Singapore, part two.
I'm back from Singapore! W00t!
I've been feeling lazy, and so didn't really want to type up a report half as detailed as my first one. That said, I'd like to remember a few things...
Having finally figured out where the bloody station is, I left early in the morning to head out to my Photoshop class. I was one of 11 people, with 8 women and 3 men. One man was crotchety and kept complaining about the cost of the class, society, the program....irritating old jerk, though the teacher handled him with kid gloves quite expertly.
I wound up sitting in the first row because when I arrived, there was still half an hour before the class...and most of the people didn't show up until five past nine. We didn't actually start until 9:30. I wrote out plotbunnies by hand while waiting.
Behind me sat two ladies who talked the entire time. And I mean talked the entire time. I suppose that's the difference between someone who goes to this sort of class of their own accord and someone who simply volunteered to fill a company quota.
It was essentially review for me, but I did learn a few neat things that would've worked in CS just as well as CS2, and I'm kind of wondering why Rose didn't teach us a few of these tricks. *sigh*
Then came lunchtime, and as I headed to the elevator bank this guy in the class who had jsut transferred departments in his company came to the elevator too, as did the computer class' receptionist. The receptionist asked me where I was planning on eating, and I mentioned that the Japanese restaurant across the street looked tempting. The day before, after all, I scouted out the area and looked at their menu, and they had chawanmushi, which is like hot egg pudding with mushrooms and fishpaste cakes and chicken and is YUMMY and one of my Japanese culinary obsessions. She suggested also that there was another one down the road a bit, to which I nodded and smiled.
The guy looks at me and says,"I'm actually planning on going to the one across the street. Would you care to join me?" Not thinking, my response was,"Sure, why not?"
Which led to an hour of my life feeling awkward as I talked, then felt guilty for not letting him talk, and then having all my questions sort of fall flat. Midway through I was bored out of my mind and desperately wishing I hadn't agreed to eating together. He wanted to know when I'd arrived, when I was leaving, and when I was coming back to Singapore. All through this I'm trying to eat my teriyaki salmon set lunch which came with the chawanmushi I'd so looked forward to...the rice was dry, the salmon was okay, and the chawanmushi...not the best, not the worst, mediocre at best.
When we left, he asked if we should pay a split bill or just put it on his credit card. I was determined to pay my half, so we asked that the cashier split the check.
Only...they didn't. I paid the full amount, which wasn't that much, but was certainly more than my meal alone cost even WITH tax. I figured,"Meh." And then HE paid too, so the restaurant ripped us both off. And no, I didn't realize this until I was out the door --foreign money makes my head temporarily stupider than it normally is.
Needless to say, I didn't go to that restaurant again.
Second half of the class went off much the same as the first: I learned a few new tricks, remembered old skills, and had the teacher joke about me working there as an instructor. Which is silly, since I'm nowhere near Certified level.
For dinner, I took the subway back to the station near my hotel and walked over to the shopping center I'd discovered two days before, and bought bread from the bakery (melon bread rocks my world!), and teriyaki chicken w/rice from a stall vendor for about $2 US. MUCH yummier than the crap I bought the day before, and I quickly determined that this would be my dinner the next day too. I also purchased a new contact lens solution --they had a small selection, and the majority of the things were in bulk packages of two bottles each, and I did not need or want that much. I finally found one that was just a lone bottle, good for soft lens and sensitive eyes, and bought that. Inside, along with the bottle was a tiny pack of tablets that said to use them only once a week in the solution. Okeedokee. Rinsed out my contacts and put them in the solution, happy as could be.
The next day, I had one of the melon bread I'd bought for breakfast, along with some breakfast tea (the hotel very kindly provided breakfast and afternoon tea packets with the hot water machine. And coffee and Chinese tea, but those are not important.) A few minutes before I was time to leave for class, I went to the bathroom, and opened my contact case. My contacts felt a little rubbery, but I figured different solutions make contacts feel differently (Optifree or whatever it is makes my contacts feel dry, Renu makes 'em feel slippery), so I popped my left contact in.
IT BURNED IT BURNED IT BURNED I had to pry open my eyelids and take out the contact, and then flushed out my eye with water for a good seven to ten minutes. A quick glance at the mirror confirmed that my left eye was bright red and oh it HURT.
What the hell was wrong with that solution?
I went to the garbage and fished out the box with all its tiny print and looked at the instructions. Then I ripped the box open so I could read the text on the inside of the box too. Apparently it was not a soaking solution. Apparently it contained (I can't remember which amount) 0.03 or 0.3% hydrogen peroxide. Apparently the 'One Step' name of the solution is a lie and it's a two step cleaning process. The people who designed the packaging and where the warnings are located and how BIG the warnings and instructions are need to revisit their concept.
I freaked out for a bit, called my mom telling her I got something in my eye (I was not telling her how stupid and deceived I was. No no no) and asked if, when I went back to Taiwan the next day and my eye still hurt, could I go see a doctor? She suggested using a bit of salt water to disinfect --I figured it was good and disinfected, but agreed politely and then headed out to class, glasses on and one eye bright red. *sigh*
The redness wore off by the time I got to the class building, which is excellent. Awkwardness with the guy from the date was not so excellent, but since he sat in the back and I sat in the front, I was safe.
One of the exercises in day two of the class was to use the Selection tool and color burn/dodge an image. Our practice image was Bakura Ryou from the YGO manga, which I found terribly amusing. Anyhoo, I enjoyed myself and gave him lots of gold shinies, and the teacher came over to me and asked if I was an art student.
"Nope."
"So are you considering art school? How old are you?"
"I'm 22. I graduated from college already."
"Oh. Interesting."
...Not going to lie, multitudes of painful stabbing sensations occured nowhere near my eye. I'm getting to hate that question more and more. Yes, I wasted a fortune on a useless liberal arts degree. No, I didn't go with my natural talents. Yes, I regret it. Shut up.
But the image came out nice and pretty.
For lunch, I waited until everyone had left so as to avoid a second 'date' situation. I wandered around, and couldn't find anyplace I felt comfortable enough to eat in. So I grabbed a hotdog and walked back to the classroom to eat.
The rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully, and then came time to finish and take a group photo and all of a sudden the girls started talking to me. Not lying, they just started chatting me up at the end of the two days together. One even said to me,"Oh, I'm going to Taiwan next week!" while I was waiting for the bathroom.
Anyhoo, after class I went back to my hotel's area and snapped these pictures of two sides of a building that made me feel like I was in the first grade again.
I don't know, the rainbow colors...
I popped back to the shopping center and hit up Kinokuniya's, having realized that in Singapore anal sex is illegal, as is oral sex unless it's a prelude to straight sex afterwards, and therefore combined with Singapore's obscenity laws, yaoi is nowhere to be found. So I bought a couple of books on living and working in Japan to research the possibility of moving there.
I bought more bread and chicken teriyaki w/rice for me, though when I got back to the hotel I realized that in my painful haste to leave, I'd forgotten to turn off the 'Do not disturb' sign, which meant neither my tea nor my towels had been replaced. Alas!
I took a bath every night I was in Singapore because the tub in our Taipei apartment...well, it has slidey glass doors on top of a tub and is just...not bubblebath material, y'know?
The next day, I took a taxi to the airport, where once again I discovered something in the bookstores there that I should've bought and didn't. (I have since come to the conclusion that when it comes to books...I should totally impulse buy. Because there's little chance of tracking down international books and publications in foreign countries.) It was a watch magazine that was cheap (four dollars US) that was coupled with a smaller pen magazine that had an article entitled,"Why Monte Blanc is not a pen brand." Since then I've been to three bookstores in Taipei trying to find it, and alas I cannot.
I flew to HongKong to change planes. I tried so hard to find the Dragon's Beard candy so beloved by my family and sold in the airport, but the guy wasn't there. I had planned to send small boxes of it out to various friends, but...ARGH. The main store was in the arrivals hall, well beyond my reach.
Once in Taipei, the taxi driver asked if I was Filipino. When I negated, he suggested that I was Thai.
....Yes, this made me unhappy. Shut up. I can understand mixing Koreans/Japanese/Chinese together sometimes (because sometimes, one looks more like another), but I fail to see how I resemble a Filipina; I'm too fat and *square.*
I got home after everyone had eaten dinner. W00t!
What has this outrageously expensive trip to Singapore taught me?
* A few new PS skills.
* I really enjoy working on graphics. The handson digital tweaking is soothing to me.
* That Singaporeans have an odd sense of conversational humor. My class instructor said that he would never say "Brush size," and would always say,"Size of brush" instead. This led to much laughter in the class, and when it was apparent I didn't 'get' the joke, someone yelled out,"Bra size!" ...which doesn't really sound the same to me, no matter how I say it, so...
* That I can never live in Singapore longterm --i.e. anything beyond two or three months is pure torture.
* Dating is torture. I refuse to go through more of it. Dating is the primary method of obtaining a lifemate. I will not be going through the primary method of obtaining. Logic concludes my chances of getting married just decreased drastically, while the chances of me spending my life as a spinster just skyrocketed.
* I want to obtain expat benefits at some company in Asia. Look! A goal! Or at least...a goal parameter! Hey lookit! I have one side of a triangle! ...Square! ...Polygon of indeterminate number of sides!
* That expat benefits for entry-level employees are damned impossible to get.
* That, upon reading the living guides I bought, I'm not entirely sure I want to live in Japan, but am at a loss for where else to go that'll give me space to breathe on my own. Oh, bloody fabulous.
In other news, I have also seen Pirates of the Caribbean 2. And...just much love for the fun factor, and bizarre angst factor. Beyond that, I'm not saying anything because I don't want to spoil anybody. If you haven't seen it yet, do so, but with zero expectations. Zero. Not bad expectations, not good expectations, just neutral. Neutral yields the best experiences in movie-going, I find.
I've been feeling lazy, and so didn't really want to type up a report half as detailed as my first one. That said, I'd like to remember a few things...
Having finally figured out where the bloody station is, I left early in the morning to head out to my Photoshop class. I was one of 11 people, with 8 women and 3 men. One man was crotchety and kept complaining about the cost of the class, society, the program....irritating old jerk, though the teacher handled him with kid gloves quite expertly.
I wound up sitting in the first row because when I arrived, there was still half an hour before the class...and most of the people didn't show up until five past nine. We didn't actually start until 9:30. I wrote out plotbunnies by hand while waiting.
Behind me sat two ladies who talked the entire time. And I mean talked the entire time. I suppose that's the difference between someone who goes to this sort of class of their own accord and someone who simply volunteered to fill a company quota.
It was essentially review for me, but I did learn a few neat things that would've worked in CS just as well as CS2, and I'm kind of wondering why Rose didn't teach us a few of these tricks. *sigh*
Then came lunchtime, and as I headed to the elevator bank this guy in the class who had jsut transferred departments in his company came to the elevator too, as did the computer class' receptionist. The receptionist asked me where I was planning on eating, and I mentioned that the Japanese restaurant across the street looked tempting. The day before, after all, I scouted out the area and looked at their menu, and they had chawanmushi, which is like hot egg pudding with mushrooms and fishpaste cakes and chicken and is YUMMY and one of my Japanese culinary obsessions. She suggested also that there was another one down the road a bit, to which I nodded and smiled.
The guy looks at me and says,"I'm actually planning on going to the one across the street. Would you care to join me?" Not thinking, my response was,"Sure, why not?"
Which led to an hour of my life feeling awkward as I talked, then felt guilty for not letting him talk, and then having all my questions sort of fall flat. Midway through I was bored out of my mind and desperately wishing I hadn't agreed to eating together. He wanted to know when I'd arrived, when I was leaving, and when I was coming back to Singapore. All through this I'm trying to eat my teriyaki salmon set lunch which came with the chawanmushi I'd so looked forward to...the rice was dry, the salmon was okay, and the chawanmushi...not the best, not the worst, mediocre at best.
When we left, he asked if we should pay a split bill or just put it on his credit card. I was determined to pay my half, so we asked that the cashier split the check.
Only...they didn't. I paid the full amount, which wasn't that much, but was certainly more than my meal alone cost even WITH tax. I figured,"Meh." And then HE paid too, so the restaurant ripped us both off. And no, I didn't realize this until I was out the door --foreign money makes my head temporarily stupider than it normally is.
Needless to say, I didn't go to that restaurant again.
Second half of the class went off much the same as the first: I learned a few new tricks, remembered old skills, and had the teacher joke about me working there as an instructor. Which is silly, since I'm nowhere near Certified level.
For dinner, I took the subway back to the station near my hotel and walked over to the shopping center I'd discovered two days before, and bought bread from the bakery (melon bread rocks my world!), and teriyaki chicken w/rice from a stall vendor for about $2 US. MUCH yummier than the crap I bought the day before, and I quickly determined that this would be my dinner the next day too. I also purchased a new contact lens solution --they had a small selection, and the majority of the things were in bulk packages of two bottles each, and I did not need or want that much. I finally found one that was just a lone bottle, good for soft lens and sensitive eyes, and bought that. Inside, along with the bottle was a tiny pack of tablets that said to use them only once a week in the solution. Okeedokee. Rinsed out my contacts and put them in the solution, happy as could be.
The next day, I had one of the melon bread I'd bought for breakfast, along with some breakfast tea (the hotel very kindly provided breakfast and afternoon tea packets with the hot water machine. And coffee and Chinese tea, but those are not important.) A few minutes before I was time to leave for class, I went to the bathroom, and opened my contact case. My contacts felt a little rubbery, but I figured different solutions make contacts feel differently (Optifree or whatever it is makes my contacts feel dry, Renu makes 'em feel slippery), so I popped my left contact in.
IT BURNED IT BURNED IT BURNED I had to pry open my eyelids and take out the contact, and then flushed out my eye with water for a good seven to ten minutes. A quick glance at the mirror confirmed that my left eye was bright red and oh it HURT.
What the hell was wrong with that solution?
I went to the garbage and fished out the box with all its tiny print and looked at the instructions. Then I ripped the box open so I could read the text on the inside of the box too. Apparently it was not a soaking solution. Apparently it contained (I can't remember which amount) 0.03 or 0.3% hydrogen peroxide. Apparently the 'One Step' name of the solution is a lie and it's a two step cleaning process. The people who designed the packaging and where the warnings are located and how BIG the warnings and instructions are need to revisit their concept.
I freaked out for a bit, called my mom telling her I got something in my eye (I was not telling her how stupid and deceived I was. No no no) and asked if, when I went back to Taiwan the next day and my eye still hurt, could I go see a doctor? She suggested using a bit of salt water to disinfect --I figured it was good and disinfected, but agreed politely and then headed out to class, glasses on and one eye bright red. *sigh*
The redness wore off by the time I got to the class building, which is excellent. Awkwardness with the guy from the date was not so excellent, but since he sat in the back and I sat in the front, I was safe.
One of the exercises in day two of the class was to use the Selection tool and color burn/dodge an image. Our practice image was Bakura Ryou from the YGO manga, which I found terribly amusing. Anyhoo, I enjoyed myself and gave him lots of gold shinies, and the teacher came over to me and asked if I was an art student.
"Nope."
"So are you considering art school? How old are you?"
"I'm 22. I graduated from college already."
"Oh. Interesting."
...Not going to lie, multitudes of painful stabbing sensations occured nowhere near my eye. I'm getting to hate that question more and more. Yes, I wasted a fortune on a useless liberal arts degree. No, I didn't go with my natural talents. Yes, I regret it. Shut up.
But the image came out nice and pretty.
For lunch, I waited until everyone had left so as to avoid a second 'date' situation. I wandered around, and couldn't find anyplace I felt comfortable enough to eat in. So I grabbed a hotdog and walked back to the classroom to eat.
The rest of the day passed relatively uneventfully, and then came time to finish and take a group photo and all of a sudden the girls started talking to me. Not lying, they just started chatting me up at the end of the two days together. One even said to me,"Oh, I'm going to Taiwan next week!" while I was waiting for the bathroom.
Anyhoo, after class I went back to my hotel's area and snapped these pictures of two sides of a building that made me feel like I was in the first grade again.
I don't know, the rainbow colors...
I popped back to the shopping center and hit up Kinokuniya's, having realized that in Singapore anal sex is illegal, as is oral sex unless it's a prelude to straight sex afterwards, and therefore combined with Singapore's obscenity laws, yaoi is nowhere to be found. So I bought a couple of books on living and working in Japan to research the possibility of moving there.
I bought more bread and chicken teriyaki w/rice for me, though when I got back to the hotel I realized that in my painful haste to leave, I'd forgotten to turn off the 'Do not disturb' sign, which meant neither my tea nor my towels had been replaced. Alas!
I took a bath every night I was in Singapore because the tub in our Taipei apartment...well, it has slidey glass doors on top of a tub and is just...not bubblebath material, y'know?
The next day, I took a taxi to the airport, where once again I discovered something in the bookstores there that I should've bought and didn't. (I have since come to the conclusion that when it comes to books...I should totally impulse buy. Because there's little chance of tracking down international books and publications in foreign countries.) It was a watch magazine that was cheap (four dollars US) that was coupled with a smaller pen magazine that had an article entitled,"Why Monte Blanc is not a pen brand." Since then I've been to three bookstores in Taipei trying to find it, and alas I cannot.
I flew to HongKong to change planes. I tried so hard to find the Dragon's Beard candy so beloved by my family and sold in the airport, but the guy wasn't there. I had planned to send small boxes of it out to various friends, but...ARGH. The main store was in the arrivals hall, well beyond my reach.
Once in Taipei, the taxi driver asked if I was Filipino. When I negated, he suggested that I was Thai.
....Yes, this made me unhappy. Shut up. I can understand mixing Koreans/Japanese/Chinese together sometimes (because sometimes, one looks more like another), but I fail to see how I resemble a Filipina; I'm too fat and *square.*
I got home after everyone had eaten dinner. W00t!
What has this outrageously expensive trip to Singapore taught me?
* A few new PS skills.
* I really enjoy working on graphics. The handson digital tweaking is soothing to me.
* That Singaporeans have an odd sense of conversational humor. My class instructor said that he would never say "Brush size," and would always say,"Size of brush" instead. This led to much laughter in the class, and when it was apparent I didn't 'get' the joke, someone yelled out,"Bra size!" ...which doesn't really sound the same to me, no matter how I say it, so...
* That I can never live in Singapore longterm --i.e. anything beyond two or three months is pure torture.
* Dating is torture. I refuse to go through more of it. Dating is the primary method of obtaining a lifemate. I will not be going through the primary method of obtaining. Logic concludes my chances of getting married just decreased drastically, while the chances of me spending my life as a spinster just skyrocketed.
* I want to obtain expat benefits at some company in Asia. Look! A goal! Or at least...a goal parameter! Hey lookit! I have one side of a triangle! ...Square! ...Polygon of indeterminate number of sides!
* That expat benefits for entry-level employees are damned impossible to get.
* That, upon reading the living guides I bought, I'm not entirely sure I want to live in Japan, but am at a loss for where else to go that'll give me space to breathe on my own. Oh, bloody fabulous.
In other news, I have also seen Pirates of the Caribbean 2. And...just much love for the fun factor, and bizarre angst factor. Beyond that, I'm not saying anything because I don't want to spoil anybody. If you haven't seen it yet, do so, but with zero expectations. Zero. Not bad expectations, not good expectations, just neutral. Neutral yields the best experiences in movie-going, I find.