I forgot to make mention of an important aspect of Singaporean life: The Hawker Centre. Here you can get all kinds of food in a market. Each booth is manned by a man or woman keen on beating out their neighbors for your money. As an Ang Mor (red hair, white guy), I am a magnet for their attention. Each stall sells a couple varities of food, but there are hundreds of stalls per centre and hundreds of centres around. Usually, each dish is around S$3-4. It is good, and cheap, eating.


 

A "special" treat. Through Singapore is a thoroughly modern country, there are a few reminders that this is Asia. Like this squat toilet. You place your feet on either side of the trench and squat over it. Having never encountered a squat toilet, it took a little while for me to work out where to squat to make sure I didn't miss. Apparently, people miss the target often. Mmm.... Yuck!

 

Yesterday Jac and I went to NUS (National University of Singapore) for the morning. There we spoke to a professor of hers and met up with Cheryl, Edmund and Lavinia. Cheryl has a endless fascination and addiction to Milo, which is something like a chocolate milk drink. You can guess how excited she was to see the Milo Truck:

Foot traffic at the food court at NUS is a bit crowded, so there are yellow boxes for pedestrians.
Yellow boxes are used in Commonwealth car traffic markings to imply areas where you cannot be stopped in traffic, like the middle of intersections. 

Thanks to the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Toh, I got to go to the 19th annual Lion City International DanceSport Competition. It was competitive ballroom dancing. I hadn't been to one of these, but it was great fun. It was just like the scenes from the Japanese film Shall we Dansu.

I have video of each of these couples as well, but the files average 150 mb. The bodies of these people are also subject to copyright by their sponsors. So presenting them here requires a degree of Shhh.....




Again, thanks to Raymond and Kim Toh for bringing me to this exceptional event! 

Cool Bathrooms:
These are the bathrooms at the Jurong Bird Park and the Night Safari. I just thought they were neat.

 

Today's post is going to be short - I'm really worn out. Last night Jac, her friends and I went to Zouk, which is a classic Singaporean club. I wasn't a fan. People were so mashed together that I am sure I gave a number of accidental mammograms. With a little bit of cheating their system, we made it into The Velvet Room, which was much better. There I at least had space to dance.

The moral of the story is that I wound up with 3 hours of sleep, because we went to Jurong Bird Park today. I'll start you off slowly, with a ubiquitous cab:



Last night Jac's mom took us for this soup:
I ate all of it, though there were a few bits of liver and stomach left. Shhhh....

Schoolkids, even Kindergartners, wear uniforms here. Today there were a number of schools at the Bird Park. It was neat to see 20 5 year olds running around wearing white and orange, or with and pink. Hehe...


We found this guy at the Lory Loft, a 90 foot tall enclosure. We were something like 70' above the ground when I took his picture.

That's all for tonight. I'm beat. Cheryl and Jac took me to church, at a mall of all places, but I kept dozing off during the sermon. Oh well... 

Jaclyn and I took a trip out to MacRitchie Reservior yesterday to see the "tree-top walk". It is a bridge that is 80' above the ground skimming through the tree tops of one of the few natural areas here. When we found out it was a 15 km hike, we just sat down on a park bench at the lake.


Never, ever, fuck with this city's water supply!

Later on, we made it back to the CBD and Boat Quay for dinner with Jac's Mum and Dad.
Here is another view of the banks lining the quayside.

This is the Fullerton Hotel, which apparently was once a government building and houses S$400 rooms. (US$250)

For the most part, I like this place. I don't like malls much, so that's a problem for me. On the plus side, the food is amazing. The city itself has greenery everywhere. Every street is a garden. Even the pedestrian overpasses have potted plants.

The weather here isn't too bad considering that it doesn't get much more tropical. It's been about 28-30C (85') everyday, but the humidity is always at full bore. I think I'd rather take a dry 100' day at home than this, but it is liveable.

Today I am moving out of the Toh house in favor of a hostel in town. I like it here, but I don't want to stretch the limits of hospitality. 

I've uploaded a few pictures from Day 2 in Singapore. I forgot to bring a camera on day 1, so I made up for it by taking about 150 today, lol. I set off with the lovely Miss Jaclyn Toh:

Singapore is a big, bustling, modern city in most respects. It is a world hub of finance, which is why almost all of the buildings in this picture of the CBD are banks. CNBC was playing on the entrance to the subway!

After picking up Jaclyn's passport and student visa from the US embassy (what an ugly building!), we headed to Singapore's most famous street. Orchard Road is where Singaporeans engage in their two national pastimes, eating and shopping. Most US cities will have one or two malls around the outside of town, right? Not here. It is a 3 km long strip of malls that are 5 to 8 stories each. Tang's, Ngee Ann City, Tanglin, Wisma Centre and Takashimaya are each huge, and they are all next door!

At the Wisma Centre, we went to a place called Food Republic. I had a bit of fun ordering, mostly because the Auntie really preferred to speak Chinese. I got us Char Siew (pr. Char-Shoe) with noodles and a beef brisket claypot. The Char-Siew is a form of BBQ Pork, and it's easily one of my favorite dishes. It's really simple, just noodles and pork, but the BBQ sauce is sweet and the color is gorgeous. The Beef Claypot was just like a western beef stew.

BTW - those carrots are almost impossible with sticks! 

Hello Again!

I know it's been a long time since I've written last, but it's time for some new chapters! Since my return from Europe, I've been into Kayaking the rivers of Oregon. It's the greatest thing in the world, because it lets me concentrate on just one thing: the water.

Here's a shot of me in a flat stretch of Oregon's McKenzie:
To go boating more often (I'm at 28 paddling days, out of 75 I've owned this kayak), I sold my beloved 16v Golf and bought my first benz! It is a 1986 300E with ABS, airbags, leather and power everything. There is even a switch on the dash to lower the rear headrests! It may be twenty years old, but it rides like a sofa and is as quiet as a library.

The real beauty of the car is that I don't care about it. On my first week with the car, I just strapped my boat to the top using a layer of cardboard as padding.

Later on, Rack Attack came through with the proper fit kit for my Thule rack. Yeah!
I think this rig is going to be great for kayaking and skiing. She does the whole highway cruise thing very well.

Anyway, the reason for starting the writing again is that I'm going travelling again soon! I'm off to Singapore for a couple of weeks, then a road trip of the Southwest with Timmy. It should be an epic five weeks on the road. Too bad I'm going to be away from my boat! 

Assorted Carbage:

 

I guess I have a couple of days to fill in here -
Yesterday Tim and I left Meribel headed to Bristol through Geneva. We gave up on the 20cm (8 inches) of fresh powder that had fallen overnight in the mountains, which was disappointing, and grabbed lunch in Geneva instead. I've been in a few cities where you could feel the money flowing, like Miami, but in this city the presence of austounding sums of money was everywhere. In a 15 minute walk, I saw about twenty different banks, five of them Arab, about a dozen watchmakers and more high end boutiques than I can recall. It handily beats out Oxford street in London, or the nicest bits of San Sebastian and Paris. The place just has more cash than it knows what to do with.


After lunch, we flew into Bristol (BRS), where I found that I forgot about the state of British infrastructure - which is about on par with British customer service. On the plus side, we drove home through the center of Bristol, which is undergoing some astounding changes. I lost count of the number of cranes and new buildings in the eighteen months since I was last there. Lots of the ugly post war buildings were being torn down, allowing the figurative light to pierce into the places where I hadn't dared to venture. Bristol may yet turn out to be a world class city at this pace. All they need now is a real airport - like the one they already have at Filton (where the Concorde was built), but the NIMBY's keep it at the current site in the middle of nowhere with horrible transport links to the centre of the city. Will someone with some spine please move the airport where it belongs?

Anyway, this is Tim's new home:



In fact, it's not new at all. It is almost 310 years old, and gorgeous. It was just renovated last winter and given a freshening outside. Although it looks quite small - it's not - it just happens to have 6'6" celings, so it looks small in the photos. There are actually five bedrooms, two living rooms, two fireplaces and three toilets (bathrooms) in there. It's a miracle of liliputian architecture.

The house is also well into the countryside of Wiltshire, to the west of Chippenham and the south of Castle Combe. I don't quite want to give out the name of the village, as for practical purposes this would reveal the exact location of the house, but the village isn't more than about ten houses.

Dinner for tonight is over at The Crown, a classic English country pub, in Yatton Keynell with Adam (my former sidekick) and Tim. I just hope they have John Smith's and Steak and Ale Pie! 

So the weather today was absolute rubbish. I can put up with skiiing in slush as long as the weather is nice, as it was earlier on, but today was horrid. I made it to the top of Tougnete this afternoon, and found myself in a blizzard. I just couldn't see more than 50 feet in front of me, and there wasn't enough light to make the contours of the snow apparent. It took me about a half hour to make it down to Meribel - and it's only 1000m of drop. I was very worried that I would wander off the trail, or that I would wind up going into St. Martin and then the lifts would be shut. Anyway, the skiing and weather were bad today - so no pictures.

I've just come back from a lovely dinner with the hosts of edelski.com, what a treat that was. These guys have a definite handle on how to prepare and present your meal. You know, I've been eating quite well this week, and this is one of the best meals I've had. Lots of wine, a wonderful pudding (Brit for dessert) and beautiful presentation really make it out. It was a great way to spend about three hours - which is normal for dinner in France.

Anyway, I'm knackered, and I have to be up for breakfast at 8:30. If the weather is nice, we'll go up for a fourth day. If it isn't, then we'll just drive to Geneve early and poke around a bit.

Au revoir!

I got my grades in today - and I'm pleased enough with them. I managed a pair of A- and a B+ across mirco and macro econ, and Japanese Lit. The showing in the lit class was much better than I had expected, but the 98/100 on my final certainly made up some ground for me. It turns out my gut test meter was a bit off with my econ classes - I didn't do nearly as well on the finals as I thought I did, much less what I would have liked to see. But there is nothing to complain about there. I had known that my calculus grade was going to be weak - but all I needed was a C-, and that's what I got in it. I think I need to burn that book now.