I love Singapore. And loath it at the same time. The love is grounded in all that has been achieved here, the entrepreneurial spirit and all those reasons which every observer admires and on which more commentary has been made than can ever be read. The loathing is more personal I think.
Balu ushered me to the vehicle in bit of a rush. Balu? Was that really his name? I truly hoped it was though he did not have any easy going, saxophone loving idleness about him which his namesake showed. This short fellow, in a drab brown shalwar kemeez that failed to hide the fact that…
I arrive in the Airbus and my South Asia expectations (born of deep experience) about a crush and rush to the front are quashed. I feel slightly undersold. What’s with these people being so polite and deferential to each other? This is very Javanese of them I think. Since when were these guys so docile?…
(Language warning!) They’re sitting in the seats behind me. 76J and 76K in the 380. One is wearing shorts and a ‘wifebeater’. It went something like this, in loud voices used to projecting over the sound of the dogs on the back of the grinding ute. My laptop was on my knee so I made…
You betcha. In the inelegant scramble to haul over the edge of a two meter overhang, sections of pelt were left on the sandstone, and down an indented shin the claret seeps. You don’t notice the latter until the hot water of the shower hits the skin that evening and startles you awake.
I wrap up at SIMaid tomorrow and wonder that the last week of April should mark the anniversary of so much that has happened over the last year. Most of it (not SIM I hasten to add) has been stuff I would not have scripted into the fabric of the life of my worst enemy…
I was thinking of Herbert Money this evening as I picked my way through the smokey warm dark evening of a boisterous Dhaka street. He wrote home in 1927 from Peru recounting his delight at being witness to a revolution in the streets as a President was told he was no longer needed. Actually I…
Apparently the French had a saying that went something like “the Vietnamese sow rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, the Laotians listen to it grow.” I think they were onto something there. This place is nothing like any other Asian city I have been to. It’s actually not a city in that sense and long…
The words fingered into the dust of the battered little Renault van in front of my taxi in from the airport suggested this was going to be a very different place from Algiers. Not that I go around looking for differences. In fact the reverse is true. But “Lord of the Rings” above an exhaust…
The Genie from Fez strode the streets, enjoying the morning and pretty much minding his own business, which he had to do given he was from out of town, when he noticed a man and his donkey nestled into a driveway in Rue Rouget de I’Isle. The donkey was hitched to a small cart into…