Sun conures

Are these birds beautiful, or what? Highly sociable, too – there are about 35 of them in the exhibit, and all of them have all their feathers – a less punishing hierarchy than among chickens, I guess.

African Hornbill

Back to the Bird Park.  I’m proud of this picture because it’s one of the few I managed to take that really focuses on the detail of the bird’s features.  I like the scratches on the bill and the single eyelash going off to the left – yes, these birds have eyelashes. African hornbills are […]

Jackfruit at the pool

 May seems to be the season for large tree-borne fruits to ripen.  The university is built on land that was once a durian orchard, so in a few parts of campus you can see very large spiky durians hanging perilously high.  Old inhabitants of the neighborhood will start to congregate underneath these trees in early […]

Southern Ridges Walk, with pix

Ok, here is the elevated walkway a couple of kilometers from Mt. Faber, in the Forest Walk section of the interconnected trails.  It’s over a kilometer long and descends gently down a hill that’s largely covered in secondary rainforest growth.  That is, if you start at the top of Mt. Faber.  If you start at […]

Dragonfruit

 This is dragonfruit, a which grows on cacti in Thailand, or so I’m told.  And it does look like cactus fruit in its scaly rind.  The inside comes in two colors: basic white, and amazing killer pink.  The pink has a more acidic and interesting flavor, and makes any smoothie it’s blended into a lurid […]

Mount Faber Walk: White-crested laughing thrush

Last weekend we went walking up and around Mount Faber. This is a centrally located park in south central Singapore.  You can take a taxi there, or you could go to the Harbourfront MRT station and take the cable car (gondola) that connects that station both to the top of Mount Faber and down to […]

The Singapore library system

The library system in Singapore is good, but not free.  Foreigners pay $57/year for membership, and locals pay $24 (I think).  You can reserve books, but it costs $1.55 per book.  Late fees are fifty cents a day.  You may not borrow more than 8 books at any time, or borrow more books if you […]

Singapore Transit: an introduction

Some pictures are embedded in the post below. One thing you may have noticed about these postings is that I get a lot of my information about Singapore from cab drivers.  No, I am not made of money, that I take cabs around all the time.  We live in the far west of the island […]

Swine Flu Update again

The epidemic alert level has been lowered from orange to yellow.  This means, in practice, that all those people taking the temperatures of everyone going into work buildings have disappeared.  Now only vendors and visitors have to register, and nobody bothers about their temps. My spouse’s department has many thermometers ready to hand out, in […]

Singapore River Walk Tour

This is something we did over the weekend.  Late one afternoon we got off the MRT at Raffles Place and headed towards the river.  From there you can look across at the Asian Civilizations Museum (yellow building on the right), the Stamford Raffles Landing Place (white statue) and some other stuff.  We didn’t cross over, […]