Day 2: 11/5/2007

Yesterday, much to my charin, a lot of things went wrong after I headed to bed. It started with me fretting about not receiving any of my expected calls. I jerked awake at 10:30 wondering why no one had called yet. My mom noticed something strange: our phone had a blinking light. She called the receptionist to find out why, and discovered that people had been trying to contact us.

What followed was a fiasco regarding telephone setting and problems with Chinese names. Someone had changed our phone settings so the ringing tone was off. So when the phone rang, non one in our room noticed. To make things worse, the receptionist was not sure that the people calling were actually looking for me. Apparently they had difficulty knowing which part of the Chinese name was the last name. That was why they refused to connect our call directly or give out our room number.

This caused a lot of trouble for us. I had to call up people and specially look for them.

Somehow, we managed to sleep after that, and today we headed into Freemantle.

The train system reminds me of the subway. It has these ticketing machines with fares divided by zones. Toss the correct coins in and get the tickets. Now that I write that down it doesn't seem too exciting, but it was pretty daunting when I was standing in front of the machine.

Heading into Freemantle was quite exciting as some sharp eyed passengers spotted a school of dolphins in the bay. They didn't leap out of the water, but you could see fins breaking the surface every now and then. Freemantle really is a port city and much of the activities there reolve around the sea and sailing. We took the free bus and headed to Freemantle Markets first.

The Markets are very similar in feel to Bugis Junction. There are a lot of shops selling all manner of things in a higgly-piggly layout. It's interesting if you like shopping, but not really if you don't. I had expected something more on the scale of Victoria Market in Melbourne, but it wasn't like that.

Next we went to the Shipwreck Museum, which was unique, interesting and informative. Did you know that people accidentally mapped the top part of the East Coast of the island as the West Coast? This resulted in a lot of shipwrecks as the ships made the wrong turns and also met reefs.

Acting on Jie's suggestion we went to Kaili's. The food there was very fresh, but I wouldn't the BBQ again. The seafood platter was better. Eating by the seaside has its perks, and the scenery is one of them. Just wandering by the quay is nice and relaxing.

We also visited the Maritime Museum, where Freemantle really lives up to its name as a sailing hub. They also had a decommisioned submarine, but I didn't sign up for the tour to go on it. On hindsight, I should've done that. We headed home instead in the afternoon. Jessica was quite surprised to hear that we left so early, and mentioned that I should've gone to the Freemantle Museum and the Art Museum.

Going back to the hotel early had its perks though. I got to watch a British drama called Spooks, revolving around the MI5 and their cases. Just watching it made me think of CovertAR and GuardAR, especially the notable office break-in and tailing of the suspect. It was surprsingly current, with a storyline involving the CIA trying to gain British support for the Iran war by tailoring a terror attack. Can't imagine that happening in any Singaporean dramas.