Archive for April, 2011

Singapore election!

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 […]

Chinese medicine in Singapore

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 […]

Singapore real estate…

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 […]

Melbourne – food

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 […]

A note on bathroom (and other) maintenance

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 […]

Art and aesthetics in Kuching: Museums!

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 […]

Sarawak – Daily life among the ex-headhunters

OK, I mentioned headhunting for the sheer exploitive sensationalism of the word.  The people we met in the traditional village were charming, hospitable, gentle peaceful folks, and their English was meticulous.  They had some skulls in a basket in the meeting house, but no skulls were newer than 60-70 years, as far as I could […]

Kuching folks and features

This is an interesting view from our hotel; the round domes belong to the Sikh temple (Gurdwara) in front of the old pink city mosque (onion domes). This is a view towards the Sarawak River that run through the city. This is the south side of the river, so it has the Indian and the […]

Fun in Borneo: friendly natives (non-homo sapiens)

These two orangutans are in the reserve near Kuching.  The reserve started as a place where orphaned orang babies were to be rehabilitated so they could fend for themselves in the forest.  (They were orphaned because poachers shot their mothers so they could sell them to people who wanted the babies as pets.  The babies […]

Fun in Borneo: Kuching, city of cats – or is it ports?

It’s hard to know where to begin on our trip to Kuching, in Borneo. Maybe with basic geography; Borneo is a big island east of Singapore, that has several states in it, belonging to three different nations. There’s the Kingdom of Brunei, which used to own Kuching, the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, and […]