I’ve collected the blog posts on education in Singapore and turned them into an eBook. This contains some more research and information, and presents the posts in an orderly, comprehensible way. The title is Singapore’s Education System: How it Works, and it’s available on Amazon.com. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Singapores-School-System-Works-ebook/dp/B007D7SXW0/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330294049&sr=1-2 The book is now (June 2012) […]
I’m no longer living in Singapore, but found that I had one last post buzzing in my head, so here is my meditation on domestic workers in Singapore. What am I, the maid? In the US this is a rhetorical question generally employed by people who wish to draw their family’s attention to the fact […]
We were in a mall that houses many Japanese shops yesterday. The place was bustling, which is kind of unusual, and I wonder if there were special deals that sent money to Japan for earthquake relief. Anyway, we walked past a shop that has incredibly beautiful tea sets, and saw this sign in the window: […]
I was doing yoga this morning, when I saw a pair of hornbills fly into the tree outside the window. My spouse took some photos, and here is the best one, cropped and blown up: Or a closer look: Sorry it’s a bit grainy. I think it might have been clearer with a manual focus, […]
Everyone’s excited about this, because of the 87 seats in the Singapore Parliament, 80 are being contested. In the U.S., that would be like 89 Senate seats and 398 House seats being up for grabs simultaneously. And for the first time there are a lot of people opposing the single-party system, and they’re not just […]
My officemate from Beijing seems to have more or less given up on western medicine for her aches and pains. She goes to a guy in the back room of a Chinese herb shop (one of a prominent chain in Singapore), and he does things to her that leave her with slight lacerations and scraped […]
OK, buying an apartment in Singapore is a highly controlled affair. The Housing Development Board (HDB) controls what sizes of apartments are built, how many, where they are located, and who can buy them. So limiting, lah! But I just heard from my officemates that Singaporeans get a 2.6% interest rate, which my Singaporean […]
I went to Melbourne for a conference 2 weeks ago, and it was lovely to get out of the tropics for a while. Just think – when you open the hotel window, the air outside is COOLER than the air inside – what a concept! And if you towel yourself off in the bathroom, you […]
I was telling my officemates about my affection for the Sarawak Museum, but had to mention (of course) the strangely nasty toilet facilities there. Why is there such a contrast between the exhibition halls and the fairly simple matter of clean toilets? Turns out it’s not simple. In the first place, the whole building and […]
Let’s start at the airport, where you can see this lovely fern. The curving green silhouette is a nice contrast to the usual right-angled gray bleakness of airport architecture. And so to the Kuching Museums! Our hotel was right next to the museum complex. I like the exterior of the Natural History Museum of Sarawak […]