Well, we're back. I tried to post once more from Singapore, but the maid was ironing at the time and, apparently, the iron has developed a short that trips the circuit breaker. So, the entire post was lost. I hope I can resurrect it.
We went to see a Korean movie called "Old Boy" on Friday. It's very interesting visually, but extremely gory and violent.
The IMDB entry for it is here. It was recommended by many of HWMBO's friends, but I found it very disturbing. I don't deal well with screen gore. We had dinner in the food court underneath the cinema complex. I had Vietnamese spring rolls and beef pho supreme. Very good. It's interesting that, almost without exception, food courts and hawker centres in Singapore are clean and provide very tasty food at a reasonable price. Hardly anyone cooks in Singapore: it's too tempting to go out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The prices are reasonable: probably about 1/6th of what you would pay in London for comparable dishes.
After dinner we went on to Mox Bar and Café, a lesbigay bar in the Tanjong Pagar district. It's smoke-free (yay!) and has lots of foo-foo drinks. One characteristic of Singapore bars is that they must offer non-alcoholic foo-foo drinks, since many Chinese and other Asians cannot drink much, if at all. Our friends Leslie and Louie joined HWMBO, BK, and me at Mox, and Louie, who has the aforementioned Chinese reaction to alcohol, had a drink called Liquid Cocaine. We tasted it and thought of cough mixture. However, he got quite tiddly and loud on 1/2 a drink. The gay scene in Singapore is very much acquainted with each other (though not small) and people continually came up to the table to greet us. The manager contributed a tiramisu which, I must say, was excellent.
On Thursday (I believe) I took a ride on the new North East Line of the MRT.
Here is a .pdf file with the route map of the system. It's the first totally automated subway line (as opposed to a tramline or trolley line) that I've been on. It has a motorman's window in the front, but no controls. So, one can stand where the motorman would be standing and watch the tunnel fly by. For, unfortunately, this line is entirely underground. The stations, as all underground MRT stations do, have platform doors that prevent the heat from the train airconditioning from escaping into the station (and prevent suicides as well). So you can't even see into the stations from the front of the train until the doors actually open. The novelty is that there are two complete stations that are not yet open. They are between Potong Pasir and Serangoon, and between Hougang and Sengkang. The astute may notice (at 200% magnification) that every station is numbered and that there is a 1-station gap between each of these stations. The stations are complete, lit, and if you look through the train windows you can see them. However, they aren't open yet. I gather that the housing estates they are meant to serve are not yet finished and populated.
At the end station, Punggol, I got out and found...almost nothing. There is a huge station, with a bus transfer station, but only a very distant housing estate. Nearly everyone got off at the previous station, Sengkang, where there is a light rail system (more on that below). I took some pictures (which I will be posting on my website) of the expanse of nothing. One half of the station is basically unused, with escalators turned off so to exit one has to climb a flight of stairs (and that is something you very rarely do in the tropics).
I got back on, and exited at Sengkang to ride the
Sengkang LRT. This is, again, an automated system, and puts me in mind of the Miami and Detroit peoplemovers. One car, very quick. Note that the left side of this map is greyed out: there is no service there yet but all the track and stations are there.
So, what else to say about the last few days? We had lovely meals: dim sum with our friend Tiow Hua at Novena at which the hit was crispy goose with peanuts was lovely. I had dinner with my brother-in-law Petrus and Alex Au, one of the premier lesbigay activists in Singapore.
His website, Yawning Bread, is here. I have known Alex for 7 years, since I met him on my last trip. He is the founder and moderator of the
SIGNEL Singapore lesbian and gay mailing list, and in a previous incarnation on a British host server, I showed Alex and the other moderators how to use that system. Alex also co-owns
Rairua, one of Singapore's 7 saunas. We had a lovely chat about the finer points of operating such a business in Singapore, as well as Singapore bureucracy and politics in general, which was very interesting. After this, HWMBO joined us along with his friend Tjo and we went to Tjo's flat for wine and conversation.
During the day on Friday I went to
Sim Lim Square, which is a shopping mall east of Bugis Junction devoted entirely to computer and hi-fi material. It's 6 stories of fun for every computer aficionado. I had decided that my backupless state here in London needed to be remedied urgently. So, I wanted to buy an external hard drive of such a size as to ensure that I could do a quick and easy backup. I went to the shop that BK uses for hard drives, and bought a 200GB 3-1/2" Seagate drive along with an enclosure. The entire kit and caboodle came to the equivalent of GBP 88, or USD 158.40. I could have claimed about GBP 4 of tax back at the airport, but didn't as the amount is too little to bother with. It works well, and with Norton Ghost I backed up my entire C drive in 1/2 hour. Note that, like everywhere else, 200 GB doesn't mean 200 GB (one gigabyte as equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes) but 183 GB (one gigabyte as equal to 1,024,000,000 bytes) as formatted and used. Oh, well, I can live with
just 183 GB.
On Saturday, after almost finishing packing, I went out to breakfast/brunch with
Kevin, whose blog is here. He's a really nice guy and we went around Ang Mo Kio after having a brunch of Fried Dumplings with noodles (for me; I can't remember what he had). Dinner with BK, then off in a cab to Changi for the flight home.
I must seriously warn anyone against flying British Airways unless they love bad food. Both HWMBO and I found the food inedible. I had cheese ravioli, and discovered that under something that looked like sweet duck sauce glop were stuck-together ravioli of indeterminate origin. HWMBO had the Pork in White Wine Sauce, and found that equally awful. I also believe that the feeding times were seriously awry. We took off around 11:30 pm Singapore time. I'm certain that everyone had already had dinner. However, before the lights were turned off, we had another (inedible) dinner. I realise that it would be silly for the airline to wake us up in midflight to feed us, but who says that we need two meals on a 12-hour flight anyway. I would have preferred a sumptuous breakfast getting into London after a light snack before bedtime. I suppose I booked with BA for patriotic reasons, but I am coming to discover that other airlines might treat me better.
There is an online check-in system available for BA "members", so I signed myself up and tried it. The only advantage is that you can change seats before you actually get into the airport. But, it's hard to find your booking number if you didn't book with BA (hint: I found it on the outgoing luggage tag at the top right hand corner), and I could only check myself in: HWMBO, included on the same ticket, wasn't checked in. I had to create a login for him before I could do that, and his name (which for me has a hyphen in the first name) had to exactly match what was on the booking (no hyphen, no space) before I could check him in. Oh, and BA is doing the "cram more seats in" thang on their long-haul flights, which meant that one the lady in front of me leaned back, my nose was almost in her hair.
The Singapore immigration person who collected my landing card from my passport was definitely a Friend of Dorothy, and the airport itself is relatively modern and stuffed with amenities. The duty-free area is quite large; we had to buy a carton of cancer sticks for our friend Nicky: 20 packs of Marlboro Menthol for SGD 19 (about GBP 6.25 and USD 11.25). I suppose I should have bought a bottle of bourbon, but couldn't bring myself to carry one more thing.
Oddly enough, I was able to fully unpack yesterday. I got the hard disk drive up and running and did a backup (yay!). Today I'm decompressing and preparing for work (ugh!) tomorrow. Perhaps I can plow through the three Economists, the three Church Timeses, and the three New Scientists which piled up in my absence, as well as prepare for tomorrow's Diocesan Board of Finance meeting.
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