Settled
After living in Singapore for roughly a month, I am settled. My troubles have become mundane (for example, every time I try to write a blog post I need to look up how to locally host my jekyll site again), and my annoyances have become small. I am considering the more long-term steps, and the pace has become slower. In short, things are cooling down.
Not literally; in a far more literal sense, things are heating up enough for me to make a point of wearing a hat, to not get a sunstroke or something. This of course means that I have now equipped a hat. Those with discerning eyes may recognize this hat as the hat I brought home from Peru, so now this hat has been all over the world.
However, even in this autumn of activity, there was some last adventure to be had, as I announced last week. And so it came to be that on Tuesday, I set out fresh from the house, after depositing my bag there, on a quest to get myself a Steam Deck. I had checked the buses I needed to get; the plan was to catch bus 143, which would bring me to my destination in an hour’s time, during which I could chill and maybe listen to an audio play.
As I forgot to signal the bus, I missed the bus. I ran to the next stop, but that was not to be either. It was thus that I actually had a fairly eventful journey including one busline and two MRT (metro) lines, after which I found myself in a most typical mall:
The mall pictured here is Plaza Singapure, and it has a fan site. It’s quite an awesome sight to behold, for sure.
I truly think that before I went here, I had only a limited understanding of what a mall actually was. I think that’s because shopping streets are more common in the Netherlands, so it’s a matter of taste, but I do quite enjoy the many different malls I see here. You could probably make an entire vacation out of checking all of them out.
This was my first destination. From my earlier intel-gathering, I had found that the shop I went to earlier did have Steam Decks, but not the 1TB version. For a data hoarder like me, buying the 512GB version was unthinkable (Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 together already take up around 200GB), so I had to look for alternatives. Luckily, the branches of this shop were all relatively close together, so I decided (wringing my hands in anticipation) that I would visit these one by one, enjoying the scenery in the meantime, while enquiring about when the 1TB version was going to be back in stock.
And so, I walked into the first store.
“Yes, we have exactly one left.” (paraphrasing.)
Alright, so that was the adventure. But wait! The store manager told me that it was likely that the Deck was the Japanese version, and that I should get a socket converter from another shop in the mall!
As I was already considering my path to this other store (I had not quite understood exactly where it was, but sometimes having a terrible sense of following directions is a boon), it again turned out that no, I was lucky, this was a European version.
I got a screen protector installed, paid for my Deck, tried out the Viture glasses they had (for I don’t have a TV and these could be a nice replacement without requiring a TV), resolved to come back here if I needed anything else gaming related (their service was excellent) and left.
And so my quest ended. I did not see more marvelous sights, so instead here is a picture of Orchard Road, which I walked along to reach the bus stop.
Of course, I got bored during the hour I spent on the bus on the journey back.
After that, it was back to work. I spent most of this week reading Related Work relating to two possible projects I am to be involved in. Sadly, one project was not very interesting research-wise, according to what I found, so that’s one project less. Happily, me and another postdoc, Sungmin, are considering another project to work on.
The pressure to find something to contribute to the group is real, as I feel I should do something to be worthy of the postdoc position, the benefits and the possibility to broaden my horizons by coming to Singapore. Yet, I also know I should be patient, for rushing never got me anywhere.
Wednesday, I had dinner with Martin, which we spent at the ABC Brickworks Food Centre in Bukit Merah, where I ate Penang Asam Laksa at the stall Jason Penang Cuisine, which I have been told is in the possession of a Michelin star.
It was DELICIOUS. At once savoury, incredibly fresh and filling. I cannot do it justice, but I will try to find a recipe and make it myself at some point, for if my efforts will be 40 percent as good as this I will be happy.
After dinner, I splurged a little and bought a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, for use with the Steam Deck and my laptop. My work posture has already improved in the few days that I have used them.
The rest of the week I took it a bit easy, partly because I wanted to play with me Steam Deck, and partly because I have been kind of busy, and so the time has come to wind down. Friday I ate with David and Zhiyuan (a colleague) at Sanook, a nice Thai restaurant within walking distance of my house, where I saw an astounding explosion of road rage from a taxi driver. Also on Friday, I finetuned my audio setup and was able to enjoy some nice audios with Pim.
Additionally, I also found these figures with a most royal bearing on Tuesday:
This leads me to Saturday afternoon and evening, where I once again joined up with Martin and with Sungmin to go and eat crocodile. We traveled to a hawkers food center near Little India in Singapore, where we were able to sample the dish in question (as they got their crocodile from some nearby crocodile farm). It was quite interesting; crocodile tastes like chicken, and the skin is a feature which should definitely also be consumed with the crocodile. The soup we got was also quite delicious, good use of coriander.
We enjoyed this crocodile soup with some beer and rice, and also got turtle soup later, as we also wanted to try that. Turtle shell, when cooked, is also quite interesting (a sort of more solid jelly structure), though it did not taste of much to me. The meat is excellent though, very reminiscent of the beef I would expect in dutch beef soups.
After finishing our meal, we went to eat ice cream at Tom’s Pallette. The ice cream was excellent, so I was sad to hear that the shop would close in one or two months due to not making enough profit. I resolved to go again. Some more pictures from this outing:
In the rest of the weekend, I called my parents a few times, as they are now enjoying a nice mini-holiday for their 30 years wedding anniversary. May many more years follow. Today I gamed with Lars and tried out the swimming pool of the building I am staying in. Swimming has relaxed me more than I expected (especially as what felt like an hour only turned out to be around 30 minutes), so that’s where I will end this blog.
Tom out.
This blog post’s recommendation will be A Short Hike, a wonderfully relaxing and short game recommended to me by Joep. I played it (and finished it) on Thursday and it was just a lovely experience.
I have not yet finished the Hobbit, the Steam Deck distracted me. I have mostly been playing Dishonored; the gameplay is as excellent as I remember, but the dialogue and story so far are sometimes a bit clunky. Still an excellent game.