I saw this on campus once I had access to the areas that were previously off-limits because of the Youth Olympic Games. Looks great, no? Quiet, zero emissions, and out of commission now that the Games are over and there’s no international spotlight to shine on the thing. The branding exercise is over, and the […]
Nothing like a few rolls of barbed wire to make your day. Thus endeth the evil fence. The Youth Olympic Games were finished on Saturday, their dorms were dismantled on Sunday so the NTU students could move in, and on Monday classes started and the fences started to come down. Soon all we’ll have left […]
Now on, big yawn. So the young athletes are scattered all over campus, and the local kiddies can meet them and get little pins from them. I did see a few athletes about 13 years old, but most of them look at least 16 to me – hard to see why they get their own […]
In my last post I mentioned that the Japanese and Chinese Gardens exist as a result of city planning decisions – that in the industrial wastes that would eventually occupy the Jurong swamps, Singapore’s government realized that people needed a place to go for greenery, tranquility, and recreation. Naturally, since this is Singapore, we could […]
We had a tour of the Japanese Gardens this morning, and I learned a lot, at long last, about what the Japanese garden aesthetic idea is – why there are rivers of gravel, for instance, and why rocks are parked all over them. Singapore’s Japanese and Chinese gardens were planned in the 1960s and built […]
rather than a swamp, which is what it used to be. There are concrete drainage ditches all over the place, and usually they’re not conspicuous for their beauty. But this morning after some rain, they became gurgling fountains and waterfalls. Two examples: and I don’t know if you can see their charm; perhaps you need […]
A Singaporean promotion is one in which your job title changes, you have tons of new duties and responsibilities, and no additional pay. How does this happen? Well, take performance appraisals at the university. These are directly tied to performance bonuses, which makes sense. And the number crunchers assume that if you graph people’s performance […]
Singapore’s government likes to make a lot of noise about family values, supporting the elderly and so forth. But I learned today that there’s some real money put into at least one policy that supports the ideal. If you purchase a flat within one kilometer of your parents, the HDB (all-powerful Housing Development Board) will […]
There are two traditional ornate gates to Nanyang Technological University, both inscribed in Chinese and with the date 1955. Neither is actually at an entrance to the university, but we’ll pass over that for now. They are both within hailing distance of the main campus and obviously point the way to the same direction. But […]
As part of the government effort to ensure survival of the species, or at least of the well-educated Chinese Singaporean portion of it, the National Institute of Education was relocated to Nanyang Technological University 13 years ago. A huge new campus was built for NIE, located in an old durian orchard just across the street […]