On Monday, I played hooky and went a couple of places, did a few things, and bought nothing! The last, especially, is an accomplishment. Woke up as per normal, as I was still deciding whether to head into work. Fickle was me so I hopped off the train at the JE station and caught a train on the north line, and that meant I couldn’t have made it to work on time anyway. And that was settled.

There aren’t that many MRT stations in Singapore, but when you don’t have a set destination and each station presents itself as one, it gets a little trickier to decide on just one. I thought about heading to the zoo, but decided to just alight at Sembawang because I had never been there. Well, well. There was nothing much around the station area, and the shopping mall felt a little sad (and gloomy), so I went out into the HDB estate and out into the unforgiving sun. Mornings are weird times to be around HDB estates; barely anyone is around (only a handful of grandparents and their grandchildren) and the void decks smell like their absent inhabitants. Yet, there was the feeling that there was always someone peering from his/her window and wondering why the hell I was taking a photo of wall corners, public telephones and expired parking coupons.

After a while, I got this brilliant idea of walking to the next station, which was Yishun. So I did. I have walked from station from station before, and those walks were manageable (10-15 mins for a station, maybe). Of course, this time, it took longer. Much longer. I walked along with the tracks so there weren’t any detours or stopping-to-play-with cats moments, and still it took 40-45 minutes. I did stop a few times to take a few pictures, but it was at least half an hour, my dear. How that happened, I still have no idea. “Welcome to Yishun”. Well, after you’ve passed that, you know you still have a few kilometres to go. And, then, yes, the shopping mall (aka aircon aircon aircon) had to be under renovation.

I also had a related brilliant idea when having the first brilliant idea that I would walk to Ang Mo Kio, but the brilliance of that was downgraded infinitely after walking to Yishun. I took a look at the train route map afterwards, and a train ride to Yishun takes 4 minutes. A ride to AMK from Yishun will take 10 minutes. Me legs grateful. Me likes trains.

After heading to AMK, I took a bus that took me somewhere in Lorong Chuan/Toa Payoh where I had the worst bak ku teh ever. Pepper + soup != bak ku teh. On a not entirely unrelated note, add potatoes to your bak ku teh; they taste great. So by one in the afternoon, I was more tired than I would be if I were working, so I decided that some relaxing was in order. And therefore, I watched a movie.

The Shinjuku Incident was/is a very decent movie. If you blank out Jackie Chan’s face and replace it with Daniel Wu’s face, you get Daniel Wu’s doppelgangers and a better-looking film. I don’t know why the former gets all the young girls. Why. Why. Anyone in their right mind would choose him over Jackie Chan. I didn’t think I would like it much and I did find it a tad (tad) demoralising and depressing and extremely joyless. Nevertheless, it stayed with me after it ended, and that is usually a good indication. I stayed in Kabuki-cho during my first trip to Japan, and the first evening my friend and I arrived (after a long train ride from Hiroshima), we got lost and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Imagine huge black guys bellowing at you for acting like foreigners (erm, we are foreigners and no, we didn’t want to enjoy ourselves). Our hotel was situated at the far end, so every day, we would pass by numerous love hotels and scores of male hosts loitering outside their workplaces. Hmm, it was quite an interesting experience, I guess, and I thought I wouldn’t mind staying there again (hotels there are cheap!). After watching the movie, I’ve changed my mind. Har.

Damnit. This is turning out to be a long entry. Shall continue the rest of the day another day.