked by a flying bird when we went into the small-mammals enclosure, laughed at a sleeping lion, symphatized with a zebra who was isolated by the rest of his peers, wondered why on Earth were the penguins shivering in their enclosure - and much more besides. We had to take several pit stops at the rest areas when covering the vast grounds of the zoo, and it was at one of this stops when Paul decided to catch forty winks by lying down on a bench - he can sleep anywhere, can he? Hahaha.. I wish I could do that!

We also managed to watch several animal shows due to the careful planning of our two navigators - the polar bears' feeding time, the lions' feeding time, the white tigers' feeding time and the pygmy hippopotamus' feeding time. The polar bears seemed uninterested in the fish that was thrown in and didn't even bother to go after a live fish that was thrown in to display their "hunter skills" - so much for learning about the great polar bear's ability to catch fish. The lions' feeding time consisted of a couple of zookeepers hurling chunks of chicken meat at the lions and the bored-looking lions chasing after the pieces of meat that tumbled from their grasp. Incredibly boring - and by that time, our stomachs were already rumbling from all that walking! The meat meant for the lions started to look pretty good at that point. Hahahaha... At least the white tigers' feeding time was far more impressive - at least they looked like the predators they were rather than just large cats running after a morsel of food thrown by their owner. They chased and jumped in mid-air to clamp their massive jaws on the meat thrown by the zookeepers, at times even splashing into the water surrounding their enclosure to obtain pieces of meat that fell into the water. In addition to that, we also managed to catch the sea-lion show, by far the most interesting show we had seen the whole day. After that, we headed to the elephant show, where we saw some elephants lift a couple of logs, roll them into a fake river, lie down and...you know, the works. What Elephants Do. By the time we had watched all the shows we deemed interesting or neccessary to watch, we proceeded to take a tram ride around the zoo - our legs just couldn't take ourselves any further! Add the fact that we didn't eat lunch and that the air was incredibly humid due to the large amount of vegetation and the dense canopy overhead, the end result was that most of us couldn't really walk straight anymore. After the tram ride, we exited the zoo and went to the next item on the itinary - Orchard Road and dinner! We returned to the Kranji MRT Station and took the MRT to Orchard Station, fourteen stops away.

Dinner was at Seoul Garden in Takashimaya Shopping Complex, a steamboat-cum-barbeque restaurant akin to the one that us Johorians patronized twice back in Johor Bahru before finally discovering that food drowning in oil is rather disgusting. However, as Yih Seong recommended it - and, most importantly, it's buffet-style! - the decision to dine there was unanimous. We paid, we entered, and we ate. A lot. The selection of food available for cooking was rather large, and we listened to our growling stomachs and cooked damn near everything in sight! Barely five minutes after settling at our table, the grills were already sizzling with slices of chicken, fish, sausages and beef! After that, what happened was a non-stop eating marathon that continued for nearly an hour - yeah, we were that hungry! For the first half-hour or so, everyone was busy eating and conversation at the tables were kept to a minimum, but after that, the table comprising of myself, Patrick and Ashok kept competing with the other table comprising of Yih Seong, Jeremy, Paul and Tze Chow in terms of creativity when it came to the grill and the steamboat. When Patrick suggested that we crack an egg into the soup in order to make it tastier, the other table followed suit - and that sparked off an inter-table rivalry with each table coming up with more and more ingenious ways to cook food, albeit not always resulting in platable food! After repeated grilling, boiling and eating, we were finally stuffed to the maximum, but that could only have meant one thing when it came to us - dessert time! Since the ice-cream was all-you-can-eat, everyone ate all that they could. Pardon the pun. We loaded up bowl after bowl of the ice-cream and the more adventurous made their very own customised ais-kacangs. Paul was overambitious and overloaded his bowl with ais-kacang and when he settled down at the table, a massive spill took place - resulting in the formation of coloured syrup puddles! We scrambled to grab tissues to soak up the mess, and thankfully, Paul's clothing didn't undergo any major changes in colour after we were done. By the time we were done eating, I could have sworn that our weights at least doubled - we did eat that much!

After dinner, we stopped by at Kinokuniya as Paul wanted to check out some books. As we waited there for Paul, we suddenly had a surprise - Eric was there as well! If this doesn't prove that it's indeed a small world, then I don't know what will! Hahaha... Of course, Eric might have been stalking us too, so that might have to be taken into account! Eric then joined our merry party as we headed from Kinokuniya to our last and final item on the itinary - buying the iPod mini and the iPod shuffle! As I had scouted Orchard Road the day before for the best places to buy an iPod mini with my family (and ended up buying my iPod mini), we already had a destination in mind and all we had to do was to get there, find out the best buys and hopefully prevent ourselves from getting suckered into buying unneccessary accessories for the iPod mini or the iPod shuffle. Surprisingly, the first shop we visited offered Paul and Tze Chow rather good prices for the iPod mini and the iPod shuffle respectively - in fact, they paid S$2 less than what I did, GST included! And without wasting time (our legs seemed to have turned to jelly already after spending the whole day in Singapore), they bought the items they wanted and left. Eric followed us until the MRT Station and then we went our separate ways - we took the MRT back to the Kranji MRT Station whereas Eric took a bus back to his hostel. Once we reached the Kranji MRT Station, we took a bus to the Woodlands Customs and Immigration Checkpoint - and repeated the process all over again. Got our passports stamped, took a bus all the way back to the Malaysian side, cleared the Malaysian Customs and Immigration Checkpoint and voila! We were back in Malaysia! After that, we took a cab back to Yih Seong's house, and everyone went back home - with that, ended a very tiring but fun Day Two of Paul and Tze Chow's visit to Johor Bahru!

Here are some of the pictures we took on Day Two :


Ahh.... There's nothing better than dim sum for breakfast on a gloomy morning! Even though we might not have gotten to eat Kuey Teow Kia for breakfast as planned, we ended up having something just as tasty, which made up for a superb beginning to our day! Here's Round One of our dim sum breakfast!


Jeremy and his favourite animal - the camel! Hahaha... Wonder why? That's because the camel is the animal that Jeremy can draw best! Actually, come to think of it, when Jeremy doesn't doodle stuff on the camels he draws - stuff like spectacles, ties and speech bubbles that say "i am yc" - the camels he draws are actually quite good! Well, better than what I can draw anyway.. Hahaha..


"Ladies and gentlemen, no need to panic - yes, we are lost again, but this is rather routine already." Just joking here - Patrick and Yih Seong, our designated Official Navigators did a very good job leading us around the zoo and planning ahead so that we could watch the animal shows and feeding times that we deemed interesting!


Taking a break at one of the rest stops. The rest stops were air-conditioned, and we were so tempted to remain in the rest stops indefinitely as the air was incredibly humid! From left - Ashok, Paul and Yih Seong. Check out the sweat on Paul's shirt!


This is a lemur, not the parodies that you see in "Madagascar". I tried summoning them with my signature "I like to move it move it" chant, but no lemurs were forthcoming until we bumped right into them. I am so disillusioned.


Ah, yes - the three stars of the elephant show. Truth be told, the elephant show was rather unimpressive compared to the elephant shows in Thailand, but it was interesting nevertheless. But going to a show just to see elephants pick up logs and roll them all over the place? Their creative director needs to go on a refresher course, methinks.

Next - Days Three and Four!

posted by yong chen @ 6:07 PM