Like New York in so many ways, with the old being constantly overtaken by the new. There’s a lot of building going on in S’pore right now, from upscale residential to commercial towers sprouting all over the place. This is the Thian Hock Keng temple on Telok Ayer Street, right around the Central Business District [...]
Entries from May 2008
May 28, 2008
Adjusting our plans
Our plan was to take things as they come and to switch tracks when necessary and circumstances quickly out that to the test. Shopping for plane fares to Siem Reap and hoping to leave S’pore for there on Thursday, we quickly found that our plans coincided with the plans of apparently hundreds of S’poreans on [...]
May 28, 2008
The missing terrorist
Big news here is that an alleged terrorist is still on the loose and suspected to be on the island after escaping during a bathroom break. Yesterday, the papers reported that the superintendent of the prison and 8 others have been fired or reprimanded. Today a letter to the editor The Straits Times called it [...]
May 28, 2008
Fleet of feet, even in the heat
On our first full day in Singapore our first stop was at the Singapore American School. Don’t worry, we’re not planning to move here! My cousin Ka’s daughter is a 3rd grader here — it’s a K-12 school attended by about 70 percent children of American expats in S’pore. They have a beautiful track and [...]
May 28, 2008
the U.S. economy, seen from here
In the Straits Times this morning, in an article about a conference in which a Singaporean government minister was interviewed by students via text messages projected on a large screen, the American economy was described as being “meltdown.
on a similar note, in conversations I’ve had, and in conversations I’ve eavesdropped on at hawker’s markets, the [...]
May 28, 2008
In Singapore
in holland village, a commercial and social center of S’pore’s considerable expat community .
Singapore (pop. 4.5 million, per capita income about $27,000) is a great place. The type of city many others would aspire to: with efficient services, wonderfully clean, cosmopolitan in the extreme, and for me, unpolished and bustling commercial districts that feel like streets [...]
May 28, 2008
en route
whew. I don’t care what anyone says, 23-odd hours — all but two in an airplane — is a long day of traveling. due to the oddities of international time zones, we left SFO at 1:40 p.m. Sunday and arrived in Singapore, hereafter referred to as S’pore, at 2 a.m. Tuesday.
Jeremy was heroic throughout [...]
May 25, 2008
how we got here
while we’re in SE Asia we’ll be traveling mostly by bus and train and tuk tuk, is the plan. And when we get back we’ll be traveling by my ‘79 Honda, because we sold all our other cars to finance this trip!
May 25, 2008
Packed light
Well, we did it (mostly because of Keleakai’s indomitable will!) and squeezed everything into one backpack, one little backpack, actually the one Dante used for school this past year, and two fanny packs. In the heat, we’re going to be happy about this light load.
