Johor Bahru and Singapore – So Close, yet So Far.

So I wrote part of this entry a few days ago too – and yet I’m just finishing it now. Needless to say, we’ve been incredibly busy. But to thank you for dealing with my tardiness in posting, please accept this entry, filled with pictures! :D

I feel so bad for everybody on this flight. I feel worse for myself, since I am closest to who is undoubtedly the loudest, most annoying baby on the face of this planet. Now the dad is PTFO, and the mom must not really give a crap either. Can I smack the parents? Someone smack me if I ever let my kids misbehave so badly someday.

We only got a brief view of Singapore en route to the Zon Regenecy Hotel  By The Sea in Johor Bahru. It was a fairly comfortable bus ride, minus the stops for immigration in both countries. But when we got to the Zon, I was overtaken by the cigarette smoke everywhere. It was absolutely disgusting. We didn’t even make it into our first hotel room, as it was worse than the poison in the main atrium. But of course there were no nonsmoking rooms available, and we ended up in a renovated room which was marginally better, although I found myself having trouble breathing even in that room. Fortunately, Dielle showed up and we went out to dinner nearby at a hawker stall. The food was decent, but not as good as Bangkok.

There wasn’t really much else to do other than try and get some sleep for the tournament. And be amateur acrobats:

Since this isn’t a Scrabble blog, I won’t drone on and on about the tournament, but just touch on the non-Scrabble highlights.

Well first, a picture of Jesse and I playing. I won this game, but I drew very good tiles.

The food overall was quite good, but maybe not quite as good as Bangkok. Actually, my favorite meal in Malaysia was a Chinese dinner, but a simple Nasi Goreng Daging (beef fried rice, Malaysian style) is super tasty. I would liked to thank KL-er Vannitha for taking us to some very tasty street food, and providing some insight and translation (since she speaks Malaysian!)

The main story happened on the last night. We went to dinner at a noodle shop in the mall below the hotel, which tried to close 45 minutes early on us, rather than accept our orders and money. Eventually we convinced them, and despite the fact that they were out of most of the food, it was actually a pretty solid meal. We next went to KTV (Karaoke), also in the mall. After buying one hour of karaoke time, we struggled for a good 15 minutes figuring out how to get the machine to work, which was clearly an old and well-worn system. Jesse was visibly angry. But a pitcher of Tiger later, we were hard at work singing to some very strange covers of pop music (and the occasional actual song). Highlights of the night included Jesse singing Jay Chou, Sandy and Vannitha going all out at “Dancing Queen”, It’s MY Life (Bon Jovi) and of course, THE FINAL COUNTDOWN. According to everyone else, I killed on “Bad Romance”. Karaokeing was actually pretty fun – maybe I’ll try again sometime (yes, this was my first time karaokeing.

So what happened after karaoke? Well, we tried to buy another hour, but were told by the workers, who were very tuned into their facebooks, that they couldn’t give us more time because there was a police search. We were rather befuddled, since there were no police inside. After about 10 minutes, we gave up and left. But then, from outside the karaoke place (keep in mind, this is the fifth floor of an incredibly seedy mall, which is below an additional 11 story hotel), we saw down to the floor below, where a bunch of Malay police had surrounded a restaurant. Drunk guys kept staggering out, but finally the cops walked away with what we could only assume were some hookers. It was probably the most boring shakedown ever, but all the locals seemed rather enthused. By this time, I was falling asleep, and headed upstairs, while the others apparently took down a tower, and listened to the “cellophane slappers”. Who are the cellophane slappers? They are the lounge singers who sing every night in the cigarette smoke infested “open air” lounge at the Zon Regency. Apparently in the past they have been downright terrible, but honestly this batch wasn’t too bad. I heard them sing Bad Romance at one point, and didn’t think it was too bad, but it got far less rave reviews than my karaoke performance, so take my words with a grain of salt. *shrug*

As it turned out, in the Scrabble tournament, after lots of upswings and downswings, unending exhaustion, and lots of frustration from the word list difference previously explained in my entry on the Princess Cup, I ended up in 6^th place, and won $700, which paid for a couple more flights, and the tournament itself. Granted, I lost my last 4 games to get 6^th, but this tournament has one of the strongest fields each year, and I already had the huge dictionary handicap, so it was hard to be too upset.

Not the best picture ever, but all we could get of me receiving my prize from a higher-up in Johor:

We hung around for a bit, trying to figure out the best plan of action on how to get to Singapore. Somehow, we convinced Dielle to tag along to Singapore with us for the evening, so eventually the three of us headed off to catch a taxi to the bus station. Before we left, we talked to Pakorn (tournament winner) and Sha-Lyn, and agreed to possibly meet up at a blues club in Singapore later that night, which was supposedly a pretty awesome joint.

We hopped a taxi pretty quickly, and made it to the Causeway without incident. We then got on a bus to cross. Once we tried to go through the Singapore customs, we realized we had not filled out departure cards. So we waited in line a second time, got through, and headed down to find our bus. Apparently our bus was running rather infrequently because we had to wait for close to an hour in the stuffy bus terminal for our bus to some place in the city. Our dinner reservation was for 8:00, and I'd say we showed up at maybe 9:15. Actually we were saved by Jesse's Chinese speaking abilities when hiring a taxi in Singapore itself to get to dinner because the cab driver had no idea where to go otherwise, or so it seemed.

Actually I was pretty impressed with Jesse's fluency in Chinese. I think he took it for a couple years at Yale, and then spent what sounded like a pretty darn awesome year in Beijing learning the language more after undergrad.

So it was finally time for the meetup with Gabe. He was there, with a couple friends, as well as Sandy, who had taken a private car from Johor to Singapore and was actually likely the only person who was actually on time to the dinner.

Lots of food had already been ordered, so we jumped right in. Crab was everywhere, as well as shrimp, noodles, rice, veggies – so much good food. And quite frankly, I’ve never had such big pieces of crab meat. And so tasty, too. And then you take a bunch of the chile sauce and mix it with the fried rice. Oh man. Regretably, I took no pictures since we were so late, but suffice to say it was a delicious meal. A picture with 3 of my 4 main travel buddies this trip (Dion was home by then):

We wanted to drop off our stuff at the hotel, and then Gabe finally clued us in on where we were staying. He booked us a night at the CONRAD HOTEL!!!!!! The hotel was absolutely GORGEOUS. Once we got there, I didn’t really want to leave because it was so nice. And then everything had my name on it! EVERYTHING! I made plans to bring a bunch of things home.

So then we finally got out of the hotel to go to the blues club. We tried to take a “maxi cab” (to fit 5 people), but instead ended up in a pseudo-limo that cost S$45 for like a 10 minute ride. We found the club, which was cool, but no Pakorn or Sha-Lyn. Oops. We walked around for awhile, found no other exciting bars, and then found a building with KTV places. We got off on each floor, heard the super expensive prices for all-night rates in incredibly strange dark, many-colored rooms (only pictures can describe, or just being there), and then walked back to another outside bar, where we took down a tower of Tiger. Eventually, we stumbled back to the hotel and had a nice long sleep – my first full night in quite awhile.

One KTV joint:

When we finally got up at 11 AM, there wasn’t much time to do much of anything except swim. So what did we do? Well we swam, obviously. The pool was gorgeous, up to par with the rest of the hotel, and we got every last minute out of it. I’m not sure the rich tourists were thrilled by our frisbeeing in the pool, but hey, we had a blast.

Jesse in pool-layout mode:

So yeah, staying at a Conrad Hotel, in Singapore no less, was totally awesome. Thanks so much Gabe! That was so incredibly awesome.

And yes, I got plenty of Conrad swag.

I was disappointed we didn’t have more time to see/do stuff in Singapore because it is a pretty unique place, so clean and pretty, but I get the feeling that I will probably layover through there again in the future, and will see more then. But it was a nice little break. Which leads me to the title of the post.

I can’t really speak for all of the city of Johor, but at least the area we were in was just so dingy, smoky, dirty, seedy – I could only spend 5 days at a place like that if there was an awesome Scrabble tournament there. Otherwise…eek. Now Singapore on the other hand, just a complete polar opposite. Yet somehow, these places are just a causeway away. Just a very interesting dichotomy. I’m not saying Johor is like a ghetto or anything, but it just wasn’t for me.

So then we got to the airport and found out our tickets were actually business class! So we got to fly Thai Air business class from Singapore to Bangkok! The food was fabulous, the wine was great (and free flowing), and the reclining seat was just too cool. Not to mention warm towels. And I didn’t even mention the lounge buffet. Thai partners with Singapore Air, so we got to use the Singapore Airlines Business Class Lounge. Speechless. Words cannot describe. My attempt: so much food, drink, awesome, everything, I wanna go back. Actually, it turns out our tickets from Bangkok to Manila are business class, too, so that’s something to look forward to! Good surprises rule.

PTFO, yo.

So needless to say I was nice and relaxed going into Bangkok for the overnight stop. It turned out Siam Journey was full, so we stayed near the airport in the Lat Krabang neighborhood. We walked around the nearby night market, Jesse bought an absolutely ridiculous[ly awesome] puffin-like ceramic(?) thing which we named “Sandy-Puff”, and then walked down the alley our hotel was on. It was a trip to be in a suburb of Bangkok because there were no bright city lights – it felt like we were somewhere totally different. It turned out that night was the King’s birthday, but we didn’t really go outside in time to see any celebrations, oops. Still super tired, and we had to get up bright and early to catch our flight to Luang Prabang.

And sure enough, we made it to our flight on time, and I won’t say much else about it, since you undoubtedly know how annoying the screaming baby was and the damn careless parents. Next post will start our journey to Laos. We’re currently in Phonsavan, going to see the Plain of Jars tomorrow. I don’t really think I’ll have the blog finished by the time I get home, but I will finish it – I promise! Hope you’re all well wherever you are.

P.S. Thanks again to Michael Tang for putting on an awesome event. I’m so glad I finally got to attend (and in the nick of time apparently), and I will undoubtedly be back for more international Scrabble. The atmosphere in the tournament room is just so much more enjoyable than in the US.

P.P.S. Especially for you, Mom:

This picture was taken from the room in Singapore, no joke.

Ni Hao Laos!