Medan; the end of my Sumatra trip

I headed to Medan, one of Indonesia’s bigger – and therefore more horrible – cities, to fly back out to Singapore then onwards. I ended up spending a lot more time in Indonesia than I’d planned, and had a great time. But in my last few hours there I finally cracked… all sense of patience and compassion was lost and I started getting angry at everyone. In my lowest point ever in traveling, I even ate at McDonalds to avoid the real world. So it was with a lot of relief that I got back to Singapore for a couple of hours to reaquaint myself with personal space, hot water, flush toilets, and all that good western stuff. Then 12 hours later, jumped on another plane to take me to Istanbul!

Singapore

I stopped in Singapore for a couple of nights. My old workmate Vinnie and his kiwi flatmates let me sleep on their couch – thanks! Here we are enjoying a feast:

Try and spot the king prawns with cornflakes… it’s better than you might think. The other culinary delight was an ice-cream sandwich for breakfast.

Singapore is a strange city. I’ve thought of how to describe it for a while and the best I can come up with is that it’s like when you’re playing simcity, and for some reason everything goes right. So you get all this money and don’t know what to do… in the end you splash out on a couple of nice museums (Asian Civilisations Museum was excellent) and parks… then after a while all your land is filled up (Singapore is definitely full). So you play for a bit more and try and get the biggest population you can. And we all know what happens next: you get bored and frustrated and launch a bunch of monsters and earthquakes and hurricanes, then go outside and play cricket. So, if you live in Singapore, leave now, while you still can!

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably had a more productive childhood than me.