Laneway, night out, the day that flip-flops failed me,

 St. Jerome's Laneway Festival!

Around 1:00 PM I met my Australian friend Ryu at the nearest MRT station. Somehow, despite being a long time sufferer of bitchy resting face, I've managed to make a few friends. I really, really underestimated the timescale of this whole endeavor- I didn't actually end up back home until ~6:00 AM. But first, the festival!

Hey, look at all the white people that turned up! I think like a good 80% of them were Australian, Ryu thought so too

MBS off in the distance behind the main two stages

Early show by XXYYXX. Check out this song. I thought it would have venue translation problems, but it was really quite good.

More Australians. Not pictured: Ryu and I bumped into an earlier acquaintance, a Swede named Sebastian. We'd already bought a pack of clove cigarettes, but then Sebastian introduced me to snus, which is like a small tea bag of tobacco you hold against your gum with your lip. Soooo much nicotine.

Party hadn't really started yet, as the night went on, the beer cups really started to stack up

ERMER GERD, Mount Kimbie! They had some sound issues, they seemed a bit peeved with the fellows in charge of  the microphones. Vocals needed to get mic'd up a lot more

Night falls!

Some Australian friends we made. The woman to the left is putting a fake H&M tattoo on her leg. They were running a promotion where they'd give you an ice cream if you put on an H&M tattoo or were wearing H&M

Checking for integrity

Jamie XX! He played a very 70s sample-based, more-or-less continuous beat. We got a bit bored and beat it for Chvrches

Another bad picture of Jamie XX

Things really heated up when James Blake took the stage

A truly amazing show, it must be said. Check out the video below for an idea. I feel the song of the night was probably this one, CMYK.

 

 Clarke Quay!

During James Blake, we lost Sebastian. Oh well. We found Sarah, a friend from Germany. I guess one good European friend follows another. We decided to take the last train of the night to the famous Clarke Quay (pronounced 'Clark Key'). The bridge over the river was jam-packed with other youth of various nationalities drinking and smoking. Around here I ran out of clove cigarettes.

So many people!

Sarah on the left, a very nice woman whose name I forgot for like the third time on the right

Our host on the left, a Singaporean that kindly put us on the guest list at a club her family owns. On the right is Egle from Lithuania, which I was embarrassed to learn is the bottom Baltic state, not the top one. Whoops, ugly American.

To the club!

Front: Steven, the other American

Flip-flops! Nooooooooooo!

It's now 2:00 AM, but you couldn't really tell. The bouncers wouldn't let me into the club because I was wearing flip-flops! Around this point, literally the strangest thing that has ever happened to me in my life... happened. I'll have to collect my thoughts on this matter before publishing it, but it's hopefully going to be a good story one day?

Anyway,  I waited outside the club, reading History and Class Consciousness. Some local Chinese fellows took pity, tried using their superior language access to get me into the club, but ultimately failed. Anyway, we ended up chatting about Singaporean society and politics. One of the young guys I had a cigarette with turned out to be something of a police officer during daylight hours.

My friends emerged from the club and we headed out in search of cheaper beer. I ended up with a large SKOL.

It was definitely beer

Now it's about 4 or 5 AM, and we got breakfast at McDonald's (which, disappointingly, is almost exactly the same in Singapore) before cramming into a hired van to head back to NTU. At about 6:00, my head finally hits the pillow.

Laneway tomorrow, more food, molecular dynamics progress, campus exploration

Laneway!

For those of you who have yet to hear my rant, tomorrow is the long-anticipated St. Jerome's Laneway Festival, Singapore, with some of my favorite musicians playing at Marina Bay Gardens. For those interested in the lineup, the website is here.

The main acts I'm excited for are Cvrches, Daughter, James Blake, Jamie XX, XXYYXX, and probably one of my absolute favorite groups right now, UK-based Mount Kimbie. But there's also many more great acts.

Here's a link to Daughter's new, free EP on bandcamp, and here's a video of James Blake's excellent music video, Retrograde. Finally, I'll actually embed Mount Kimbie's amazing Tiny Desk Concert (live show via NPR) because you should definitely watch it. Skip to ~14:00 for what I'd say is they're most climatic song in this performance. I'd like to point out that the ratty pair of headphones I use is the same as those they use in this show, because I'm that pro.

Food

More food pictures. I've been having a bit of trouble getting up to the daily vegetable consumption I think is acceptable- I'd say 55% of my caloric intake in a day is noodles or rice, maybe 30% meat and egg, 5% super-sweet tea and coffee, and the remaining 10% vegetable. Bit tough to do better out there.

I see the guy in blue a lot, he's the bus boy for the whole area.

View of Canteen 11 from the second story, lots of Chinese New Year decorations

Near the breakfast cafe in Canteen 11, where I usually go in the morning for some hard-boiled eggs, kaya toast, and coffee flavored cocoa (it's supposed to be coffee, or actually as it's legitimately spelled here, kopi. Took me forever to make the connection).

Korean BBQ, relatively lots of veg.

This is what I've been looking for! Yong tau foo stall. You pick a set number of 'pieces' from this selection, they chop 'em up, sauce them, then mix them in with a noodle soup for you. Pretty tasty, got myself lots of mushrooms and bok choy.

One of the tastier meals I've had in a while, this is a bean paste with pork and julienned cucumber on a bed of- what else? noodles.

Finally worked up the courage to try a local dessert. This is chendol, a local favorite I'm told. That's three different kinds of gel, sweet bean paste, and sweet corn on a bed of dense shaved ice and coconut milk. I kinda liked the bean, corn, and the green gel, the other gels were kinda bland and slimy. Overall, I prefer ice-cream waffles.

Halal Indonesian food. Fried fish, curry, rice, token salad. Coffee (excuse me, kopi) is not really any less sweet sans condensed milk. But you get closer to the bare hint of coffee flavor.

 Molecular Dynamics

I've been slowly making progress in the GROMACS tutorial. It's a pretty funny little program- fairly easy to use as I'm getting the hang of it. After every computation, it'll show a little quotation from a nineties band, it's cute. I'm including some screenshots of the models I've produced, eventually I'll figure out a way to post the fully produced videos. For those of you with too much free time, you can download PyMOL and then take a look at my model for yourself.

KALP-15, a small, synthetic model peptide in a dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) membrane solvated in water molecules

Same KALP-15 model zoomed in slightly. You can't see too well, but I think the lysines are a little angry, the model isn't very relaxed

To give you an idea of how small that peptide is, here's a homology model of TRPM8 based on- I think- the Shaker Kv crystal. No membrane or solvent. I helped do this back in the US, but it's probably not worth much now that the Cryo EM structure of TRPV1 is out, we'll need to model with that as a homologue. This protein is probably two or three times bigger than the whole membrane patch in the previous pictures.

Campus Exploration

I've been trying to find a place on campus to get out into the jungle, but everything is blocked either by fences or "WARNING! LIVE FIRE" signs or both. However, I took a few pictures out and about to give you lot a feel for the University. BONUS: a people-breaking-rules picture.

The nearby Pioneer MRT Station (Mass Rapid Transit, the rail)

Yay, NTU

I couldn't decide if this was really a community garden due to the signs telling me that I'd be shot on sight. But I ended up making it up and out alive.

Couldn't tell if this was like a shrine or a shop. No English in sight.

Campus housing on NTU! Apparently, they're for foreign professors. Only actual houses I've seen in Singapore

Pretty, I think

Birds hanging out on a hill by the so-called North Spine, one of two major academic complexes

View from the top floor of the South Spine

Oh look, bathroom ceiling lizard!

What the hell? People apparently smoking on an INDOOR staircase in the Biological Sciences building. I feel like you couldn't really get away with that in the US.

Stay posted for pictures and musings from the Laneway Festival tomorrow!

Minutiae, Food, School, People Breaking Rules

The so-called Jackson Plan for Singapore's expansion

Minutiae

Went back into town to return the tourist pass for the bounty on it (SG$10.00, plus an excuse to wander around). On the ride over to Raffles Place, I brushed up on some basic history. Modern Singapore was founded by a reputedly very capable colonial administrator named Stamford Raffles as a trading hub for the British East India Company in competition with nearby Dutch strategic interests. You get the feeling that Britain was pretty late to the game in Southeast Asia, and Raffles' successes were major pivot points for British expansion in the east. Interestingly, one of his first orders of business upon arriving anywhere was to abolish slavery, usually replacing the loss of labor with convicts from the Indian colony- the Australia model.

The kind of person a monarch trusts to found cities, apparently

Anyway, I headed towards Raffles Place in what is now Downtown Singapore, by the river shown in the picture above. I quickly ran across the Asian Civilizations Museum, which admitted me for free due to my attendance at NTU. Lovely museum- beautiful collection of keris, interesting Chinese snuff vial display, plus I learned that present day Singapore is about 15% Muslim by population in its extensive exhibit on Islam in Southeast Asia. Remember Raffles? Malaysia was predominately Muslim long before he came along.

I gathered this building dates back to the colonial administration

Then,  I stumbled upon a weirdly placed bust of Comrade Deng Xiaoping of Chinese CP reform fame. The lengthy text describes his political career, contribution to reform, and his visit to Singapore that apparently inspired in part a thawing of China-Singapore relations and the institution of partial capitalism in China. It's interesting to note that Deng considered himself (and was considered by government of China) to be a Marxist despite his role in capitulating to imperialist market forces. A complicated character, to be sure, and it's no accident that this statue was the only mention of communism I've seen so far here.

Personally, I think it would be better accented by a much larger statue of Mao nearby

I also swung by Singaporean Parliament, seems to be under partial reconstruction.

Hello, constables!

The four official languages of Singapore: Malay, Chinese, Tamil, English. English serves as the lingua franca.

 And I continued out on foot in search of food, here are some more pictures

The famous Fullerton Hotel

Fellow tourists. 98% sure they were Russian, saw lots of Russians that day

Bayside festivities

This bar wasn't open, which was probably for the best.

Some kind of Chinese New Year thing off in the distance

Oh, I remember you (building, that is).

Hey look, people

Malaysian-style... something. I forget. From Glutton's Bay Hawker area. Spicy as hell, and those shiny bits are scales-on, bones-on dried fish that stick in your throat. But I would do it again in a heartbeat

Some fellow consumers of food

Tai Chi Chuan?

'Green man'

This is like the tenth train I've been on where I said 'that's the most crowded train I have ever seen'. Not pictured, me awkwardly crammed next to a bunch of waist-height people

 People Breaking Rules

"What's this?" you say "nobody breaks the rules in Singapore because of ridiculously stringent mandatory sentencing laws and an overall culture of deference". Well, I thought as you do, but I've already seen things here that imply a few problems for that narrative. For one thing, jaywalking is rampant, people definitely smoke cigarettes where they're not supposed to, and on top of it all, there are NEVER any cops in sight. Seriously. You're liable to see more cop cars in Tempe in five minutes than I've seen the whole time (okay, one week) here. I think I've seen maybe three separate constables. Maybe.

A cop spoke to the assembled exchange students at NTU, apparently graffiti is not tolerated and carries mandatory jail time. I saw this right next to the Tai Chi ladies in the picture above, not exactly off the beaten path. I still have no idea what it's supposed to mean though- a name?

Right by the train station. Oh well, it's only a few bikes

Just kidding. Wall-to-wall bike parking for like half a block. Couldn't get too much perspective due to the busy street right behind me

I think this'll be a recurring segment, so stay tuned for further rule-breaking in beautiful Singapore. I think I overestimated the amount of control it is really even possible to project over public space, even a tiny island's worth of it relative to a much larger country's amount of entrenched capital.

Food and School

I've been eating around, but still haven't exhausted the options at my local canteen (canteen 11). School is going apace, and although course registration has been chaotic, I'm only waiting on one additional course to fill out my ASU requirements.

A very peaceful spot I stumbled across lost. Near the President's (freaking palatial) house atop a hill.

Overgrowth outside Hall 11

School of Biological Sciences from the courtyard. There was a tent event going on tomorrow, I wasn't invited :(

Lost!

Ah here we are.

Lots and lots of jungle-razing construction outside my dorm. Off to the left is the bus stop.

Breakfast in Hall 11! I know, let's text the whole time. Funny thing is, I don't have phone service, so I just stare at people (or in this case, photograph them)

Korean restaurant (Bugis Village @ Canteen 11). Plain bowl of rice, veg, pork, egg, served with an egg drop soup. Mostly ordered for the added vegetable mass, you don't find that in everything around here.

North Indian restaurant (it's something like Karkat @ Canteen 11?). Butter chicken + garlic naan. Super yummy

Chinese (Hokkien) restaurant (Temple Street @ Canteen 11). Prawn Hokkien Mee.

And this. Sandwich vending machine. I'm not brave enough, and I've seen nobody else solicit it, so it remains a bit of a mystery.

Well, thanks for reading. I would again encourage anyone to volunteer subject matter for discussion or pictures. I think once a week makes sense, but maybe I'll up the frequency of posts due to popular demand.