Maybee I Should Just Hold My Breath…

I have been really lucky when it comes to flying, but I seem to have hit the odds. After sitting on the plane for an hour, while they try to fix the oxygen system, they make us deplane and move aircraft. The problem is that my 12:50 pm flight now lea?es at 500pm.
I selected this flight specifically because I wanted to view the world as it passed by. Sometimes, things just don’t work out as you plan..

My seatmate, a lovely gentleman named Ray, is an 87 year old man from hong kong. He lives in the UK now. Really quite charming, he was a teenage student in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941. To show my ignorance of this part of the world, I admit I never knew the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. I did know they invaded the Alutions, and occupied american soil in Alaska for quite a while. Not many people know that little fact.

Well, there’s nothing to do but wait…

So Far So Good…

Well, so far all the work I put in over the weekend is panning out. It is 9:00am here in Singapore. There’s no screaming, and no one has asked me a question about the network, so it looks like… Well, nobody moves, nobody gets hurt…

I do not expect any problems. I think everything here should go fairly well. We may have to make some adjustments, but otherwise it was all fairly clean.

No, It’s Not.

“Singapore is really clean!” I heard that so many times from people before I embarked on this voyage that I really had fairly big expectations. The reality?

The Chewing Gum Ban At Work

Not so much…

It’s on a par with any huge city. On the other hand, for Asia I am sure it is very clean- I have not been to Hong Kong or Mumbai, but I’m betting they aren’t quite as well put together as Singapore.

I will say one thing, however, and that is that Singapore is safe. I saw my first police car last night, and I am in a particularly “interesting” area of town. I am very close to the red light district, the gay bar district, and tons of other nightlife. I have yet to hear people screaming at each other at night, and I have never once felt worried. That includes walking the three blocks back to the hotel at 3:00am several nights. In fact, Singapore boasts a very low crime rate. I really do like it here. It is an exceptionally comfortable, safe city, with great food.

This sign, however, gave me pause…

Now they tell me…

The sign is basically beside the office door- The red and white tape around the pillars is there because they painted the lobby floor. I need to go check if there is a similar sign pointing across the street saying “Begin X Rated Zone”, and if that is the case, where is the PG-14 zone?

Now for the Tedious Part

In my company we have a strict checkout policy for new installations. Every single i must be dotted, every t crossed. The list of requirements for production acceptance is fairly long, but it has served us very well. The unfortunate part is that now I have to get this gear ready for it! It should not be that tough, it’s just a lot of checking, and like I said- It has served both implementer and supporter very well. When something passes and is accepted into production, it is really ready for prime time. Any of us can support it.

I am actually feeling relatively well rested. I had a good sleep last night. A really solid 7 hours.

On the way to work I stopped into a local grocery store for some snacks. I think it is called “Fair Price” or something like that, which I thought was cute.

While there I found a couple of really interesting items:

Now I have to admit… There is nothing that could convince me to drink this. When I asked if they were “Dolphin Safe” I was met with a blank stare, then as employees gathered and chattered in Chinese I slowly made my way to the checkout counter and left. The cashier was about as friendly and talkative as the customs and immigration officer I tried to talk to on my way into the country. I got half way to handing her my passport before I came too and remembered where I was.

A glance over my shoulder showed that the employee mob I had created over the “Dolphin Water” had come to a consensus on what “Dolphin Safe” meant. That only encouraged me to gather up my “Munchy’s Muzic”, and head for the safety of the street. After all, my Munchy’s Music is “tuned for my tastes”!

Zis Chocolate Maestro… it is wafar thiiiin!

Then… there’s this:

Your guess is as good as mine.

I have also decided to review the drinks we get here, in that I have never seen them before, and unless I have to return, I probably won’t see ‘em again…

First up! Coca Cola Inc’s “White Grape”:

The can (which is the most interesting part, I should point out) features a character of some kind, I’m betting a dog, since his head has a tail and seems to be wagging, sitting in a liferaft. The life raft is on a potato, and he is rowing very hard- Witness his manly breath, and rosy cheeks. I asked, but there really was no good reason why an act of futility sells soft drinks… I’m betting that it is a character from a cartoon of some kind, not something Coke made up.

This is a grape beverage. Delicious sucrose in every sip.

“The taste?”, you ask, that Pavlovian bead of drool slipping slowly from your lip to your slacks…

It tastes like grapes. And sucrose… It’s actually quite drinkable. No fizz. It’s just grape juice.

The Second Night

This is the second night of insane hours. There actually are a couple of things I’d like to talk about, but I can barely keep my eyes open.

Today Benny and I did an impromptu trip to China Town. We went to get Chinese takeaway from the place next door. We chose a few dishes from their selection of ten, and the chap that took our order told us to go walk around, and come back in 20.

The waiter had what could only have been a fairly acute case of Parkinson’s. He had no control over his left side. His right, on the other hand, seemed to be fairly free of twitches and random movements. One way or another he was very pleasant.

While we waited for our food we decided to walk the two blocks to China Town.

China Town is a madhouse. There’s about a hundred things “going on” all around you. Some Hindus getting ready for a festival, hawkers selling wares everywhere… It was definitely a real China Town feeling. The camera, unfortunately, stayed home.

Kickin’ it Asia Style

I awoke this morning to the sound of thunder. I got dressed, got my act together, then went to get my expedition coat that I packed. I did pack it… Didn’t I? The one thing I forgot is rain gear.

So I got breakfast from the “club room”, and strolled across the street to the covered marketplace. Lots of tiny stores selling lots of crap. No tourist stuff. I found an umbrella at a store that sold panty hose, dropped by a really nice drug store, then off to the office.

It’s been a rough couple of days sleep wise- I’m a little crabby, and very fatigued. I had to fix something the contractors dis last night, but it wasn’t a show stopper.

More a little later- I need to get this a new system configured.

You have got to be kidding me

I got 3 hours of sleep, which is plenty, but the traveling and time change have caught up with me. If only I could consume caffeine… I’m already paying for that one and a half canned coffee things I drank. Paying bigtime.

This is your brain on…

I am tired.

It’s 3:30am here, and I have one last job to do before I can go back to the hotel. The problem is that i need to find two other people to do it. I need one to verify my work, and then I need another to sign off on it… And I can’t leave until it’s done.

Red Light Fever

Well, today myself, Benny and Yvonne went to lunch at a great Indian place. It was Northern Indian, I think, and it was simply delicious. I really enjoyed it.

The really interesting action, however, happened on the walk home…

Yvonne showed us through a shortcut to the office through a back alley:

We popped right out nearly at the front door of the office. The back alley wasn’t all that back, or an alley, but it was still interesting to walk a path that someone who actually lives here would walk, rather than simply up the tourist streets beside the pubs. Even that back alley, however, pales in comparison to what happened next.

As we approached the office I realized I needed some dental floss. Like I couldn’t live without it. Everyone has some strange need or other- Me, I get thirsty real fast, I love things that are flavored with Orange, and when I need to floss I need to floss, period. The difficulty was that I’d left my floss at the hotel. So I asked Yvonne and Benny if there was a place nearby that I could buy a toothbrush or toothpaste. I figured wherever there is toothpaste there’s floss for sale too. Yvonne said “7-11, up the street”. Now how easy is that?

For some reason, however, Yvonne decided to go with me. I would find out soon enough just why she had decided to traverse the one extra block there, and back, for such a banal chore.

“This is a brothel.” She said as we passed an ordinary looking door, three hundred meters from the office.

“Excuse me?” I replied, I must not have heard her correctly, or we must have been using the same word to describe different things.

“This is the red light district.”

“Holy crap…” I replied. It was actually really quite nice. Apparently in order to advertise a brothel in Singapore you put out a white sign with a red letter or number:

Looking at the photo above, especially if you click on it, you can see the white signs with red numbers. Above the blue door is an 8, and further down the street is a “4″. Again, in the expanded photo you can see another number above a door between the two. Below is another example:

I don’t know what the number stands for, maybe the floor, but I don’t especially care- However fascinated I was by the fact that I was in their midst, that was as far as my curiosity extended. The reason Yvonne had decided to come with me was because she wanted to make sure no one accosted me on my way to get my toothpaste. The area is for the most part benign, but Yvonne felt it appropriate to escort me. I was just as happy as she was to put the street of broken dreams behind us, and head back into the office.

Now here’s one just for the jDate Message Board crowd. It looks like this brothel is just for #4:

Flirtin’ with the Cleaning Lady

I know just enough Chinese to make someone smile. I figure this is one of my most important talents- Making people feel comfortable, and making them smile. Of course I have also had girlfriends that hated this talent, assuming that every attractive woman I met was throwing themselves at me, because they themselves had done so. If only.

The cleaning lady rolls through about five, six times a day. Yesterday she just said “Hellooooo”, came in to the conference room I have taken over, fetched the garbage pail I’d stuffed with cisco refuse, and fled. Today, however, I had a huge pile of cardboard boxes and Cisco “Flash Envelopes” in a pile by the door.

Cisco, for some reason I have never really been able to grasp, has this really weird habit of packaging the smallest thing in something huge. Example: Cisco compact flash. This actually REALLY bugs me. They put the CF cards, themselves are only about 4mm by 30mm by 40mm, and pack them in a largish black box. Then they take the box, and instructions on how to insert the card, and put it in this padded yellow envelope.

The envelope itself gives me the heebie jeebies. It is padded with this kind of material that always makes me think of asbestos. I am sure it isn’t, but the stuff just looks and feels toxic. For heavens sake, folks, use bubble wrap. It can’t be more expensive than that fibrous poo you use, and it cause me to need to run to the washroom and scrub out my lungs.

That envelope reduces to, you guessed it, a 128mb flash card. [sigh]

So the cleaning lady comes in and I say “All of this is garbage.” We then proceed to have a huge communication meltdown- I can’t understand her, she can’t understand me. Finally I say “Boo How!” and she lights up like a display of fireworks. “Boo How! Xie xie!” Suddenly she’s my bud, and proceeds to chatter at me in “Chinglish” for another five minutes while she gathers up all the nasty envelopes, figures out which bags she is going to save and which she is going to toss, and removes all my forlorn boxes…

In other thoughts…

This is a typical Singapore “China Town” street:

Compact, cramped, full of life. I don’t know what other parts of Singapore are like- I have not been outside of China Town.

One of many small “moment” parks, as I refer to them: A small accent that really gives the place a wonderfully cultural feel. Singapore culture is, after all, both a blend and a separation of Chinese (mostly), Malay, Indian and British/European culture. They celebrate the way these four cultures meld and blend, but they also celebrate their difference. This is a wonderful place.

People say Singapore is very clean. I ask: In comparison to what? Bermuda was cleaner, in my opinion, but both countries are covered in a layer of post organic grime that comes with being surrounded by so much water, and having such heavy, thick air. Don’t get me wrong, by Asian standards Singapore is very very neat and tidy, but after hearing so much about Singapore’s relentless attention to cleanliness I expected something different.

I’m glad it’s not sanitized- I like it a little dirty.

Some others, however do not- Buildings that have no dryers for clothes hang their washing out the windows on sticks:

The architecture here is really quite amazing- Everything is big:

And of course, after walking past it twice without seeing it yesterday, here is the really quite nice eBay Singapore office:

Perhaps this afternoon I’ll regale you with the tail of my dinner last night- I went for Korean food. I can’t wait till I stop tasting it.