I was supposed to be running with quite a bunch of guys today; when I discovered the PAssion Run and the details on it, I already started to ask people to register with me. People like Jing Ying, Zhong Hao and Darrell expressed interest for it. At that time I finished Suburban Run not long ago and was really interested in another challenge. Yi Da, who ran with me for the 10-km Suburban Run was unsure, saying that he might be busy with Operations stuff in the army. Zhong Hao decided against it pretty early, since he was going for the Sundown Relay which is going to be the week after PAssion Run. Since I still had friends joining me, I went to sign up because my idea was that I’d be running no matter what. In the end, Darrell suddenly decided to go for his Hernia surgery during that period and Jing Ying just didn’t want to run.
I didn’t exactly have 7 hours of sleep since I got a little too engross with chatting online and reading stuff in the night yesterday; I got up 5.30am, and I was lucky to get a lift from my uncle over to East Coast Park (after the run, I took 1 hour to walk from the starting point and the race carnival area to the bus stop where I could take my bus home). I stretched a bit and walk around, deposit my backpack and then visited the loo before the emcee started asking people to gather for warm-up. I thought it was good that they provided the fitness people to guide people for warm-up. Though I didn’t follow through everything, it reminded me to stretch certain muscles and really get myself warmed up – the SAF warm-up is seriously inadequate in this respect.
The starting of the run is a little confusing. I was informed through the website that my category (Men & Women 15-km Open) flags off the first wave at 7.30am but in the end they told people with the Orange Bib, which is what I’ve got to start off around 7.10am. I thought that it’ll be good to start off early then I can leave early as well so I just started running. I have never tried running in East Coast Park because it is too far away from my place and if I ever go there, it’ll be to cycle. It was great running beside the sea except that there’s too many people and the lane is too narrow at the starting point area. As the crowd start to distribute themselves along the path, it became much easier to run. The water points are quite well distributed for this run although I personally think that the trashing areas are too close to the water point – I usually grab a cup, drink a bit as a run and then toss the cup into the trash area. This means that if the trash area is too close to the water point, I only take 1 or 2 gulps and will throw away the rest of the water.
I maintained my pace pretty well until about 12km, when the turning point started feeling pretty far away, I slowed terribly and my mind seem to start focusing on the aches that my ankle, feet and shin is experiencing – before hitting that distance, these pains were virtually hidden from my mind, I was only focusing on overtaking and breathing properly. In any case, I have never ran more than 12km at one shot in my life so far so perhaps my body was trying to condition itself. I started slowing almost to walking pace to drink sufficient water at the water point; I didn’t feel thirsty but I was just plain worried that I would dehydrate since I was perspiring quite madly even during the warm-up and I daren’t take risks. After 13km, the distance of 1km, which used to be absolutely no kick for me start to seem like a super long distance. In the remaining 2km, I couldn’t maintain my pace at all, slowing and taking very small steps at times and then speeding up to pull ahead whenever I think there’s someone I could overtake. I looked at my watch and I knew I had to keep up with the pace I was running just a while ago because I wanted to finish the entire thing in 90 minutes, which technically speaking, should not be that tough a challenge.
Running alone, albeit in such an event with so many people, is a very different experience from having friends around you whom you’re trying to catch up or pacing. This time I did try to pick someone who seem to be running about the same pace as me to follow until I manage to overtake him/her. I overtook people very frequently in the beginning. In fact I was almost overtaking all the ordinary pace people in the first 9km or so – the only time when people overtake me was those who were speeding up to catch up with friends ahead or the crazy ones who are already running way faster than me but started a little later.
This run’s baggage deposit is way better than the Suburban Run I had 2 months ago. I really appreciate the fact they have shelves in place for the bags and the officials were not frantically fumbling through heaps of bags when you bring your tags to them. The start point is probably the only problem – it is not friendly to people taking public transport. That explains the above fact involving my walking.
After the experience I know I definitely have to condition my body for the longer distances before running them. I think those who go join 42km Sundown without any conditioning is really quite insane.
Update – My timing came out; it’s 1 hour and 27 minutes, within my target of 90 minutes!
” It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities, but of their advantages” – Adam Smith
This couple of months I’ve been watching so many movies I can hardly keep track. I watched Passion of the Christ, The Shawshank Redemption, Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Home Alone, Red Cliff 2 and Seven Pounds. I’m not sure if there’s more but that’s all I can remember. The wonderful thing is that these are not watched in the Cinemas; most of them rented, some are DVDs borrowed from friends and the last 2 I watched on board flights for my trip – I guess the cost was included in the airfare since the budget airline offers no such thing.
There was a time when I thought I could do reviews for all the movies I watched but it’s too much information overwhelming me in a very short time and I lacked the time (and possibly attention) to sit down and devote myself to plainly writing movie reviews and not getting paid for it. But here I’m, trying to at least say something about stuff I watched. I watched Seven Pounds on board Cathay Pacific from Singapore to Hong Kong. It was a great movie at least to me although the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes turned out to be a rather pathetic 28%.
I guess the mainstream people thinks the movie is too much of a monologue but I really appreciate the aesthetic of it and the story-telling method. And I was positively touched by it. This is one of the movies in Will Smith’s series of serious movies and I think his performance in Seven Pounds deserves loads of credit.
On my flight back to Singapore from Hong Kong, I watched Red Cliff 2 since previously I already watched Red Cliff and this movie is a continuation of the story. Many people on board the same flight was also watching this particular movie as evident from the sudden coordinated sitting up of people in the cabin all around me almost at the same time as the movie ended.
The story adapted from one of the major story recorded in the history during the Three Kingdom was more or less accurately portrayed although not without dramatization. The problem is that stories revolving the Three Kingdom era are always woven with fiction nobody knows what really happened. Anyways the film was well shot, especially those typical Chinese war scenes where you see mass movements of people, it’s really different from the footage of modern warfare where you have people shooting, covering each other and then alternating between running and staying in prone position. You don’t see medics running around and saving lives while the war goes on and most of the time, people can get injured by arrows but continues fighting.
There are some illogical parts of the story here and there but generally the film is well shot, the things the character say are mostly meaningful and have lots of subtle messages hidden in them.
I would recommend anyone to watch both of these movies, for Red Cliff 2, even if you didn’t watch the first part, you would still enjoy this part because they try their best to fill you in on what has happened in part 1 before they start off with the movie and also because this part is already entertaining enough.
Blogging is usually rather spontaneous affair but this time I suddenly decided to plan my writing. It is not a random decision but rather, a step to get my English on to the next level. I started this blog as an effort to write in English more frequently and also to express myself using this language. I must say the attempt have been more than successful because after more than 4 years of blogging, my English is way better than my Chinese despite the opposite trend when I started out. Nevertheless, I realised that my writings have been little less than organized and it reflects the messy kind of thinking my mind engages in. The fact that I enjoy multi-tasking and stray into reading random Wikipedia articles while attempting to source information for the things I am writing about doesn’t quite help. Anyways, here’s my first attempt.
This article is definitely long overdue. My trip to Vietnam was from 20 February to 24 February and I’ve now already made another trip overseas again. I planned on writing this long ago but then even with all the data and information in my mind, its poor organization up there naturally called for procrastination and thus I postponed the writing of this entry. I got on to reading other stuff and now that I promised myself to devote a good deal of today’s afternoon writing I shall write this entry and some others to get this matter done and over.
Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City
Technically speaking, my February trip was a Ho Chi Minh City Trip more than to Vietnam. I’ve mainly only seen the city side of the country, knowing barely anything about the North, where traditions and customs were more properly preserved I learnt. I have, for the benefit of my readers, decided to look up Wikipedia to aid myself with an introduction of Ho Chi Minh City.
Ho Chi Minh City is the largest city in Vietnam. Under the name Prey Nokor, it was the main port of Cambodia, before being annexed by the Vietnamese in the 17th century. Under the name Saigon, it was the capital of the French colony of Cochinchina and later of the independent state of South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. In 1976, Saigon merged with the surrounding province of Gia Định and was officially renamed Hồ Chí Minh City. – Wikipedia
I think this is one of the best kind of summary when you want to talk about history of places; their development and all that will take up too much space so just talk about who rule or is in charge of that piece of land, how the name changes and be done with it. How
My Brush with Vietnam
Before the trip, all I know about Vietnam’s History and Geography is that she was involved in the Vietnam War and that she is located in South-East Asia, which sort of explains why she happens to be an ASEAN country. Besides that I know they are an emerging economy and doing pretty well with globalization.
The Vietnam War segment of my knowledge was largely a result of this short thesis paper I wrote in Secondary 2 that briefly discuss if United States screwed Vietnam during the war. It was a crappy piece of work and I failed the assignment terribly.
Pre-Trip Facts
I wanted to get away during my Birthday period and since I was going to deplete some leaves for it, I might as well take Overseas Leave to avoid the trouble of having people bug you. I have to decide somewhere to go anyways and it’ll be good if I’d be able to explore myself and travel entirely at my own pace. It is an entirely random idea and I was glad that Yi Da made the trip because he made it possible for me to foresee the stuff there, he gave me recommendations on what to do and places to go and such. I must thank Yi Da for all that and he has been a great ‘Guinea Pig’ sort of subject for me. Unfortunately, this knowledge and foresight was not enough to convince my parents to allow me to go on a trip without package tour and frills like such by myself with a friend. I got Ruiyuan to go Vietnam with me but was subsequently forced to drag my 2 aunts along with me to pacify my parents. I guess it’s pretty embarrassing but I’ve no fear about revealing this since this step is supposedly my stepping stone for more trips on my own.
Economic Observations
Okay, well. So I did make it there eventually and as a rather academic person who admires Economics, I thought it’ll be a great idea to consolidate my Economic Observations. I think it’s a wonderful city with lots of opportunities – as I did mentioned in some previous entry that you see street-side stalls in front of posh hotels and everywhere. Most families own these street businesses probably on top of some other breadwinners in the family working either for the government or big firms. The city consists mainly of people from the South Vietnam, more acquainted with capitalism and more entrepreneurial so to speak.
The development is somewhat haphazard, with poor maintenance of roads and these traffic networks evolved so spontaneously that I must say it is considerably messy. The good thing about Ho Chi Minh is that their terrain is relatively even so there’s little geographical barriers to development (say relative to cities like Hong Kong). There’s is no decent maps that tells you the name and location small streets around the place and the street signs are kind of small so it’s really difficult to tell where you are. Buildings there for residence are probably mostly build by households and not centrally planned so they’re also in quite a mess.
However, they have the grand advantage of super smart people who are full of drive to improve themselves. People (mainly referring to shop-keepers and stall owners) there could mostly speak a little bit of many languages thanks to the influx of tourist into Ho Chi Minh in the recent years – I heard English, Mandarin, Cantonese and probably French (logical since they were the focus of the French Colony. The shop-keepers at Ben Thanh Market successful scammed me into buying imitation dry-fit tees at a cost of almost SGD $9 when I could have gotten it at 4 bucks or something. Technically speaking, I can only blame my poor bargaining skills, which improved quite a little after the trip. The girls there have got pretty vicious mouths since lowering the prices too much yields exclamations like ‘I kill you!’, which can be pretty scary when they hold up their fist and try to look fierce. For that I have got to admit I’m a pretty timid person and I shall not defend myself against this charge.
Vietnam companies have obviously been really good with diplomacy, securing the formation of many cartels for the agencies in the tour industry. On the trip I went for 2 tours, one to the Cuchi Tunnels which I learnt about extensively during my study on Vietnam War (out of curiosity than academic interest) and the other was to the Mekong River Delta. Usually when one talk about Mekong we think about Thailand but the fact is most of the rich stuff that comes down along Mekong ends up with Vietnam. At the Mekong River Delta, I observed the lives of Vietnamese farmers and the simple lives in those rural towns. Frankly, it isn’t that different from those rural towns on the coast of Malaysia.
The food there is not priced as competitively as I’d expect but I think it’s good price relative to Singapore when you consider the service there; their KFC have staff serving you and taking orders, you can get the smallest Whipped Potato at about SGD$0.80, the typical cafe fares around Pham Ngu Lao region where I stayed was price around SGD$4.00 to SGD$6.00. Some restaurants have that sort of prices too although they often offer more foreign sort of food like fries and steak. The best is streetside fare, since a meal cost at most SGD$2.50 bucks with a drink and both the cooking and ingredients used are great! I had a plate of Stir-fried Beef Noodles for SGD$1.80 although I have to put up with sitting on the small chair that I used in the past to do homework when I was 4 or 5 years old and also for most unlucky people, they have to sit beside the roads where motorcycles were rushing by. The locals didn’t seem to mind though.
Some Prescriptions
The thing lacking in Ho Chi Minh City that most modern cities need to have is a metro-system, rails trams that shuttles people around. Their public buses work poorly because some roads are not suitable for big buses to go through and their street sides are not so suited to being lined with bus stops. Currently most locals travel with the aid of bikes and foreigners are allowed to rent bikes – this isolates those travellers who doesn’t ride bikes (me for example) and makes it difficult for people to move around in masses.
The lack of a rail system removes the excuse for a ‘transport node’ where you can open huge shopping mall and generate positive network effects. Vietnam doesn’t need those super high class malls, they just need those mid-class ones like Singapore’s old style malls Beauty World, Bukit Timah Plaza, People’s Park Complex and such. A degree of centralized planning is needed.
For those ‘learning’ to backpack (like me I guess) and want to explore cities of foot, Ho Chi Minh is a good place to start out. Knowing Vietnamese language is definitely a huge advantage, but for people like me, Broken English is good enough in Pham Ngu Lao district and otherwise you can only rely on kind souls who can speak English to help.
