Singapore

The last time I visited Singapore was 16 years ago, during a school field trip in the last days of my primary school years. Don't remember much about it, other than that it was okay. I did stop by Singapore a few years ago in transit from Penang to Melbourne, and did a day trip thingy, but that hardly counts, does it?

Anyway, after purchasing RM360 of now-worthless Killers concert tickets and RM240 in flight tickets, I ended up spending the weekend in Singapore following people around shopping. Which actually isn't nearly as bad as it might sound.

I got more exercise than I ever did in the past year just by walking around.

Oh, and comics. I bought a fucking library's worth of comics. Fuck me, have you seen the size of their Kinokuniya? The one in Orchard Road. Ho-lee shit. I could honestly spend half the day there, if I could get away with it. I thought I was in heaven. Their graphic novels selection certainly has a much wider variety than ours (which actually is pretty solid to begin with). The Kino in Bugis isn't nearly as impressive - quite pathetic, in fact, but then I happened to find Absolute Comics right next to it and that was impressive. I think I bought way more comics than I paid for the tickets.

Oh, and we stopped by Clarke Quay Saturday night. Upon which we did this:



Followed immediately by this:



(These aren't videos of me, by the way, as far as I know no one took any vids. But take my word for it anyway.)

The first one, the Slingshot, actually isn't so bad, mainly because you're staring up at the sky and not the ground. I didn't care for the constant bobbing in mid-air, but other than that it was fun.

The second one, the Xtreme Swing, should be classified as torture and banned under the Geneva Convention.

I have no idea how high up we were (though looking at that video, the answer is "probably pretty fucking high", but how it works is that they position the car parallel to the ground, and you're staring down at the ground as you're slowly pulling backwards and up. So you get to see the entire world shrink away from you as you go up higher... and higher... and higher. Seriously, I couldn't recognise anyone on the ground by the time we reached the peak. (Though that might be because they made me take off my glasses.)

The exact moment my entire body weight started to rest on my chest straps was when I came this close to wetting myself. I'm not proud of it, but I'd like to see you handle it with any semblance of dignity. Okay, Leanne (the only other person in our group who went up, after everyone else, including Kean (food poisoning my ass), chickened out) handled it a lot better than I did. She's got ice water running through her veins, that one. Me, I barely saved my membership in the Manliness Club by not bursting into tears. Barely.

Unlike the Slingshot, we actually get to pull the lever once we're up. Shirley, a nice Indian girl who coincidentally also came down for the Killers concert, ended up pulling the thing. We warned her to let us know when she'll be pulling it, under pain of an ass kicking. The drop was nearly as bad as being stuck up there - I actually screamed like a girl as the ground rose up. Screams turned to desperate laughter, because if we didn't laugh we'd fucking cry right there and then.

There are Facebook pics out there of me looking either bug-eyed or pretty damn pale. No, I'm not linking them, you go find them yourself.

In any case, we survived, and I honestly didn't think I had it in me to go up at all, so, er, that ought to make up for nearly wetting myself going up, right? Or literally having nightmares that same night about chest straps disappearing and me falling down to the ground, right? Right?

Crap.

Ah, screw it. I went up, you didn't. HAH.