Fever Pitch

Much of yesterday was spent concentration on matters off the football field, but today has been much more about 'The Beautiful Game'.

After my little jaunt to Sembawang Park yesterday, I felt like going down there again this morning, with the only difference being the speed that I would be getting there, and also the fact that I was going to remember to take my camera along!

Setting off at 8am, hoping to beat the rather warm Singapore sun, I headed in the direction of the park. I'd definitely consider myself to be a 'fit and healthy' individual, but initially I was pretty skeptical about doing any kind of physical exercise in the humidity I've had to face at certain times during my stay here.

I'm also not so fantastic with the whole 'jogging thing'. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy getting out and doing exercise, and even having not played for two weeks I didn't think that would affect my ability to run too much.

With the help and encouragement of the Nike+ iPod app which acts a bit like a personal trainer, I managed to make my way 3.75kms in a reasonable decent time to arrive at the park.

The route to get there is relatively easy, but with a fair bit of construction being done, it took me some time to get to the location that I managed to make it to yesterday. There was a map as you made your way into the park, but Singaporean cartographers must work differently to european ones as due to following it I ended up wondering off down a few paths and found myself at a shipyard to the left of where I wanted to be.

Recalibrating my personal navigation system I backtracked and tried going in a different direction. Thankfully this proved much more successful and I was able to get to the location that I had visited yesterday.

Whilst getting busy with the camera, I also took a walk out onto a jetting where some men were fishing so that I got a panoramic shot of Johor Baru.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it is quite strange to think that another country is within a short paddle of this small island.

After snapping away I headed back for home, and enjoyed my second shower of the fledgling day. Yesterday was the first time since coming to Singapore that I actually experienced a warm shower. Living in a huge tower block, surrounded by about thirty of the same type buildings, I would guess that its quite difficult to time getting a hot/warm shower, but yesterday I must have worked it out right!

Due to the heat its not exactly been a bad thing that I have been the recepient of cold showers, but it was something that I didn't realise I would miss quite so much.

Freshened up I was readying myself to get on with some work when I was informed that I was going out to coach this afternoon, so the laptop got closed and I headed out to a new location on the east.
Alunied, where I got off the MRT was actually not the location of our session, but it was our first destination to pick up the kit.

Unfortunately not all of the locations we work in and around have storage facilities. As I was about to discover, the place we were going to was actually an open playing field so we ended up having to lug all our equipment out of a storage locker and into a taxi to get to where we were actually coaching.

Despite being about six or seven stops away from it, and this demonstrates the size of the country, we were greeted by the sight of Marina Bay Casino and also the Singapore Flyer in the distance.
The location we were coaching in today was also a first for me as we were coaching in a public space hidden in between rows and rows of condos.

We had two sessions today; one of children who were 3-5 and one of kids who were 6-8. For the first session we only had 4 kids, and for the 2nd we had 7 so it was relatively easy to keep them occupied for their allotted time.

By the time we'd got back to the lockup, it was about 7pm, and I had promised myself that if I got finished on time then I would head a couple of stops over to a place called Lavender where there was an S-League (Singapore Premier League) game going on tonight.

I'd been wanting to go check out a game for a while now, but it seems that there were some weird schedules going on in the Singapore League. Team's don't seem to actually have a home ground, as the team designated for the home game, Tampines, have a stadium out towards the airport, but yet they were playing Home United, in a completely neutral ground.

I managed to navigate my way to the groud after a little bit of time - no need to wonder if backwards signs did me again; yes they did! The Jalan Besar stadium isn't a huge ground, and only has seats on three sides of the stadium. A ticket to watch the 4th place (Home United) against 2nd place (Tampines) set me back only $5 which is about £2.50, and I was treated to an entertaining game which Tampines won 2-0.

It was interesting to watch how Singaporean football is played. I know from the kids that I coach, they don't use their voices very much during the game. Where as English players, even at the amateur level, are quite vocal, Singaporeans have a reluctance to relay even simple information to their team mates which is quite strange. 

The stadium itself holds about 8,000 people, but I would be surprised if there were even 750 people in the ground for the game. There seemed to be a large section of Tampines fans in one location, but there were a few mixed in around the rest of the seats as you could tell from the sporadic cries as their team took, and extended their lead.

Although I haven't been out and done a great deal today, it was nice to get to go back to Sembawang Park (camera in hand) and also to see a local football match.

My international travel to date has clearly served me well as I seem to have very few troubles navigating from one place to another as I do my best to see all that I can in Singapore. 

Why is it that adults aren't supposed to go mad about anything? You gotta keep a lid on it. And if you don't then people are apparently entitled to say what they like. "You haven't grown up. You're a moron. Your conversation is trivial and boorish. You can't express your emotional needs. You can't relate to your children." And you die, lonely and miserable. But you know, what the hell, every cloud has a silver lining.