A Better Title

Just to drop a note that I’m now back in Singapore with my mum, cruising around in the island state to tourist attractions, with only the perpetual torrential rain stopping us.

Well, to be precise, we were supposed to cruise around in the island state to tourist attractions, but the darned perpetual torrential rain had been stopping us. Damn!

Not today though. We went to the Singapore Science Centre, and were disappointed by the appalling collection of exhibits. Many (and I really mean many!) of the exhibits available are broken, and as such we couldn’t really enjoy ourselves.

Anyway, Australia has been fun! We went to beautiful places there, including an aquarium, a zoo, three beaches, lookout points which, erm, marks a spot of a wonderful lookout to the beaches, two wineries (though we only stepped in to realise that the darned places were closing), a seat, an observation deck more than 200 m high in the air, and in general, close to the entire city. Add that to an arts gallery, a museum, a botanical garden, and a shrine, and many others which I might have forgotten, all packed in a ten-day visit to the country.

(And maybe that explains why I am sick at the moment when I’m supposed to bring my mum around Singapore).

Anyway, I’ve got to thank my brother for sponsorring my air ticket to Australia and covering all my expenses, and my mum for being so afraid to venture in a foreign land that she enlisted me to be her guide before we meet up with my brother (she was supposed to travel alone to Australia and back with my brother).

Apart from the horrifying experience of having mum, unbeknownst to me, bringing Eclipse mint tin cans across the electromagnetic scanner gizmo used for security checks in airports (thereby triggering the alarm, and a barrage of instructions from the security personnel which my mum happily didn’t understand [she doesn't understand English], and forcing me to tap the security personnel to say that “she doesn’t speak English” before translating what he said into Indonesian) the experience has been wonderful, and I look forward to being in Australia again.

Being the linguist-wannabe that I am, I can’t help to analyse Australian English, and I must say that I now understand why Singlish deviates so much from the standard English that it could just be categorised as a new language on its own. And that Australian English is not without its own uniqueness, like how “a couple of bottles” literally means a couple, i.e. two bottles. Or bush to mean country (as in the music). And how “wotah” is how some people pronounce “water”. Or “yair yair” to mean “yes”.

And if you feel that I don’t sound like myself today, it might be because I’m under the effect of a drug. It’s an opiate.

But before you turn me in to the police, I must add that the opiate is codeine, which is contained in Panadeine, a drug which my doctor prescribed me long time ago, but I believe can be taken in my situation right now.

Ok, time to drop dead.

See ya latah!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.