Singapore: Feeding My Pesky Travel Bug

After returning to Thailand from a month in England visiting my family I began to feel homesick for the first time - it was incredible to be reunited with my family and friends, see my Dad get married and meet my nephew for the first time and so boarding another one-way flight across the world, just like I did when I flew to India at the beginning of my trip two years ago, felt wrong this time, especially since I didn't have the excitement of the unknown to look forward to. It was back to work for me which meant being a human climbing frame/clown to twenty-nine cheeky little five year olds, roasting in Thailand's furnace-like climate and meeting the new foreign teachers that replaced my friends who left at the end of last semester. It took me a while to feel settled in my little north-east Thailand town again but the minute I did I started to crave adventure; this is why I decided to embark on a mini solo-backpacking trip to Singapore during a long weekend - it was the Buddhist version of Lent in Thailand which meant we had a few extra days off school (cheers, Buddha!). In the name of adventure and stinginess instead of flying I travelled by bus from Thailand, through the entire length of peninsular Malaysia, to Singapore; apart from the border crossing we only stopped once at a dark roadside shack in the middle of nowhere where I ate a plate of green mystery food whilst being stared at intensely by twenty perplexed Malaysian people - they seemed to be wondering who this yellow-haired, white-skinned creature was...I was back in the unknown again and it felt great! 

As soon as I was dropped off in Singapore I started exploring on foot - this is a mosque in the Arab quarter.

Luckily I'd travelled with only hand luggage so I was able to comfortably explore as soon as I got off the bus.

Cable cars join the main island of Singapore to one of its many surrounding islands.

When I visited this Chinese temple I was instructed to perform a bizarre fortune-telling ritual by shaking a cup full of sticks and throwing fish-shaped stones on the floor - the answer? "Misfortune comes naturally to you. No good times". Thanks for the optimism...!

I headed to my hostel after spending the day wondering around the city state and immediately signed up for the free kick-scooter tour they were offering. I'd already researched all the things I wanted to see and do during my visit and foresaw three busy days ahead however we were taken to every conceivable point of interest during the five-hour excursion. Singapore seemed like it was worlds away from most of the places in Asia I have lived in and visited - it is modern, westernised and very expensive (especially for me coming with my Thai baht) and therefore home to many up-market shopping centers; in order to navigate through the heaving metropolis we scooted through a couple of these centers and I've rarely felt so out of place - fifteen scruffy, sweaty (Singapore's humidity is stifling!!) backpackers scooting past Prada and Gucci under crystal chandeliers was surreal to say the least! As was our bizarre scoot through the iconic Raffles hotel - our cheeky scoot saved me spending a month's worth of food money on their famous Singapore Sling cocktail just to get a look inside. 

Here we are outside The InnCrowd Backpackers Hostel before the scooter tour began.

As it got dark we were taken to Gardens by the Bay where we laid on the ground and watched lights in giant tree-structures dancing to local music. In the background you can see Marina Bay Sands Hotel which features three skyscrapers with giant ship plonked on top.

The scooter trip culminated in an utterly spectacular light-on-water show at the harbour with Singapore's stunning skyline as a backdrop. 

Singapore's harbour comes to life at night.

As far as travelling experiences go, Singapore was one of the easiest and most pleasant cites I've been to on this continent; not only do most people speak English, making it a nice break for me as I'm constantly having to translate everything where I live, but it's also super organised and squeaky clean - littering, J-walking, smoking outside designated areas and even chewing gum are illegal and carry hefty-enough fines to deter people. Singapore is a melting pot of cultures and so I revelled in the spicy culinary delights of Little India several times, ate Singapore noodles at a Chinese restaurant, enjoyed a Japanese muscle dish at an outside food court, shared a plethora of local dishes with a couple of foreign Singaporean residents over beer at a roadside restaurant that spilled on to the street as well as chowing down on sushi and Malaysian food...YUM! I spent the rest of my time in Singapore with various people from all around the world that I'd met at my hostel and together we waffled for hours on end about our travelling experiences, explored the Botanic gardens, climbed Singapore's second-highest mountain (at a whopping 105 metres it's nothing to be proud of however I could see the entire country from the top), sampled the country's nightlife several times, danced at al fresco street bars whilst colossal-sized umbrella structures shielded us from the rain and then attempted to sweat out our hangovers by cycling along the country's coastline. 

I've been longing for authentic Indian food ever since I spent three months travelling and eating my way around the sub-continent in 2014 - this was definitely the place to satiate my cravings.

The Botanic Gardens were full of unusual looking plants, strange sounding animals in the trees, black swans and these giant lizards.

A Hindu temple.

I scootered, walked, cycled and danced around a whole country in three days - how many times can you say that?

Dancing Farang

An average day in my second teaching job in Thailand starts with my little students following me two by two, holding hands, across the school to the flag-raising ceremony. Everyone stands still and quiet for the national anthem whilst the school's giant flag is raised by students on a podium; the school band plays before prayers and chants are recited in unison by the thousands of children and teachers who are spread across the school's playing field. After about twenty five minutes, once the daily routine has finished, all the older kids leave to start class leaving only the kindergarten students; us foreign teachers all take turns getting up onto the stage to dance and sing English songs into a microphone whilst the students copy our actions. This is followed by fifteen minutes of dancing to Thai songs and by this point we are all drenched in sweat and desperate to retire to our arctic air-con in our classrooms because the humidity, even at 8am in the morning, makes it difficult to be outside. After I've handed out milk, distributed baby powder for their little faces and brushed their hair I begin my lesson. At 11.30am the train of students reappears as I lead the way to the cafeteria whilst they fight to hold my hand and after handing out their lunch trays I sit with them to eat; one of the best perks of the jobs is the free school lunches! Forget soggy carrots and chicken nuggets, no, no, no...every day is like going to a Thai restaurant. Some of my favourite dishes are deep-fried eggplant, papaya salad, glass-noodle salad, egg soup and grilled mackerel all served without fail, every single day, with plain white rice (yes, the Asian/rice stereotype is true - I eat it twice a day!). I then read to them whilst they wriggle around on their sleeping mats before walking home for two hours whilst they have their nap. The afternoon is filled with more stories, time with their workbooks, them using me as a human climbing frame at every opportunity and then and 3pm we have yet another break where we go to the cafeteria to eat hot rice soup with pork- how the Thais are so slim I will never know because they are always eating! 

Posing with the director of the school at the New Year party where they raffled off a mixture of prizes such as fans, bikes and gold(!!) before making us dance on stage - Thais LOVE making the foreigners dance...

 ...daily dancing after the flag raising ceremony...

...dancing around the school with a tambourine with trees made out of money to show off how much my students' parents had donated towards the new building!

Here are my little rascals eating lunch and mucking around - no wonder I'm always finding rice in their hair!

Sports day in Thailand - where the students are plastered with make up, hair pieces and frilly, sparkly outfits then paraded through the town!

The name of this sport in Thai translates to 'monkeys carrying watermelons'.

I was asked by the Grandma of one of my students, four-year-old Zoe, if I would tutor her and her two three-year-old twin brothers after school; the Grandma, or Khun Yai in Thai, is very rich and pushes me to tutor her grandchildren every day whilst speaking to me solely in Thai which is a challenge since I'm still learning. I'm concentrating so hard when she speaks that I must look almost constipated! The extra money is great but the children are a handful, so much so that they each have their own nanny amongst the vast team of domestic servants that the Grandma employs. I can't blame three and four year olds for not wanting to learn a second language after a long day at school but I sometimes feel like I'm battling with them to pay attention and it doesn't help that on more than one occasion the little ones have weed on my leg or poked my eye out with a pencil! 

This is Huns, one of the little boys I tutor for and although they can be hard work they are extremely cute as you can see!

We went on a school field trip to a beautiful temple which had these giant statues outside.

The school trip ended at a rather sad zoo where the animals were kept in tiny cages.

Aoei and Yok showing us that Thailand really is the land of smiles! My students are so happy and it really makes going to work every day a pleasure!

On the weekends we have room parties and sometimes visit the local Thai clubs.

I will never get tired of the fruit here! This is juicy dragon fruit. 

Teacher Jellyfart

After a very memorable month off school travelling around Indonesia I landed in Bangkok and made my way to my new home town, Sisaket, in the north-east of Thailand. I was still unable to walk properly, due to my bunk bed fiasco in Bali weeks earlier, so I hobbled on and off planes and buses with my overflowing backpack (moving house at the same time as travelling...I don't recommend it) until I reached Sisaket. When I arrived in my previous town, Lampang, six months earlier I didn't know anyone, I had no idea where I was going to live or even where to start looking, there were no other foreigners, nobody spoke English and I didn't know any Thai and so the feeling I got was a weird mixture of fear, excitement, adrenaline and anxiety however my arrival in Sisaket couldn't have been more different; waiting for me at the bus station were my friends (who I'd met during my teacher training course in Bangkok last April), there's a small community of foreign teachers, I had an apartment waiting for me and friends to show me around. Sisaket is similar to Lampang in the sense that it is very much, at the risk of sounding clichéd, the 'real Thailand' - tourists just do not come here - so forget the paradisiacal images of palm tree-fringed beaches and bars crawling with bucket-wielding backpackers - those destinations are firmly reserved for school holidays! My new home town is like most (non-touristic) towns in Thailand; the obstacle courses they call pavements are crowded with bins, drains, giant wobbly chunks of concrete, the odd sleeping person, motorcycles and Thai barbecue stalls, everywhere you go you are incessantly stared at and talked about (p.s. dear strangers: I can speak a bit of Thai now so I can understand what you're saying!!!), there are stray dogs chilling on every corner, there's a market that comes alive after dark, you can't swing a Siamese cat without hitting a 7/11 convenience store and (now this next one is the best part) everywhere you look there is a plethora of street food stands each selling its own specialty dish or snack from crispy deep-fried bananas, Thai pancakes, coconut ice cream topped with peanuts and fresh tropical fruit to squids on wooden sticks, mango and papaya salads, noodle soup, sticky rice, chicken feet and cups full of sweetcorn covered in sugar! That being said Sisaket does have a few features that make it special, namely the giant lake that plays host to regular outdoor festivals and events, has running and cycling tracks around its 2.3 mile circumference and an unrivaled view of the sunset.  

My absolute favourite Thai snack - crunchy fried bananas with sesame seeds and massive potential for addiction!!!

The Tree House Hotel in Sisaket is home to the swimming pool we visit most weekends.

Sunset at the lake.

The Thailand sky never fails to please. 

A shrine at a temple in neighbouring town Surin.

 Loi Krathong festival at the lake was a colourful frenzy of flowers, lights, fireworks and Thai dancing. 

We launched our handmade 'krathongs' - made out of banana tree trunks and leaves, flowers, incense and candles - into the water to symbolise good luck.

Thai street food (complete with child under table).

My second Christmas in Asia was spent in a restaurant run by an English man who cooked us a traditional festive lunch with a side of fancy dress.

We didn't get any time off over the festive period apart from a long weekend at New Year which was a blur of beaches and bars on Koh Samet island - a great example of the aforementioned Thai paradise.

After a few days of settling in to my new home it was time to start my new job; instead of teaching a whole high school full of lovely, sometimes shy, giggly teenagers obsessed with their phones I am now responsible for imparting knowledge to twenty-eight curious, impossibly-adorable and for the most part snotty five-year-old students who are obsessed with...me! Rather than teaching twelve different classes once or twice a week I am now a kindergarten English Program homeroom teacher which means I am with the same class all day and able to build special relationships with the children whose parents pay extra for them to have a farang (foreigner) with them all day; I teach them in the mornings using flashcards, games and songs and and the rest of the day is spent reading them stories, guiding them through their English and maths workbooks, playing with them, cuddling them and sitting in on their music, computer, swimming and Chinese lessons (yes, they are five years old and they are learning English AND Chinese!). All this is done with the help of three, yes THREE, Thai teachers who are with me all day: T.Grace is the head teacher who is in charge of organising the class, teaching them Thai and attending meetings, T.Rainy helps control the class and we also have a nanny, T.May, who cleans the kids up. This allows us farangs to be the 'fun' teachers and therefore we're pretty popular with the children and sometimes I can't quite believe I'm getting paid to sing, dance, act like a clown and have so much fun! A lot of my kids are better at expressing themselves in English than my eighteen-year-old students at my last school however they are still learning how to speak Thai and form words; they pronounce my name 'Teacher Jellyfart', partly thanks to the 'J is for Jellyfish' poster that's on the wall and as for the 'fart' part, well...I can't explain that one. I've noticed a big difference in Thai nicknames here compared to what I'm used to - probably a geographical and generational thing - but instead of having the odd 'Poo' in my class I've now got children with names like Boss, Bambam, Tamtam, Ninja, Fighter and Progress (who has a brother called Program). I tell a lie, I did have a poo in my new class but it was not the 'nickname that means crab in Thai' variety, more the 'freshly laid by a five-year-old next to the classroom door' kind. 

Every couple of weeks we celebrate a student's birthday by throwing a party for them in the afternoon complete with cake and pizza. For some reason the cake is always eaten first and the pizza is always seafood flavour which is the kids' favourite.

Getting some serious colouring work done.

I was asked to choreograph a dance for the Christmas show to 'Jingle Bells' as well as design their costumes - my students are the little snowmen and reindeer.

 There are four other foreign teachers working for the Kindergarten English Program and here we are with some of our Thai co-teachers.

 Thai dance show at school.

 The students gave food to one hundred monks that came to school in order to 'make merit'.

 Each week I am given a topic to teach - this particular week was the King's Birthday which has been designated as Father's Day in Thailand.

I incorporate craft into my lessons - here are my students with their hand-made krathongs for Loi Krathong Festival (the white on their faces is baby powder which we distribute to them four times a day).

Never a dull moment!

Swimming lessons!

The 'T' Stands for 'Party'

After Bali myself and Vic embarked on a journey to Gili T - a hedonistic backpackers' island off the northwest coast of Lombok, Indonesia - during which I had to be carried on and off boats, with the rest of the heavy loads and backpacks, on account of my smashed up left side after falling off a top bunk in a hostel in Bali. The boats on Gili T moor five metres away from the powdery white sand so I was carted over the heads of a few helpful male travellers whilst they waded through the water. I wasn't able to walk to the hostel we'd booked - Gili Castle Backpackers - so I sat on the beach whilst Vic found our hostel and dropped off her bag in order to come back and help me with mine; at that moment the heavens opened and everyone ran for cover and proceeded to stare at me - the soggy, broken heap on the shore - from the safety of nearby bars until an Indonesian bar worker took pity on me and dragged me by my arms through the wet sand to a bar table under an umbrella leaving a long, Jenny-shaped streak on the otherwise perfect sand whilst crowds of people looked on. I'd certainly made an entrance. I quickly sourced a tiny Asian-sized crutch (only one as my left arm wasn't up to supporting any weight) and hobbled to the hostel. How can I describe Gili Castle Backpackers? Well, its dorms surround a courtyard containing a bar and a pool with an attached climbing wall which are both crawling day and night with backpackers from all around the world necking Indonesian Bintang beer and vodka joss shots, its nightly parties bring together hundreds of twenty-something strangers and it has a giant black dildo of unknown origins called Bernard as its mascot; all this is in the shadow of a giant mosque that booms out its deafening call for prayer every couple of hours across the whole island. If I had been searching for the epitome of juxtaposition I would look no further. 

Hostel snorkelling trip that turned out to be more of a vodka drinking trip.

Gili Castle Backpacker's as seen from the top of the climbing wall.

THAT mosque. Some would complain about being woken up during the lengthy 4am Quaranic recitations but I say you aren't doing Gili T properly if you're already sleeping by 4am!

Partying with my crutch!

The island's food market....incredible! My favourite was the jack fruit curry.

Island friends.

A hammock in the calm sea at sunset? Yes please!

We spent ten nights having the time of our lives on Gili T!

Rick the Stick from Koh Tao joined in the mayhem - I left him there as the new hostel mascot alongside my crutch!

No cars or motorbikes are allowed on the island so the streets are full of bikes and horse and carts by day and backpackers dancing to Indonesian street performers by night.

Riding wonky tandem bicycles around the island after dark on potholed dust tracks with horse and carts thundering past has got to be some of the best fun I've ever had.

TIME.OF.OUR.LIVES!!!