Southeast Asia Trip - Part 1

It's taken me a while to update due to the start of the Spring semester and Disowned recording a demo - but here is the redux of my trip to Southeast Asia over Winter Break 09-10. My plane flew out from LAX to Beijing, where I had a 12 hour layover until I hopped on a plane to Singapore, where Lauryn is doing research. My plane arrived at 5 in the morning Beijing time.

The Beijing International Airport is REALLY nice - probably just fixed up due to the 2008 Olympic Games. It was pretty odd, however, as the moment you get out of the terminal, you see a picture of Chairman Mao right next to an advertisement for Chanel. This weird juxtaposition of uber high end capitalist stores and communist leaders was a prevalent theme in Asia - as I'll discuss in the Vietnam section.

The many tiered Beijing International Airport - the whole roof is one big lighted dome, the top floor is arrivals and immigration, the bottom two levels are departures and high end shopping stores like Gucci, Armani, Chanel, Lacoste, etc.

One of the departure terminals.

I had seen enough of the airport, and was eager to get to Singapore. After meeting up with Lauryn I was given the whole country tour on the ride from the airport (which was on one side of the country) to Lauryn's apartment (which is on the other side!) It is super futuristic, with a really nice metro and airport and EVERYONE has a really nice phone. After catching up on sleep we went to the Haw Par Villa, which is an open air garden/theme park made by the two brothers who invented and sold Tiger Balm - which is a popular ointment in Southeast Asia.

The entrance, notice the tiger motif.

There were tons of weird stucco sculptures, mostly depicting old Chinese legends with sparse placards in poorly translated English, which is odd considering English is one of the primary languages in Singapore. One of my favorite sculptures was the Rat vs. Rabbit war. There was even a rat with a knife!

One rat you don't want to mess with!


FREEDOM! YEEHAW!

Then there was the 'Tiger Car' which the two brothers would drive around when they were advertising for Tiger Balm. When you honked the horn it roared like a tiger! I bet they picked up maaaad ladies with this clean ride.

The next exhibit was...odd. It was the 'Ten Courts of Hell' of Chinese mythology. Each Court was presided over by a judge, and he would sentence you to the crimes of that particular court if you were guilty of them in life. Here is Lauryn standing outside the entrance of Hell, guarded by Horse-Face and Ox-Head.

The Judge and his Court.

Each Court has its own punishment or set of punishments prescribed for a sin you committed in life. The above punishment was being thrown on a tree made out of knives, I think for neglecting your filial duties.

You could also be chopped in half, ground into a paste, disemboweled, etc. for being a rapist or a litterer. The Chinese ethics system seemed a little skewed in my mind.

But prostitutes went in the Filthy Blood Pond...where they were drowned I guess?

Anyhow, at the end of all your punishments a nice old lady gives you the tea of reincarnation, and you enter the cycle of Samsara (continuous reincarnation until enlightenment) again. The rest of Haw Par Villa had more crazy statues, like frogs and turtles riding on ostriches and a crab lady?


Like I mentioned before, the Metro system in Sinapore is really nice, one of their national prides next to their airport. If you want to know more about the oddities and nuances of the Sinaporean culture feel free to read Lauryn's blog at Lauryn in Singapore. This is me standing next to Singa the Friendly Lion, who advises people in the metro to be kind to one another and to obey the rules lest you get fined! Next to me is a sign about the fines, also letting everyone know not to bring durian fruit on board because it smells like bananas, pineapples, and oranges stuffed in a corpse's rectal cavity that was thrown in a garbage bin in the hot sun for a week. Anyhow, Singa is touching my butt in this picture.

Lauryn and I then had lunch on the quays (pronounced like key) and went to the Southeast Asian culture museum which had cool architecture and artwork from all the cultures residing in Singapore. Then we went to the Buddha's Tooth Temple of Buddha Maitreya or the Future Buddha, which we envisioned being a hovering robot Buddha who shot lasers out of his eyes. I drew a good picture of it, but can't find it at the moment.

That Buddha is about 20 feet tall, and the background is a single piece of embroidered silk. The entire temple was very opulent - the top of the temple had a room made entirely of gold. It was a about twenty square feet and had a gilded golden altar in the middle weighing over 500 kilograms which supposedly enshrined one of the original Buddha's teeth.

We had dinner at a really delicious vegetarian Indian restaurant which was staffed by people enrolled in an adjacent school, and ran entirely on donations! We then bummed around Chinatown (as every city has one...) and retired for the night. Our next stop was Vietnam!