went back to little india (again) today to have banana leaf apollo fish head curry, which was a childhood institution. they used to cart the dishes around and you could pick them, but nowadays it's a far less exotic way of ordering off menu. but the banana leaf is still there, the ladled vegetables, the poppadoms.

i ended up exploring the rather noisy area with jx, makes a good break from town. along upper dickson road there's a little world i didn't know existed. it looks pretty familar from my trips to backpacker districts around the world, but yeah, found it pretty strange to have one right at home. popped into a bar (prince of wales), had a drink, and as usual the people at the bar stools were all guys. had some crappy pale ale, the guy next to us left his job at a startup [www.oodle.com] he's 31 but looks 21, major in computer science from stanford university, left his job to go travelling a while. seriously, my life would be so much better if i had a pussy. there's just so much lonely sausage around. seriously... no girls at the bar save the waitresses, who're all right but all too professional. there's that movie the rose, the one with bette midler. girls are waitresses at the banquet of life. we do that to find love. oh i love to be in love, don't you love to be in love? but on the flip side there's a lot of thai massage there too.

another nice place i was at recently was at the little sliver of beach at sembawang park, from where you can see wendy's place at permas jaya. what i thought were oil palm plantations turn out to be golf courses. i wish they would just build bridges everywhere along the straits of johor, i mean, there are rivers wider than that. save people passport time and having to swim over. and then i can visit those seafood kiosks with gaudy lights more often. still, too many mosquitoes, prevents me from settling in to what might have been if malaysia was all ours and there weren't all these artifical borders. on the right you can see the shipbuilding activity going on at sembawang wharves.

need to travel again. one of the few benefits of singlehood. i'm not going to sell you the "oh suddenly singlehood is the greatest thing for me", although i've been re-evaluating that position. but no, i was happy on balance. i'm built for that kind of rubbish. but since i'm single and full of misery, it's only right that i leave my little calling card of misery in as many places in the world as possible. and the bloody exams are what make me have to make do with these little pleasures in such a small place as this.