Saturday, August 11th, 2007

I got up early in order to be early at the ICA (Immigration bureaucracy) at 8.10am, but what d'ya see there? A huge queue. Aftr 20min I got into the buildling, got a queue ticket. When I finally reached the counter, the lady let me waiting only to refuse me (I shall pick up the damn students pass at counter 22, not counter 9). well, counter 22 does not have a queueing automaton, so how to queue there if you have no number assigned? After some quarrels I got at counter 25, where I was ultimately able to ask for the Student Pass only to recognize that they don't have it prepared (even though I was confirmed last Monday, when I travelled to ICA the first time) that I shall come and pick it up at Aug 11.
So they told me to wait at a coffee shop nearby and send me an SMS when I could come and pick it up.
After 1oam, I had no nerves and went to the city for sightseeing, fuck this pass-damn thing (and for this card I stood up at 6am... 4 hours for nothing).

It was cool to hang into the Raffles Hotel (prob. the most expensive luyury hotel in the city) with adidas shorts and a cheap, white T-shirt. They have an own "museum" (well, 3 small rooms stuffed with pic's and memorabilia), which was worth the visit, you'll get a better hint how the city evolved (cf. the old map of 1893, where the seashore was directly at the Raffles; nowadays, Singapore consists by 1/6 of reclaimed land...).
The Raffles is a huge complex, emerged in the 1880's, but was nearly gone in the 1970's (rotten).

After that I paid a visit to the Philatelic Museum (who knew that the most expensive stamp was sold for 2.6m Swiss Franc - yes, it was sold in Switzerland albeit it was a Swedish stamp). Further, I learned that I was born in the year of the boar (1983, acc. to the Chinese Calendar) and the 2007 is another boar-year (those ppl would be "intelligent, creative, kind, orderly ...", the plate said:-). Needless to say that the Singaporean Post had some stamps with boars. The first stamp obviously was printed in Singapore in 1854 (after its invention in the UK in 1840).

Highly recommendable is a visit to the Fort Canning Park (or hill). There, you can enter Battle Box, a British bunker, built in the 1930s, but lost in Feb 15, 1942 to the Japs after the Britons surrendered Singapore (which was militarily a shame). The hill as actually home to Stamford Raffles (at the Eastern edge of the hill) 1819 onwards and used as gov.-seat till 1859, when the army began to built a fort, which was demolished (except its gate) in 1926 in favor of the construction of a water reservoir pool.

To chill out, I checked out Merlion Park and the Starbucks at One Fullerton.