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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]