Extra curriculum activities

This time I am sharing a selection of Singapore enabled free time activities.

One of the first water activities which I made acquaintance with was wake boarding. On this artificial island it should come as no surprise that there is of course a man made lagoon with machine run cable pulling wake boarders around. Cable operated approach made it easy to try and try again to get the surfing going on. For a good part of the first hour I was underwater after repeated unsuccessful attempts at staying upright. Somehow the lost balance was eventually found and managed to start enjoying the sport. On the next visits I have since changed from the amateur board to more intermediate board. There is clearly a learning curve happening here, but not yet on the level of the guy shown on my video clip.

Another water related -- and yet as artificial -- sport is flowriding on a man made wave. They are pumping 30 000 - 100 000 gallons of water (depending on the size of the wave) per minute and adrenaline driven fools like yours truly are aiming to ride the wave with a flowboard. Once again a balancing act -- this time asking for bit of a different angle and posture than on the wakeboard and thus starting the fun of falling down from the beginning all over again. As you can expect: a whole lot of fun.

One of the niceties of living in Singapore is to be able to pack my bags and leave on a short notice to a long weekend trip to one of the magical diving sites around. A week ago I went to Tioman Island on South China Sea off the coast of Malaysia. Through quite convenient and ridiculously inexpensive bus & ferry connection I can get below the surface in a matter of hours. After hustle and bustle of metropolitan life, there I was diving through underwater caves with sea turtles and blue spotted rays while trying to find perfect buoyancy being surrounded by schools of coral fish. I've gotta do this again soon!

One final example is about flying. Singapore has this thing with superlatives: everything has to be either the biggest or largest or longest. For example this city has the largest Ferris Wheel in the world and it is currently building the biggest indoor stadium. On that note we have the largest windtunnel for indoor skydiving. Once again an absolutely stunning experience to be suspended in midair and trying to control your position in 3D space with tiniest of movements. Overall this was one skillfully executed service offering, with thematic instruction videos and clever upsell scheme after having enjoyed the thrill of flying. Once again the guy in my video is not me, but I underwent similar experience.

Naturally there is a wide variety of other activities to be pursued. In addition to the activities mentioned, so far I have

1. rented a bike for a day to see if the bold statements about this city being entirely connected for pedestrian and bicycle access without having to wait at any traffic lights is exaggerated (which it is apparently due to so many construction sites)
2. practiced wall climbing in uncomfortably hot weather (me being the odd westerner trembling on the lowest wall holds while thin yet muscular localites scaling the walls without breaking a sweat), 
3. participated in some martial arts classes (dojo luckily was air conditioned, but weirdly no showers provided. Don't these people sweat at all?)

Still on to-do list I have things like climbing Mount Kinabalu in Borneo (and enjoying the world's highest via ferrata -- apparently Malaysians know their superlatives as well) and taking the mandatory photo opp at Angor Wat.

Celestial wonders on the Finnish summer sky

Even though I have witnessed the natural phenomena of midnight Sun (or at least not so dark nights) every summer for several decades, it still continues to fascinate me. Especially powerful the effect is after having survived yet another dark winter, which is the flip side caused by the the same axial tilt of the Earth. In Singapore somebody flips the light switch at 7.30 PM and turns it back on at 7 AM practically all year round. So even after this systematic approach, it was yet again captivating to enjoy the summer solstice in Finland this June with close friends and family.

A quarter of Finland is located north of the Arctic Circle. This is where you get to experience the actual midnight Sun. I was celebrating the midsummer festivities in the Central Finland, where the Sun does set, but only for few hours and it doesn't really get that dark at all. Only a dusk. I have heard from a number of foreign friends that they have actually trouble sleeping during Finnish summers when it is so light outside. My tip for all travellers is to close their eyes when sleeping.

Picture taken at midnight on summer solstice.
That is not the Sun in the sky, but another coincidental celestial marvel: supermoon.

PS. I have been lately wondering that there aren't likely many vampires living in Finland during the summer months. Then again they all would be having a field day all over lasting from September to March.    

Gift redemption process

Obnoxiously loud. That's how I would characterize my new vacuum cleaner. I got the little beast as a gift for subscribing to local newspaper (appropriately titled The Straits Times in a country which still considers homosexuality illegal). It seems to be very common over here to bundle all kinds of unrelated gifts or add-ons to a product or a service. And it seems to be working as an advertisement tactics as it is attracting the crowds. It took me more than 2 months to receive my vacuum cleaner due to "unforeseen interest in this particular gift".

So far I have also received a camera for signing up for a mobile subscription and won years worth of ice cream from a Hobbit movie contest (Yei!). The similarity between all of these gifts has been that there is more or less same redemption scheme behind them. With the received redemption letter I need to find my way to typically some far away (as much of a far away places as there can be on this small island) redemption center between 9-5 on Monday through Friday. In one case it was 2 tiered redemption sending me from one industrial area to another. The vacuum cleaner was luckily available from the city but from a 3rd party company that seems to be providing only these gift redemptions for other companies. They had a stack of the vacuum cleaners and various other weird stuff behind the counters.

I wonder if they have intentionally made it hard to redeem these gifts -- I mean, why couldn't they just send them over through regular mail -- to decrease the number of people actually receiving the gifts. For corporations it would be a minimal save, but save none the less. Then again there are stingy individuals like me running half the city after El Cheapo vacuum cleaner. Furthermore, I just recently invested in not exactly a cheapo pair of noise cancelling headphones, so I can have them cancelling out all the infernal racket the machine is making while cleaning the floors from all gecko droppings.

Finnish Cultural Imperialism pt III

Strange. Last time I had just returned from a trip to Finland I spotted this global supply chain oddity. I came back yesterday after having enjoyed the midsummer festivities with friends and family and now I spot a can of Lonkero in a local ordinary supermarket. Well, to be honest it was one of those supermarkets that does tend to the needs of home sick (and wealthy) immigrants in addition to providing everyday groceries. This can was close by to some pretty authentic looking rye bread, which had Swedish label texts.

The moral of the story is that I can get pretty much everything in Singapore to keep the dawning home sickness at bay. Of which there hasn't really been any real symptoms of during the past 9 months though. The reason why I was browsing the alcohol section of the store more closely was to seek out any particularly scrumpy ciders which I have so far only found out in Wales and New Zealand. But glad I'm not a kiwi as apparently not all sorts of home sicknesses can be cured even when willing to pay a premium.

To cater for the non Finnish audience of this blog, here's the wiki entry of the classic Lonkero, which dates back to the Helsinki Olympics '52.