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 […]
I took unpaid leave to accompany our offspring on an extended summer vacation. As required, I filled in the requisite application, got the requisite signatures on it, and received confirmation from HR that I would indeed be on unpaid leave. But they paid me anyway. In fact, I think they paid me twice as much […]
This morning I saw an infant wild pig meandering calmly around one of the students’ residence halls at NTU. I was all excited, of course, and stopped a passing jogger to share the wonders of nature with her. She seemed unimpressed: “There are many wild pigs here.” After she ran off, I watched, and the […]
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 […]
I returned to Singapore yesterday, just in time for the Hungry Ghosts season, otherwise known as the Seventh Month festival. (If you don’t mention the word “ghost” you won’t scare away customers.) I went to Jurong Point mall to stock up on food, and found myself in the midst of seasonal festivities. Well, it’s not […]
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 […]
This crane was aesthetically posed in a pond in the Japanese Garden this morning. I thought it was a statue at first.
The Singapore Unitarians, that small but doughty band, met for a tour of the Chinese and Japanese gardens this morning. I have lots of pictures of statues that I’ll post separately, but here were some highlights: This is the big Confucius statue towards the southern end of the garden, complete with a couple of dragon-y […]