Hero Of War



one of the best damn songs ever. or this year. whatever.

i always thought the view of the night time sky at my house was really good, especially considering that i live in singapore.


however, walking back to my host's house late at night, i realized, the view is so much better here. the stars are a lot bigger, and nearer. and there's a lot more. but again. the street i'm staying in, the street lights turn off after midnight or something. so maybe that helps.



france is pretty smart. turning off street lamps of streets where not many cars will travel at night. why can't we do it in singapore?

j'avais trés beaucoup le cidre bouché brut. :)


it's been weeks since i'm away from home, and weeks before i head back. does anyone misses me?

red bull cola contains cocaine.


any one trying it?

i've been playing massivemusicquiz with my host family. LOL.

and wine and coffee(decaf) at dinner, and coffee (and cooked food) for breakfast. oh france, how you spoil me. can we drink wine every dinner, mummy? i have more than two glasses of wine each night. :D

europeans like their cents a lot. especially the 1-2 cents. hello, you have 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 cents, 1 and 2 euros in coins. is it necessary to have so many coins? especially the cents<10. can't you round it up or something? my wallet hates it. me too.

... and singapore has swine flu. and brest doesn't. seems like i might be safer here in europe than back home. that's kinda strange to think about it, isn't it?

being on this trip, i've learned how to operate the washing machine and the dryer, open a beer bottle with a key, and drink my coffee black.

i am currently in my hosts' house, and it seems like i got lucky on the side. i've got a pretty young couple (compared to some of my friends' ones) and they SPEAK ENGLISH. which apparently not all hosts can do. i'm currently the only student in the house as well.

food-wise, it's fucking fantastic. i've got cooked food every meal (no more damn sandwiches), coffee both at night and in the morning and wine every dinner. maybe because of the kids in the house, but for breakfast there's a huge selection. bread, muesli, scrambled eggs, toast, cereal, jam, butter (damn good butter), nutella and sometimes PANCAKES. yumyumyum. both the parents can cook, so i'm lucky in that sense. i've even got internet, and i'm driven to school as long as the kids are being driven to school. the bed's a queen-size bed, and the toilet is HUGE with a freaking bathtub. no more small dingy looking bathrooms. and the pathetic floor.

i think i love brest. it's bloody comfortable in the hosts' house. and apparently the 12 year old son likes green day. smart him. all i knew was fucking pop music when i was 12.

and i'm curbing my swearing tendency in the house. instead of calling out OH FUCK i called out oh crap when the plate nearly dropped. be proud of me.

eh huimin my hair is no longer black larh wtf?

sometimes i'm thinking, why bother?

like trombley said, eat fuck kill, they're all the same, isn't it?

that sort of philosophy could be applied to my entire fucking life.

god i want to watch movies but the new releases are of such shitty qualities online.

and seriously, by the time i get back to singapore my sleeping hours are FUCKED.

i haven't seen the star trek movie (which i actually want to because of zachary quinto).

it seems like only now have people realized how hot zachary quinto is or something.

hello? he was damn hot as sylar in heroes. not that anyone agreed with me then.

alcohol in germany is fucking cheap, and we bought a bottle of bacardi.

drinking ourselves silly now. :D

12th May

and so starts our journey to switzerland.

to go to bern, we have to change trains in milan. we paid for the reservations, and there were only a few minutes available for us to change the train. to our horror, the first train was late, and when we got off the train, the crowds of people were fucking STROLLING their way down the station, blocking our way. by the time we reached the track, the train happily rolled away right in front of our eyes.

fucking italy. seriously if not for their food, i think i might hate italy.

so we had to like wait an hour or two for the next train. which brought us to arth-goldau, which we had to change another time to go to lucerne, and from lucerne, we changed AGAIN to get to bern. lots of train changing. not good with luggages.

if you guys are ever go backpacking ever do not ever carry a luggage and pack really light. you don't really want to lug a huge bag around too. most places have somewhere for you to wash and dry the clothes, and i guess you can share the luggage load with someone or something. two pairs of jeans and like 5 tshirts or something and the corresponding number of underwear should be enough. :) 

first day in switzerland, we arrived pretty late, so it was just walking around in the area nearby and having the most expensive dinner ever. rosti and cheese fondue! i have no idea when i'll ever put the photos up (when carmen choy loads it). the food here's fucking expensive. twenty over francs for a cheese fondue. :(

and then it was shopping! bought another top in h&m. the sizes here are different from germany though. so i guess if you shop in europe you gotta try your clothes or something.

and it's back to the hostel to sleep.

bought a new swiss arm! 

11th May

going to venice from prague's a pain in the ass. we would have to go back to germany, and then to venice, italy. and then we'll have to pass through austria, which our railpass did not cover, so we had to pay extra. it's an overnight train from munich to venice too, and there weren't any seats available, so we had to reserve the couchettes, which was quite interesting.

and here are two idiots on their way to venice.

carmen choy has no photos of the couchettes, and my card reader is fucked, so there's no photos (anyway i don't think i got good photos). but it's this really cramped sleeping area with 6 beds, three on each side, and the beds are kinda like stacked on top of each other in some strange sort of triple decker style. the bed's actually like some sort of platform fixed to the wall, and you end up sleeping on it through the entire night.

in venice, we stayed at hotel vienna, which was off the main island (santa lucia) and on mestre. the hotel... the staff was pretty nice, enduring all our stupid endless questions. and the food was relatively ok. and the laundromat was nearby. that's about the only thing good about the hotel. 

in fact, the hotel was ahtiong land, with an ahtiong smell. it's probably run by an ahtiong, and ahtiongs were coming in and out everyday. we witnessed this hilarious conversation with the receptionist and a china tour guide. the china tour guide was speaking in italian, and the receptionist was replying in italian as well. we didn't think there was anything wrong, as the tour guide sounded quite pro. until the tour guide said to some tourist, "我也不知道他在说什么." OMG. that totally had me and carmen in hysterics. i was controlling my laughter, not laughing at all, until we looked at each other and burst out in laughter. it was kinda rude. but seriously. wtf is wrong with the tour guide.

and the hotel room. toilet's fucking pathetic. the shower is this tiny area bounded by the shower curtain, with really poor drainage system. the beds were fine, and the room rather big, but OMG the worst thing was MOSQUITOS. i had like ten bites the first night, and more the second. lucky we only stayed for two days, if not i'll have more bites than i ever had in my life. the mozzies here are fucking big, and different from those in singapore. the bites they leave makes my skin swell up really badly, and they bit my face too. and it's really itchy. i have no idea whether it was venice with the mosquito problem, or the hotel, as we never got any bites other than in the hotel itself. the morning we left, carmen killed two mozzies, i killed four, and there were at least two big ones still flying around. i killed the mozzies by smashing them against the wall, so there kind of are like blood stains on the wall with the dead mozzies plastered to them. hope the ahtiongs cleaning the room notice the stain and do something about the MOZZIE PROBLEM OMG.

We hung out around santa lucia the first day. a super touristy area with lots of gelato shops. we had gelato TWICE in venice and we forgot to take photos both times. oops. i had the cookies flavour, with "bits of cookies in it" claimed the shopkeeper. and she gave me a HUGE scoop. turns out that the bits of cookies weren't bits at all. you know the size of an oreo? well the bits were like half the size of an oreo cookie. yum yum. and it only cost like 1 euro. gelato in singapore is so much more expensive. :(

and we kinda got ripped off when we bought orange juice to drink. 2.5euros for a carton?? the orange must have been plucked by the hand of god or something.

right. anyway, you guys remember social studies classes about venice, the city on water or something like that? yeah well that's only true for the main island, where the only available form of public transport is boats. they have the water bus, the water taxis, their own private boats, and the gondolas. we bought a 36hr travel pass which gave us unlimited rides on the water bus, so we definitely spent a lot of time on the bus. 

one extremely stupid incident. our first time on the water bus, we scanned our ticket and crossed the tiny bridge, to what we thought was the bus. we wondered for damn long why the hell aren't we moving yet, before an actual water bus CAME and we realized we were on the station. wtf we are idiots.

the streets of venice are pretty small, unless you're walking out in the campo or something. the streets are kinda like alleys, and pretty hard to navigate, with the numerous turns and stuff. it's quite easy to get lost in it. and we wouldn't dare to walk around at night.

this is me eating a slice of actual italian pizza. cost about 2 euros, and it's SO DAMN FUCKING GOOD. hello gimme moar please thank you. it's a crime not to eat pizza in italy, so go do it or something.

and this is the piazza which venice is so damn famous for. cultural idiot here, so no idea what's the significance of it. lots of pigeons here, and was kinda scared that birds would poop on my hair, so i actually bought a cap before that. but i forgot to bring the cap, and was lucky enough (or unlucky) not to have a bird poop on me. i nearly wanted to say how lucky we were, but was afraid of being乌鸦嘴, so i kept my mouth shut.

there's another church at one end of the piazza, so we went in too. i have no idea why we keep going into churches, seeing how unreligious we are.

after this, we travelled by the water bus to santa maria, another church. same old, same old, photos to see, nothing to describe.

got carbonara and lasagne for dinner, which was at this place which served cheap and good food. yay for the find. also, the sinks in the toilet were pretty interesting. in singapore, as long as you don't see any way to turn on the tap manually you assume it's an automatic one, don't you? well, we definitely thought so. after sticking our hands under the tap for awhile and with no water coming out, we started looking for ways to turn on the tap, including twisting the tap and stuff. turns out there's this pedal thingy under the sink where you step on it to get the water flowing.

and then came my favourite part of the day. cheapo sim and cheapo choy took advantage of the travel pass, and we went to take the water bus with the longest trip, slightly more than an hour. this bus brought us about the grand canal of venice, so we got to see many of the sights we saw on foot. extremely enjoyable for me, seeing how much i love sea travel, but not so much for choy who gets motion sickness at the drop of a hat. on our way back (we took it back and forth), the sun was setting, and the lights were coming on, so we kinda got to see venice at night (kinda because it was still quite bright at 8 plus and we didn't want to stay too late).

and then it was heading back to mestre and our hotel. by the time we reached mestre, the sky was totally dark and the streets were pretty deserted, so we were a little freaked out and walked extremely quickly behind another guy, figuring that no one would rob us with another person nearby (the other guy was dragging a luggage and came from the station, so we assumed he wasn't a robber in disguise). it was definitely a relief to reach the hotel. but at that time, we didn't know about the MOZZIE problem...

10th May

Went to Vysehrad by taking the metro. we were kinda lost, but i guess carmen figured out the way.

vysehrad's an old castle, with a cemetery with dead famous people and a bunch of other attractions. and the cemetery's damn cool, with like statues and stuff. kinda disrespectful to take photos, so none.

saw this really old pipe/well thing, which wasn't working so i'm guessing it's really old and it's how people used to draw water. hah merlin. except merlin's one was kind of fixed to the wall.

this is the plague pillar, apparently built when the plague occurred and people were looking for spiritual help/guidance/something.

another old gothic church. seriously lots of gothic buildings in prague with fantastic artwork. and like art's painted on the ceiling and stuff.

this really old well, with no water inside. at least i think so. everything was black when i looked down it.

here's the entrance to the gothic cellar, which is kind of like a museum or something.

another interesting site was the gorlice. one bloody annoying thing about the gorlice was that it's BLOODY HARD TO FIND. we walked back and forth the area like twice before realizing where the entrance was. and despite the area shown in the picture below being labelled at the gorlice, it WAS NOT the entrance (it turned out to be the exit). and when we finally found the entrance, it turned out we missed the tour time so we had to wait like another hour for the next tour. so we went back to the exit. also saw this really young couple with a kid, and we were arguing between ourselves whether the couple was the parents or were they siblings or something. but the kid was really adorable, with a bicycle with no pedals (he moved by pushing his feet on the ground) and playing on the merry-go-round, both sitting and pushing it.

here's the entrance to the gorlice. the gorlice is this tunnel thing which leads to this great big hall, where apparently soldiers slept in the past. and it's really cold in there. if i'm not wrong the tunnel was supposed to lead out of the castle or something. so it's a secret tunnel! pretty exciting.

inside the great hall are the old statues from the charles bridge, so i guess this is actually kind of cooler than the charles bridge.

and here ends our trip in prague, as we were too lazy to go to other areas and had to travel to venice the next day. the rest of the time was spent hanging about the hostel and the supermarket.

seriously, we have some sort of obsession with the supermarket. must be the really cheap deals we can get there.

9th May (continued)

to get up onto petrin hill, we got to take this thing called the funiculum (not sure about the spelling), which is a tram that heads upwards. 

here is us in the tram. we're not photo-taking whores, and have taken very few photos of ourselves, so enjoy this one while it last. :)

the station we're leaving from.

midway on the ride. the view's always damn good around.

we didn't want to spend a lot of time at the top of the hill, as we wanted to scrimp on the tickets (one ticket's like usable for a set period of time, so if you take the tram again within the time limit, you don't have to buy a new ticket). there's an observatory on top of the hill, which we went to.

seeing that we didn't go there when it was dark (and it gets dark only like after 9pm), all we could see was the sun. which was still pretty fucking cool. for some reason, when we look into two different eyepieces, one showed the sun yellow (we didn't see any dark spots, and the person said to come back in a few years' time to see them) and the other, red. we could see like little spikes pointing out from the sun though, so the sun that we drew in primary school with the spikes surrounding it? we drew it correctly!

went to the charles bridge after that, which apparently james bond was shot. no idea which one, as i'm totally not into the franchise. kind of lazy to get photos up too, as all we saw were tourists and like little pushcarts/stores thingy. where's the performers and interesting people mentioned huh?

and then it's back to the hostel.

by the way, carbonated water seems to be a lot more popular and cheaper than mineral water in prague. all we drank was fizzy fruit water, like orange, peach and grapefruit. so it's like drinking soft drinks all day long.

and shopping in prague? try not to do so. it's a lot cheaper buying the items in euros/pounds.

9th May

and we're heading off to the prague castle. or what the locals call it, prazsky vhrad. we crossed this bridge, mistakenly thinking that it is the famous charles bridge, but when we looked down the river and saw another bridge crawling with people, as well as how empty our bridge was, we realized our mistake.

bridge is still quite pretty though.

the grounds of some parliament/european union thingy. no idea what it was, but lots of people inside so we went in too. pretty cool though, lots of hedges around.

to get to prague castle, which is situated on top of a hill/slope/mountain/idk, we have to climb up a really long slope. which again is cobbled. seriously by the end of the day my ankles were hurting from the imbalanced weight placed on my feet. stumbled a few times due to the grooves as well.

the downwards view halfway on the slope

and the upwards view.

reached the top of the slope, just before the entrance of the prague castle. it's so damn high up that apparently you're supposed to feel a sense of accomplishment reaching there on foot. uhh okay. anyway, view out there was pretty good, better on a clear day.

petrin hill in the distance.

and prague's new town/old town, where we were staying.

entrance to the prague castle. they have this changing of the guards thing too, and a quartet playing on the streets outside. the music of the quartet was pretty good, with them singing as well. i have no idea if they played for the changing of the guards,  but they were playing some music when the guards were changing.

and here's one of the guards! 

looking at all these photos, you'll notice that we've actually captured quite a few other people (tourists) as well. i wonder if we ourselves are immortalized in their photos as well?

gaining entry into the castle. walking around the castle grounds is free, but you gotta pay if you want to enter some of the buildings.

look at the flagpole. it's a spike with a sharp pointy end at the top. hell for a paratrooper (idk what the hell you call people parachuting so i'll call it the army term) to land on. :)

you can see the st. vitus cathedral in the background. (lots of churches to see in europe. kind of wasted on me.)

the square of the castle (no idea of it's exact name).

and here's the st. vitus cathedral. it's a neo-gothic structure dating back from idk when. hi mummy can we have a neo-gothic house? i think i like it.

queuing up to get into the cathedral.

the cathedral is so damn freaking huge that the photo can't do justice to it. seriously. it took us quite long to walk around the cathedral, and we weren't exacting like admiring anything since we don't know what they were about. all we knew was, ooh pretty let's take photos yay!

i don't know if this is common of a catholic church or something, but there were a lot of stained glass windows in this one. and the colours were bloody amazing, and extremely complex. it was kinda disappointing that the sun wasn't exactly shining through the windows, if not it'll be even more breathtaking.

hello lion with a broken sword! anyone knows what the broken sword means? or is it an accident?

and here the guards come from standing stationary at one spot for one hour.

and we viewed a bunch of other attractions in prague castle, but they either did not allow cameras or there wasn't anything much to take, so no photos. the st. vitus cathedral was truly the one most outstanding attraction in prague castle. perhaps that's the reason why it was the only attraction with a queue.

by the way, in prague castle, you can rent this audioguide which tells you about the various attractions inside (which we were too cheap to spend on). seeing people going around with the audioguide was pretty funny, as it was this huge phone-lookalike thingy, so people were going around with them stuck to their ears.

just outside prague castle, we saw a camera crew on the streets. turns out that a toyota advertisement was being shot when we were there. but it's not a model that singapore has. (that or it's a brand new model) but a pretty ugly one.

saw a bunch of kids in idkw costumes. quite adorable. a girl even posed for the photo. :)

we had a late lunch around the area. trying to look for cheap and authentic czech food (we heard about the goulash and potato dumplings) we walked past quite a few restaurants. again, being greedy bastards, we forgot about photos until everything was (half)-eaten.

the dark bread was pretty fucking weird. and hard. apparently germans like bread like that. i'm pretty sure the french like white bread though. the sauce that came with the bread was good though. some mix of garlic, butter and cheese if i'm not wrong.

and ta-dah! our half-eaten/finished meal. we ordered something called the peasant's omelette, which was really good (but choy thought there was too much veggie things), the goulash and the potato dumplings. if you're a person who doesn't like starchy stuff, i wouldn't recommend the dumplings to you. but again. i have no idea if the dumplings were authentic.

and off we go to the petrin hill.