I invited two friends (or rather: two friends had the time to come) to have dinner with me at Thai Express yesterday. TE is a small chain in Southeast Asia that offers great Thai food.

Sunday, I was at the TE in Vivocity and decided to become a member. For a fee of 20S$, I now enjoy 10% discount everytime (20% if I visit them again within 7 days) and received two vouchers (10 & 15 S$).

So, besides having a good time with Hannah and Jochen and enjoying great food (I love the BBQ Seafood platter!), I got my 10% discount yesterday AND could make use of my 15S$ birthday voucher. So instead of 80+ S$, I only paid 52S$ for the three of us. And as it was above 40S$ and within 5 days of my birthday, I also received a bottle of French red wine!

I could eat the BBQ Seafood platter everyday, if only it wouldn't cost 14,95S$ nett.....

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I started a new photoblog under http://www.singapore-in-pictures.com/ where I intend to post a new picture every day. As the name says, it will only feature photos taken here in Singapore. Blogging started TODAY!

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Last Sunday I decided to go to the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, which is in the north-west of Singapore, so presumably not too far away from my place.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

I took the MRT from Boon Lay to Jurong East, changed trains there to get to Kranji MRT (5 or 6 stops). At Kranji I wanted to take the bus 925, which, on Sundays and public holidays, stops right in front of the SBWR entrance. Little did I know that there is only one bus on that route and that it usually leaves the MRT station about every 30mins. Shortly after I arrived at the bus stop next to the MRT, a blonde girl also came (remember: there aren't many blondes here, that's why they stand out a lot) and waited. This bus stop also serves as a drop-off and pick-up point for people who want to go to Johor (Malaysia) by bus, the busses here drive a bit more frequently than mine (like every 2 minutes....). So after waiting for nearly half an hour my bus finally came and the blonde girl, whom I suspected to go the same way as me as all the other bus services had already arrived at least once, got into the 925, too. In there, I was sitting behind her, so she asked me if I also wanted to go to the SBWR. It turned out that she's also an intern here in Singapore, but unlike millions of other interns who are from Germany, she's from England (never met an English intern before).

When we finally arrived at the entrance of the SBWR, there were lots of monitor lizards in the ponds surrounding it, waiting to be shot by me (with the camera of course!). It turned out that Hannah (the English girl's name) also had a DSLR, so we decided to walk around together (Sidenote: "normal" people usually get impatient quite fast when they're around with photographers, as the photographers take their time to get a nice shot. This is why I prefer not to go with non-photographers on such tours).

Once again, I was mostly using my big tele lens, the Sigma 135-400. It may not always give the best results, but I didn't want to spend a few thousand € for a better one I'll start posting the pictures from that day in the next few days, some of them came out really great and thus are worth a whole posting (at least in my opinion).

The SBWR was bigger than we both expected, in the end we spend about 4 hours there. The wildlife includes lots of different birds, exotic fish (which so far I only knew from my aquarium books or rarely saw them at pet shops), monitor lizards, mudskippers (ok, they're also fish, but they're definitely worth mentioning. They'll also get their own posting soon), crabs and crocodiles. We haven't seen any crocodiles, but there are some warning signs around and at the entrance you have some texts about them. And to come back to the location of the SBWR: around the Kranji MRT there is only a horse racing stadium, that's it! Usually you have lots of HDBs, but not up there. Near the reserve there was some industry, but the main focus there was on fish and/or plant farms. One time in the SBWR, my mobile even switched to the Malaysian mobile provider DiGi (Malaysia is only about 1km away, seperated from Singapore through a small streak of sea).

When we were about 1/3 through, a storm showed up. At first, we were in a small shelter, but decided to go to a big tower nearby. Sadly, this tower was not constructed for such occassions, the rain came through openings in the roof. So we two went on to an even smaller shelter where we waited for the storm to stop, which here in Singapore usually happens more or less fast. Seeing all those water masses I thought about building an ark, but after maybe 20mins the rain stopped. Another 20mins later, it was quite hot again.

In the end, I took about 150 pictures, but only 27 were processed now. 

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It's a bit funny when you listen to colleagues' conversations and you hear sentences like the following:

Vista don't support 这个function. (zhège = this)

Usually the colleagues speak mostly English OR Chinese (with a few English words that are quite specific, e.g. 没有 PDF (méiyǒu = don't have), but every now and then sentences like the one above occur.

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