{"id":5036,"date":"2024-11-12T15:56:13","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T15:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=5036"},"modified":"2024-11-12T22:24:17","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T22:24:17","slug":"a-wander-through-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=5036","title":{"rendered":"A Wander Through History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Chatted with a friend over FB Messenger this morning; I set myself up in the ‘laundromat’ area outside my room, which looks like it’s supposed to be a secondary common space, but mostly seems to be a space people walk through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometime during that conversation a couple of identical emails arrived from the Vietnamese Immigration Dept. about my visa. Wasn’t expecting that, I’d thought I had to keep checking back on the site. In any case, the site still said Processing, and the email link didn’t load, so I figured that their systems probably took a while to filter through, and I’d check later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Headed out to follow a suggested self guided walk from Old to New as my “do something” for the day, so this is mostly going to be a photo dump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Yet more Chinatown pictures, this time from around one of the station access, which puts you out right onto the street in the middle of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried to get a good picture of the Pickled Pepper Frogs menu item at one of the places by the station, but couldn’t get a clear one & didn’t want to obviously be that guy taking pictures of weird menu items.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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St. Andrew’s Cathedral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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National Gallery, made by joining two old buildings together to make a really huge space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I tried for one of those “between two mirrors” shots with the last picture, but it didn’t quite work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Brightly coloured former police station. On Hill Street. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Riverside area, which seems to be where a bunch of restaurants have set up to drive each others prices down, based on what I saw of the menus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s like a larger scale version of the Chinatown\/Little India thing where the footpath runs through the store, except in this case it’s running between the restaurant proper & the outdoor seating, and there’s someone trying to entice you to come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A fat bird statue. Or birb statue, which I’m reliably informed is the correct term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A Salvador Dali statue, Homage to Newton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The walking route ended back at the Merlion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That was a nice way to see more of the city. I’m not going to claim any great insights or knowledge gained from it, but it was nice to have something of a route to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I went looking for a post office, but no luck actually finding it in a maze of linked underground malls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did spot this place, after misreading the name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back at the hotel, I was relaxing for a bit & ended up chatting to an Italian couple after we figured out how to get their plug adapter to plug in. (Ground pin unlocks the phase & neutral in the socket, and theirs had a separate flip-out ground)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did some more digging into the Vietnamese visa thing, partly to see whether the emails were a spectacularly well-informed scam, and it turns out that they launched a new web portal yesterday, or maybe today, which probably explains the unresponsive site because nothing ever works right first time, & presumably everyone was hitting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The important thing for me was that the visa approval happened, and I don’t need to try to change flights, and can go ahead and book a few more things with some confidence that I won’t have to cancel them again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Finished up the evening doing show-notes on the Gen Con 2024 episode we recorded some time back, and watching people checking into the hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s an odd mix of hostel & hotel, and I wonder whether people got a different impression than I did, based on watching them being shown around by the place. I checked in after hours, and was essentially self-guided, which is much like most hostels I’ve ever stayed at; It’s only if they’re really<\/em> bored that they show you around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, some of it might be language barrier based, because I did see one of the staff going through the place with some printed cards in a language I didn’t recognise, showing them to the guest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chatted with a friend over FB Messenger this morning; I set myself up in the ‘laundromat’ area outside my room, which looks like it’s supposed to be a secondary common space, but mostly seems to be a space people walk through. Sometime during that conversation a couple of identical emails arrived from the Vietnamese Immigration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[94],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-5036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sabbatical","tag-singapore"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-1je","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5036"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5043,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions\/5043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}