Underway

Waving off in style

When arriving at the University, where the bus was scheduled to leave at 15:00, there was a surprisingly full parking lot and a group of 50 or so students and (once more) parents and partners, for a second round of the long goodbye. The fill degree of the parking lot turned out to have more to do with the football game of FC Twente taking place at that moment: waves of sound rolled over us from afar - impressively loud in fact, given that the stadium is 1500m away.

Bus exit at Schiphol

After a first halfhearted practice of the buddy check principle, a protocol that I might explain later in more detail, we all got aboard smoothly for an uneventful bus trip, enlivened by the uncensured version of Julik's questionnaire (in which he himself won a suspiciously large number of categories) arriving at Schiphol with a mere 45 minutes delay due to major roadwords near Muiden. Never mind, with a departure time of 20:55 we had quite a bit of leeway - though it must have been irritating for the batch of wavers-off waiting at Schiphol for the third and last opportunity to say their goodbyes.

MISC queuing at the bagage drop-off

The remaining leeway was actually fast used up by the usual queues, for bagage drop-off, passport control, hand luggage scan and (slightly less usual) MacDonalds - some of which were longer than I have seen before at Schiphol, and all of which were aggravated by the well-known law that a group moves slower than any individual member therein. Nevertheless, all went without a hitch, and though due to our delay we didn't get to meet Sander Bannink at the airport, who is taking a different approach via Dubai as he also visits a friend there on the way back, no actual winner of the "first to get lost" or "first to be late" categories materialised as yet.

Sander, having taken the Dubai route

A flight of 12 hours requires a sleeping strategy. For the last few long-distance trips, mine has been to sleep as little as I could, on the principle that I would then be so tired upon arrival that I could sleep at any time and so get into the right rhythm straight away. I was not sitting very close to the rest of the group, as a consequence of my attempts to get the best seat possible during checkin, but later I heard that many of them had gone for the other extreme of maximal sleep, in some cases chemically induced. We'll see how that works out for them. With the in-flight entertainment you have nowadays, you can actually pass the time rather pleasantly: after a fruitless attempt to join Sytse's multiplayer Texas Hold'em game I decided to catch up on some films I missed in the cinema and successively made my way through Carol, A Man Called Ove, Alice through the Looking Glass, The Hateful Eight and part of Angry Birds. From time to time there were minor inerruptions such as servings of water or toilet stops. Midway through the fourth film I did doze off for half an hour or so.

Colourful: 101 GB (100GB for the first 5 days, 1GB for the next 2)

Landing brought no more than the usual disorientation. So far I call my sleeping strategy a success. It is 6 hours later here, meaning that our bodies want to wake up only when it's around 2 in the afternoon. We were picked up according to plan by a bus that brought us to the hotel, but not before we had stocked up on local money and (much more importantly) internet GBs. Many of us, myself included, fell for an offer of a 1 GB sim-card good for 7 days, with a promotional offer of another free 100GB in the first 5 days. That is such a ridiculous number: you could stream a continuous live HD video for those 5 days and still not reach 100 GB. It corresponds to my normal data usage for the next for 8 years.

Emily Mount Hangout Hotel

The sedentary ride from the airport to the hotel gave us our first impression of the city of Signapore. Very clean, as befits its reputation. The motorway from the airport to the city, which doubles as an emergency runway, is lined with majestic trees called 5 o'clock trees, or also rain trees, because they close their leaves at that time of the afternoon, and when rain threatens. At some point the famous items of the Signapore skyline came in sight, about which I'll have occasion to write more later. Fifteen minutes later still we were in the hotel, where we were somewhat later joined by our luggage which had been transported in a separate van that promptly suffered from a breakdown.

A different layer of humanity on the streets

The final activity on this very long day (if you had tried, like I did, to pretend the night didn't exist) was a collective dinner in downtown Signapore. About half an hour's walk, a good opportunity to sniff the atmosphere of the darkening city. It is of course a metropole and as such full of Starbucks, MacDonalds, KFCs and 7/11s, but those are superficial similarities. The inhabitants are a mixture of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Malayan, making for a very different layer of humanity on the streets. Signs can also be found in all those languages. On the average the people you pass are a head shorter than a Dutchman, so they reach no higher than my breastbone; let alone the breastbones of Sander Gieseling en Wybren Kortstra, both of whom surely span over 2 meter. Streets are wide, but with a lot of green also. Almost all shops are open at 19:30, and there are plenty of shoppers. The slow-moving, very well-behaved traffic drives on the left of the street. We managed not to cross the street while the pedestrian light was red, despite minutes of standstill on all sides, so avoiding potential heavy fines and criminal records. At some point, birds appeared to be twittering all around us, though none were in sight.

Seated and ready to order

The restaurant we reached was well-prepared for us. Outside in the very warm, humid air, seated at a long lable fanned to some coolness, we enjoyed a very good Indian-type meal. The local beer is Tiger; when they ran out we transferred to the Indian Kingfisher. This managed to keep the spiciness of the food to a bearable level. Afterwards, though a lot of participants were up for some more exploring, I myself and my colleague lecturer, Luís Ferreira Pires, decided to call it a not-so-very-early night and returned to the hotel. There will be other evenings to take advantage of the local night life. All in all, a very promising start to the MISC study tour!