A True Holiday
10.06.07 - 12:14 a.m.
I have discovered the most beautiful place in Singapore!

The most beautiful* place in Singapore is...

Bukit Batok Nature Park!!

* Note: aiyah I'm sure there are more beautiful places in Singapore lah but of a week of beauty - the sea at East Coast Park, the trees at MacRitchie - the moment I stepped into the cool green haze of this park is still the one I remember as the most magical

The second most beautiful place in Singapore is...

The Ulu Pandan Park Connector! :D

I found this out when I jogged from NUS to Bukit Batok on Tuesday to explore the Ulu Pandan Park Connector. (Now there only remains the Jurong Park Connector to be explored before I have explored all the major park connectors already hehe)

But wait.. what HAS Joanna been up to all this week? Hehe... No one could accuse me of not making FULL USE of this short break :P

(A bit about the week before: My last week of Family Medicine, and attending VCF LPC - Leadership Planning Camp - in the evenings, when school was over. LPC was very inspiring, especially the night when many leaders from past years of VCF came down. It was also a good time to talk to Zichun and Ching Mien - the latter of whom called me 'sis' for the first time in an SMS after that which made me feel all warm n fuzzy :) Not that LPC is about being warm and fuzzy lah - a lot of serious planning and discussuion goes on. It's thrilling to be serving God and to know that one's not alone! Also on Saturday we had a youth group session again- even more precious now that they're not every week and I look forward to them! :P)

Sunday: Went to watch "Amazing Grace" with most of the youth group + Zichun and Ching Mien + Jeremy... an AMAZING experience, as I have already written about :P That day was also the first time, thanks to Dezhi, I've ever seen a Ben and Jerry's Monster (a gigantic tub of many different ice cream flavours!!!) After that, went to PS with Zichun and Ching Mien to have dinner with Faith (who had been making cards for charity at Made With Love, the scrapbooking shop). Did some catching up and was introduced to the fascinating and eye-catching world of scrapbooking (it's become a specialist hobby, and I never knew) by Faith :P

Monday: Spent the morning finalising and sending off application forms for India electives with the 3 guys :P Had very nice shui jiao mian for lunch and didn't spill any chilli on myself this time haha. Went to watch Pirates 3 after that with Viks, Jeremy and Susan. The two girls didn't like the show (it was so confusing and the characters kept making grandiose gestures which, through the sheer frequency of them, weren't as significant as they expected us to think!) but the two guys loved it and told us that our attention spans were too short and we just weren't smart enough to figure it out. Huh!! I rather liked the "arthouse" sequences with Johnny Depp though haha.

Tuesday: My Bukit Batok Adventure! Took MRT to school in the morning just so that I could leave my bathing stuff at the SRC and then jogged to Bukit Batok by myself! :P This is when I discovered that the Ulu Pandan Park Connector is really the most scenic park connector in Singapore. It's beside a big canal with lots and lots of greenery on each side - all very pretty, and the park connector which is the most insulated from traffic noise - so you can almost imagine that you're following the river that the hobbits were sailing down in LOTR :P Of course lah you need imagination, but what I'm trying to say is that this is a route that helps the imagination a lot! so not only are you exercising you can also pretend you're part of a big adventure! :) and so you are!

And it's beautiful! And sometimes the route is crossed by overhead flyovers and the MRT line, which adds to rather than detracts from the scenic quality. I took some photos on my handphone but the colours came out funny and besides it doesn't really do justice to the peacefulness of the surroundings and the nice feeling of being out there in the fresh air and part of a big adventure :)

Anyway I got to Bukit Batok (very slowly because I was walking rather than jogging after a while) and then detoured to West Mall to rehydrate myself heh. And who should I meet but a whole gang of VCFers including Lester and Linus, back from his elective! :P I joined them while they had lunch heh and Lester gave me an impromptu tour of Bukit Batok Central - since I was a "tourist" to Bukit Batok hahaha. So now I know where the two bakeries are and where the bubble tea shop is haha!

Then I went to Ben Khoo's house to pick up the CG guide from him (this was just for fun - he could have passed it to me through Susan instead but since I was there I decided to run to his house lah) :) I found that Ben's house is RIGHT NEXT TO the park connector... he lives on it man...

After that I went to the Bukit Batok Nature Park, not really intending to go in... but it was so quiet and magical that it beckoned me in! It was all part of the adventure, and it was like an enchanted forest - so I went in to explore a bit. It was really nice, and quite different somehow from the usual feel of tropical vegetation such as you get at MacRitchie or in a town park.. the trees there were tall, slender and close together, like a forest in a fairytale - and all around, the bushes literally rustled with wildlife - and I saw a small monitor lizard, a squirrel and a skink of sorts within 5 minutes of each other just walking down one of the paths :) It made me feel like a princess in a Disney forest, or a child picnicking in one of the Enid Blyton books :P (perhaps even a little like Polly in the World Between The Worlds, but less sleepy)

I guess maybe many people might not have thought it was anything spectacular, and it might not have been if peace and quiet and beauty were more commonplace - but because it was so still and peaceful, it was the very silence that was spectacular - so silent that one could hear that all the bushes were vibrating with animal life, and a place where the plant life itself seemed so alive... It was a place so full of life that it felt very good to be alive :) a simple oasis of peace in a land full of care. Nothing that you'd take a tourist to for sight-seeing. This was like a secret place right at home that you don't want to tell anyone about!

Anyway, I took MRT back to school after that, my "tourist" experience at Bukit Batok having cost me about $3 worth of liquids and $1 dried kiwifruit that I bought at the provision shop at the MRT because I'd never seen dried kiwi before! (haha... acting like a swakoo tourist in my own country) :) it was a nice day... After that I quickly washed up and went to meet Susan after that to take Auntie Sylvia out for dinner!

Wednesday: Hiking at MacRitchie Reservoir!! :) This much-anticipated plan involved the Eastie party, the party from KE, and Susan (the organiser), meeting up at MacRitchie with surprisingly not as much confusion as might have been expected haha. We had a terrific 6-hour hike around the reservoir with a lunch break for a picnic on top of the Jelatung Tower. This was notable for the invention of the term "David Bread" (definition: "a loaf of bread which has been carried for so long by David that it has moulded itself into the contours of his body"). Hehe... There were tuna sandwiches, apples, durian puffs, doughnuts, chocolate rice krispies, 100-plus, pastries (...and 1 packet of Nesquik)! It was completely exhausting and completely fun :) We met lots of wildlife along the way too - lots of monkeys (who stared at David), both kinds of monitor lizards, a skink and many turtles (we invented a scandalous story for them to explain why there were so many - Mr Turtle and his 2 families!)

Thursday: Met Zichun in school to do scriptwriting - or rather, plan script (and to keep Dawn company...) :) This is a possible script for next year's Hall Play, an adaptation of the CS Lewis book "Till We Have Faces".... I will say no more at the moment, till we can pull this off and be able to put our vision of what it can be to paper... but if we can, it's going to be great :P

Med CF CG after that, a good session on 1 Cor 12:12-27 and a reminder of how all the different parts of the body are indispensable, what it means to give honour to the less honourable... and how Christian community is very different from special friendships :P It ended too late for me to go and meet Siu Qey and Alice and Charmaine unfortunately! I had dinner with the Med friends instead.

Friday: Scriptwriting again with Zichun :) This has been reminding me of all the times I worked with Steffy to write stuff heh - except that we are more alike I guess. Sometimes I feel almost as if Zichun and I are two heads belonging to the same person. Working together is rewarding, we tend to think in quite similar ways... it's almost like bouncing ideas off oneself - except a faster process! This does mean though that it sometimes takes a third head (usually Viks', so far) to help us see stuff that we can't see on our own :P

Met Faith after that for dinner (a steak and mushroom pie and a FABULOUS milkshake, the richest cookies-and-cream milkshake EVER!) and the beginner's scrapbooking course we'd signed up for at Made With Love. A fun night and therapeutic but I was tired :P Lots of girl-talk that night haha... plus a talking-to for being overcommitted!! Heh...

Saturday: Planning script with Zichun again, at my house this time - most enjoyable. I produced Humphrey Carpenter and Robert Graves for some ideas. The arrival of Viks and Dawn provided the third head (Viks') necessary to inject a new perspective, uh, as well as to set off a riotous round of jokes and mutual suanning. :D Went cycling at East Coast Park with Yenchin, Viks and Jeremy after that, and a delicious dinner at the food centre :) But Viks and Jeremy kept suanning me! (something that they learnt at Pirates 3!) "small and squealy" indeed! Huhhh! :D

Thank God for good friends and for nature and all the beautiful creatures which live in trees and bushes, for the good weather this week which made it possible to do everything, for hobbies and writing and art and craft, for love and for life, for legs to run and the air to breathe. I know I am blessed, so blessed.