More Travels

I'm going to try my best to show some of our travels in chronological order, but I waited so long until putting them on the web that I've forgotten the precise timing. Actually, even worse, I've had a lot of these pictures on the web for years; it's just that I never did any write up to make them accessible.

When I was working for Motorola, way back in 1998, I had a week of training in Singapore. This is a view from my hotel window. At that time, I still felt Hong Kong was hellishly hot, and thought the weather in Singapore couldn't be any worse, especially since I was going there in December. I was wrong.

It was unbelievably hot in Singapore, even in comparison with Hong Kong, which I found after returning is only sub-tropical as opposed to full-on tropical like the Lion City. I was sweating so much that my colleague thought I wasn't sweating at all because my entire shirt was soaked, and hence all the same colour.

I do think that Singapore deserves its reputation for being a strict city. I remember seeing signs telling you how much you would be fined if you had bad aim in the washroom. I didn't end up taking a picture of that particular sign though, since I didn't want to pull out a camera inside the washroom, for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to photograph a "No spitting" sign. That one was my favourite by a large margin.

In the end, my overriding impression of Singapore (other than the heat and humidity) is of green. After the predominantly grey landscape of Hong Kong (even our vegetation gives an impression of being grey in comparison with Singapore) because of the concrete and boring architecture, the vibrance and lushness of the plant life was almost unbelievable. The other thing I took away was how awesomely multi-cultural the city is. I love the fact that most people speak at least two languages and more probably three or four. The mix of Malay, Indian, English and Chinese heritages is pretty kick ass.