My birthday, Yogyakarta and Bali

Long time ago, so enough to tell!! This story is going to be a long one, so be prepared! The semester in Singapore is already halfway gone!!! How crazy, my last final is in one and a half month! In the middle of the semester we had a recess week, one week without lectures. This doesn't mean holiday for Singaporeans, because of course, busy busy busy and looooots of work. For exchange students..... YES it does mean holiday!!!! The week before recess week already felt like holiday as it was the week of my birthday. I've been looking forward to my birthday every year again for a long time, nowadays I can get a normal sleep, but when I was young it was even hard to fall a sleep ;). Well, how to celebrate your birthday 13 000 km away from home? 
The day before my birthday I went to boat quay with my closest friends for dinner. Boat quay is a street next to a river filled with nice restaurants with view on the skyline of Singapore. Here you definitely notice that you're in a big city and that they see white people as tourists. Definitely a place to go when you visit Singapore. We had dinner at a cosy Italian restaurant and it was really nice to have a European dinner, served by a waiter and together with some wine. (literally some wine, because we paid around 50 euro's for one bottle). After dinner we went to a bar in Clarke quay (this is the place to go out, filled with restaurants and bars, the architecture is amazing!! They even have a clin
ical bar, where you sit in wheelchairs and you're served by nurses. You can get your drink via an infusion (don't know if this is the right word in English..). ) and at 12...... it started raining cats and dogs! Hello birthday! When I woke up the next day and entered the living room my roommates put garlands everywhere, how nice. In the evening I threw a pre-party in our apartment and my friends made me an amazing present. After that we went clubbing and had an amazing evening!! I had to sacrifice from it the next day ;).

One day later the time for Yogyakarta already came!!! Together with 2 girls from Belgium (french part) we arrived in Yogya in the afternoon. Of course we wanted to travel with public transport and we found out the transjogja, who brought us to a busstop, 15 minute walk from our hostel. My friends shared a suitcase on wheels, that was not the best idea, as the streets in Yogya are not the same as in Singa. After a crazy walk of around 20/30 minutes we arrived at our hostel and it looked sooo nice!! Totally in Indonesian style and in a street filled with restaurants, hostels and tourist information. In the evening we wanted to visit the sultan palace (also known as Kraton), but this city is not used to tourists who want to visit things in the evening, because everything was dark. A nice local showed us around, but it felt a little bit creepy and as we didn't know when to trust locals we decided to further to the big street Malioboro. We had a nice (European) dinner and as we were very tired, we went home immediately after dinner. We did this in Indonesian style, by horse with a car behind it! Next day we went to Borobodur, which is one of the largest Buddhist temples in the world. Again, we wanted to go by public transport, which was truly adventurous. Musicians hopping in the buses trying to get money from us, the doors never closed and it took around 2 hours for 30 km. But it was good fun and the temple was so worth it! Sunday we visited Prambanan, a huge Hindu temple, which was also very impressive. In the afternoon we went to the Merapi volcano, which had its last explosion last year. It was too cloudy to see the volcano, but we saw a broken bridge, a river filled with lava stones and the destroyed village. There died 275 people during this explosion and our guide explained us that this was mostly because of the religion of the habitants, they don’t want to move and the explosion is the way it has to be…. Impressive and fascinating at the same time. We definitely noticed that Yogya is not yet discovered by Western tourists, all the locals wanted to take pictures of us and they even called me Barbie haha!! Monday was already our last day in Yogyakarta and we decided to do something more relaxing, we went cave tubing! Really exciting, we got our own tube, firstly made a tour on a little river and after a nice Indonesian lunch we went inside the cave!! Very cool to see a cave from a tube! In the evening we flew to Bali where we met up with 4 of our friends. Bali had everything I expect of a holiday. We visited the most important temples, did a volcano sunrise tour, went to the rice fields and coffee plantations, had amazing Indonesian food, but also a lot of crazy parties and some days at the beach. It was really weird to come back to Singapore and everybody felt a bit sad after this amazing week. It makes me wondering how it’s gonna feel to come back to Tilburg? Don’t wanna think about that!! Indonesia, I loved it! The people are so so friendly, the food is amazing and you roll from one surprising view into another. I definitely want to go back! In Singapore everything is very busy now as all the groupwork deadlines are getting closer and closer. So everybody is working really hard and we spent a lot of time in the library. Luckily the food is much better than in the menza haha, so it’s not that bad to have dinner and study late at uni.

Yesterday we had a study break and joined the MRT pub crawl, we started at an mrt stop quite far from the centre and hopped of every station to buy a beer in a 7/11, foodcourt or bar and ended up in a bar. We were around 600 students, all wearing a purple t-shirt. Crazy crazy in the clean, sober Singapore MRT! Now I’m starting to look forward to my parents arriving…. This Friday already! I’m going back to Bali with them and of course I will show them Singapore. I’m so excited to see them again!!! Ps. For more pictures, check my Facebook!