Singapore, Day 1

The first morning it was still gray and drizzling a little bit. Despite being up late the night before (as well as the night before that), I woke up early on my own before the alarm and so I walked around the area. We were in a part of Singapore called Clarke Quay (pronounced "key"), which was along a river. There were a lot of malls, shops, restaurants and bars in this section, and it was also very pedestrian friendly (most of the main part of the city that I saw was good for walking).

So after grabbing a quick breakfast and a coffee, I hopped in a cab to the hockey rink for our first game. The rink we played at was actually very small, and so all games were actually played 4-on-4 (instead of the regular 5-on-5). Besides being a better match for the small playing surface, this also means that you don't need as many people to put a team together which made for more teams. I think there were something like 12 teams in total, hailing from Singapore, Korea, Japan, Qatar, Thailand, UAE (Abu Dhabi), Hong Kong, and probably some other places that I forgot.

We played at the "Fuji Ice Palace," which was on the third floor of a shopping mall in the west suburbs of Singapore (Jurong). It's not build for ice hockey. They had to put up make shift netting to protect spectators from flying pucks, and there were no real locker rooms. The picture above is the view from one of the locker "rooms," which consists of some coin-op lockers with tarps strung between them for walls.

Here's a view from one end of the rink. It's probably hard to tell from the picture, but the rink was *small*. The entire neutral zone was at most the length from the blue line to center ice in a normal-sized rink, and so players frequently put themselves offsides because the blue line comes up fast. With such a small rink, icing was also only called if you sent the puck all of the way down the ice from behind your own goal line *and* only if no one was in a position to get it. We also only played two periods per game, but that worked out ok. The periods were about 20 minutes long (running time), but we ended up playing a total of six games over three days, so it was still a pretty good deal for a 120,000W registration fee. We were mostly outplayed in our first game, but we managed to win 2-1 (as further evidence of the small size of the ice, both of our goals were scored by slapshots from *outside* of the blue line, with one coming from behind center ice).

After the game, I wandered around the shopping area around the ice rink. While the rink was in a mall, there was another large shopping complex next door that was filled with a huge variety of food stalls, fruit drink shops, and other stores. While wandering around, we found this one really funny store that just had seemingly random items. Among them were this crate of bowling balls with a pair of used ice hockey skates (I can't imagine much demand for second hand skates in s'pore).

The store also sold rice cookers and other home appliances, which are pretty unrelated to ice hockey skates. Anyhow, we thought it was funny. Later that afternoon, we played in our second game.

Prior to the game, we were still waiting for the Zamboni to finish resurfacing the ice. This was pretty funny; the guy was cruising around on the Zamboni while talking on his cell phone. He did about half of the ice like this. The ice was in pretty poor shape. Singapore is just too warm and humid, and so if you put on too much water, it would take forever to freeze solid. So "resurfacing" the ice was basically barely scraping it and putting the thinnest possible coating of fresh water over the ice. Along the boards in the corners, there was a lot of granular ice that had the texture of the ice in sno-cones. So the ice conditions were pretty bad, but you've just got to make due when you're that close to the equator.

Another interesting picture of the ice rink that you probably won't ever see in the US or even Canada. Those red things hanging there are paper lantern decorations for the Chinese New Year. The official new year holiday season ended this Sunday, and so there were still plenty of decorations up all over Singapore.

At night we walked around Clarke Quay. With all of the lights from the buildings, bars, clubs and everything else on both sides of the river, it made for a very pretty sight. I think this is actually the ferry/boat landing for taking trips up and down the river (I think mostly for tourists). We had dinner (I had a steak! I haven't had one since I've been in Seoul since beef is so horribly expensive in Korea), went to a bar, and when all was said and done, it was relatively late again by the time I went to bed (we had an early 8:30 am game the next morning).