Presidential palace, Chinese New Year, Tony Tan, TV Studies

Been out for a bit

...Sorry about that. I've taken a bit ill, but I went to the clinic today and got loaded up with drugs. So I'm sure I'll come around. Other than that, it was a great weekend!

Presidential Palace

Some friends and I did a day trip to the Singaporean President's Palace, which apparently only opens four times a year to the public. It was beautiful, though the palace itself was a little disappointing- they only had five rooms opened up. The President appears to be mostly a symbolic head of state, most of the political power appears to rest with the PM. Then we took a walk around the city, saw some interesting stuff along the way.

View from the grassy patch I was laying in.

The palace! It was quite hot, luckily they had these tents.

So this was the second block of the queue to get into the palace. Surprisingly fast, only took about an hour.

Tony Tan, President of Singapore, wearing a red shirt in the center.

Some sweet graffiti, you don't see a whole lot of this. Spotted near SMU (Singapore Management School).

An interesting bit of architecture downtown, slightly ruined by the fake turf.

SMU. Pictured: Per of Sweden, Timmy the Canadian, and a little bit of Joon de Korea.

A monument of some sort. Accidentally pictured: Callum the Scott.

Chinese New Year carnival.

Chinese New Year festival grounds near Marina Bay

Crowded food tent at CNY festival grounds.

View of Marina Bay from Helix Bridge.

Some more food, TV studies

Picked up my fourth class, at last: TV Studies: Critical Inquiries. Lots of American TV and political economic analysis (shout out to my boys Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Althusser, and Lukacs). First day we talked about women-lead American teenage dramas and their handling of sexual violence, culminating in a showing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in class. Today we talked about American TV political economy, which turns out to be an amazing subject. After the Reganization of American TV monopolies, a group of five media corporations rapidly stabilized into an oligopoly. TV stations in America are increasingly vertically integrated, owning everything from publishing houses to clothing designers to theaters, and have basically forgone direct competition entirely. In fact, many broadcasters buy and sell the other broadcasters' productions, leading to the situation today in the US where there is at most one thing you want to watch on TV at a given time. Here's a link to the article we read, which I highly recommend, and here's a link to a very funny and relevant web comic brought to my attention by one Christopher Barton.

Anyway, that class put me in contact with the beautiful School of Communications, so there's some pictures (or, rather, PICTURE, but rest assured, more coming), along with the usual food pics.

Beef rib soup. Turns out ribs are pretty challenging to eat with chopsticks.

Beef noodle with bok choy and some kind of awesome gravy.

My new favorite breakfast food, half-boiled eggs! A bit strange at first, most of my fellow foreigners don't care for them.

One of the ubiquitous Singapore wafer-ice cream carts. S$1.20 buys you a chunk of ice cream of flavors including durian, chocolate chip, and 'ripple' sandwiched between two wafers.

Some kind of arts promotion as a mural on stairs? I thought it was pretty clever.

Near my HoR.

Communications courtyard.

Some left-over pictures from Arab Street, this is one of the many Turkish restaurants.

Alley in Singapore. Pictured, from left to right: Tim, Ryu, Steven, four non-reoccurring characters I don't remember.

Masjid-e Sultan by night, colored lights make it quite beautiful.

Finally got a local phone! My American contraption didn't have a replaceable SIM card, so I had to get this ~$18 phone from Little India. Notice the Hindii keys.