Recreation and cost of living

What do you do when you want to take a break from your assignments? Well, if you have been reading my posts and looking at my photos, the answer is obvious:


It's a sure way to quickly attract wild attention. Look at that seagull heading straight for me! (Don't worry, it is just an optical illusion. It didn't even come close)


But with the weather starting to turn quite cold, exercising outdoors is almost out of the question. My hands are like frozen numb everytime I finished my jog.

Ok, there is the gym at the sports centre (and now you know why gyms are so popular in "ang-moh" countries), but at £4.50 or S$13.50 per visit, it seems helluva expensive to me.

Yes, I still couldn't help but convert the prices to Sing dollar. The exchange rate automatically makes everything 3X more expensive.

10 minutes bus ride to city centre: $4.50
1 dinner at the canteen - 3 dishes, no rice, no soup, no drinks: $10
1 page of printing b/w: 18 cents
1 minute on handphone: 45 cents
1 day's fine per open shelf library book: 90 cents
if book's reserved: $1.80
1 week's hostel rent: $300
1 wash+drying of clothes: $9
1 loaf of bread: $3.30

I miss my bicycle. I regret not shipping more things over.

No wonder even the Japanese find the prices here expensive!

Not Previously Seen - Part 1

Here is a picture of some stuff which I don't see in Singapore:

My "Formal Specifications" lecture notes listed a proposition¹: jaffa cakes are biscuits. So to find out whether the proposition is true or false, I bought some. Jaffa Cakes are a kind of biscuit covered with chocolate, wrapped around grape flavoured jelly. It taste quite good too.

The white disc in the picture is called a flying saucer. It looks like a toy but is actually a candy. The shell is made of flour and the hollow contains sour candy powder.

We have avocado in Singapore, but this is a rather large one that cost 68 pence (around S$2). The pen is placed there to give perspective to the sizes of the objects.

¹ A proposition in mathematical logic is a statement that is either true or false.