On Friday I was (together with some friends at NTU) invited to a French crêpes party. Fabien, the guy who invited us, lives in a nice condo in Simei (East of Singapore). We actually know him from our Bintan trip. As an appropriate gift for a French guy we brought him some bottles of wine... :-) The crêpes were really great! He made some salty and some sweet ones. The best one was crêpes with molten chocolate! Since he is working for a French construction company most of his friends - his work mates - were French. So I could practice my French skills a bit... well there is unfortunately not much left. Apparently most of his guest had to work the next day (Saturday!) so the party was over at about 1am. But this was of course way to early for us exchange students. So we had a nice after party at 7-11 and on the roof of the graduate hall. But I think I shouldn't go into details here...
Despite getting to bed very late we got up at 8am on Saturday to go to Pulau Ubin. This is a small island in the East of Singapore, just like Sentosa in the South. But in fact those islands are very different. Unlike Sentosa Pulau Ubin is very original and natural. There is only a small village on the island - the rest is mainly forest which is preserved in its original state by the government. The only thing you can do on the island is actually cycling and eating sea food. So we had some different sea food for lunch first. Luckily it started to rain really heavily just when we sat down in the restaurant - and stopped when we were about to leave. So we could get ourselves some bikes and explore the island. The island is not very big, so getting around by bike is easy. The forest and the nature were a welcome relief to the concrete of the city. You can get a rough impression how Singapore looked like in the 50s before it rose to a big metropolis.
But you really had to watch out for mosquitos and Singaporean cyclists. We donated a lot of blood to the mosquito population in the forest and the lack of cycling skills of some locals is sometimes really dangerous. Alexandre was in fact hit by a girl who couldn't get her bike under control when riding down a slope. Luckily nobody was injured, though Alexandre's rear wheel was heavily bent and we had to detach the break so that it could turn again... at least the guy of the bike shop did not complain.
Anyway we passed a nice day on the island and were really tired when we finally came back to the campus. Sorry I don't have the pictures yet - I hope that I can supply them soon.
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