Musings

One of the most useful sites that I look at is Wikitravel, the Wikipedia equivalent for travelers. The information there is peer-contributed and edited, and it serves as a useful amalgamation or as a start point to get key pointers before you branch into country-specific sites for more details.

Just for fun: I took a look also at what’s generally regarded as some of the world’s most dangerous cities, and to see what Wikitravel has to advise for travelers to those places. Not that I intend to go there, ever, of course – but it’s still humorous to read what they have to say, and they certainly don’t mince words. All quotations from Wikitravel.:)

Somalia

“At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the easiest method for staying safe in Somalia is not to go in the first place, as it is a dangerous country. Kidnappings and warlordism are all common in this country.”

Chechnya

“As of 2007, independent analysts said were no more than 2,000 separatist combatants still fighting. By traveling to Chechnya you are taking a serious risk. Kidnappings and unexploded mines and munitions are widespread, while terrorist activity and shootings still occur on a lesser scale. Throughout the region, local criminal gangs routinely kidnap foreigners, including Americans, Canadians, and UK nationals, for ransom.”

Just for comparison’s sake, even nearby Jakarta gets a warning. I certainly don’t regard the country as nearly as dangerous as the first two, and this is what Wikitravel says.

Jakarta

“The high-profile terrorist bomb blasts at the JW Marriott in 2003, the Australian Embassy in 2004 and the JW Marriott (again) & Ritz-Carlton in 2009 mean that security in Jakarta tends to be heavy, with car trunk checks, metal detectors and bag searches at most major buildings. Statistically, though, you’re far more likely to be killed in the traffic.”

—

How about Singapore? Wikitravel says:

“Singapore is one of the safest major cities in the world by virtually any measure. Most people, including single female travellers, will not face any problems walking along the streets alone at night. But as the local police say, “low crime does not mean no crime” — beware of pickpockets in crowded areas and don’t forget your common sense entirely.”

So far so good – though the next bit perhaps explains exactly how that reputation is reached:

“Singapore’s squeaky cleanliness is achieved in part by strict rules against activities that are tolerated in other countries. For example, jay-walking, spitting, littering, and drinking and eating on public transport are prohibited (even forgetting to flush the toilet will subject you to a great fine). Locals joke about Singapore being a fine city because heavy fines are levied if one is caught committing an offence.”

All too true, though I can’t remember when was the last time someone got fined for not flushing a toilet.:)

The entries the both of us, with our Angmo guest Matt, post here on our blog here are ostensibly light-hearted. There’s the News & Letters posts here of course that I occasionally post under, but they aren’t nearly as frequent as say the Hannah, or Film Review posts.

Funnily, a lot of times my mind burns with imprints and opinions of current affairs but I don’t pen them down because they really take too much effort to write for what’s essentially just a half-dozen regular readers of our blog. On the other hand, now and then, a piece of news surfaces that’s disturbing enough for me to at least put up a stub post on it. Recently, it was the burning and assault of Christian churches in Malaysia. And this morning, more scary news:

Malaysia canes women for having sex out of wedlock
By Niluksi Koswanage, Reuters February 17, 2010

KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysian authorities have caned three women under Islamic laws for the first time in the Southeast Asian country, the interior minister said on Wednesday.

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the sentences were carried out on February 9 after a religious court found them guilty of having sex out of wedlock. Two of the women were whipped six times.

“It was carried out perfectly.”" Hishammuddin said in a statement. “Even though the caning did not injure them (the women), they said it caused pain within them.”

…

What I really don’t get is this: the women and their partners presumably had consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. No one peeked in. The couples disturbed no one. They didn’t pose a public menace. So why is that what two people do within their own privacy where no one else is hurt of such concern to the state?

I mean, flogging rapists and drug traffickers – I have no issue with. But c’mon – women for having consensual albeit sex outside marriage… that’s really stretching it.

Someone commented on The Malaysian Insider that this sort of punishment signifies the beginning of the Talebanisation of up north. Just to think of how little time might elapse if within the next couple of years, thieves start getting their hands chopped off. Women who’re raped get stoned. And honor killings etc.

At least the flogging has received condemnation from NGOs within the country. I really hope more reasonable minds prevail, as anything that happens to our neighbors will have spillover effects on this little red dot here.

Just scary.

It wasn’t too long ago that a lawsuit here in Singapore caught the interest of many readers. That court case was in February last year and revolved around a woman’s suit against a Catholic Church here, claiming damages over an exorcism trial. The suit was thrown out of the court after a two year trial with the woman, ironically, ordered to pay costs.

There’s a new case that started the other week that has generated interest and discussion online. This time it’s about a 94 year old woman suffering from dementia, her adopted daughter, and a $8.9 million fortune sitting in a bank account. The way I understand it: the bank in question was suspicious whether recent transactions was indeed made with the old lady in full cognizance or under the influence of her adopted daughter. When the bank declined on the adopted daughter’s request to close the account with the old lady unable to say why she herself was at the bank, the daughter then took the bank to court.

The recent turn of news sure is revealing a lot of details that, to me anyway, isn’t painting the 45 year old adopted daughter in a very good light. For instance, in yesterday’s news, it was revealed that she’d applied for the court to order the bank to release $18,000 every month for expenses. The lady protested that this was the old woman’s decision to pay for all her expenses, to which the defense lawyer replied why would a 94 year old need $1,000 for monthly restaurant outings; $1,000 for toiletries, clothing, beauty grooming and wellness, as well as $3,000 for entertainment and holidays.

I’m not fully clear about how powers of attorney in bank accounts work, though I don’t at least think it’s some sort of carte blanche to do whatever you like, especially if it can be contested in a court of law whether the decisions you are making even with the power of attorney are not in the best interests of the client.

Either way, $18,000 a month sure is a lot of money. That’s nearly twice Ling and my combined incomes. With $18,000, I could buy a Nikon D3X with a Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 and a Nikon 70-200mm f2.8, decked with a SB-900, an entire range of premium B+W filters, a tower-sized dry cabinet… etc… and that’s just for the first month…!

Continued from the last post.

The two strangers who helped my father at IMM were also busy people, but they were more compassionate and selfless than the man who took the Hippocratic Oath.

Pretty harsh words in the last statement on the part of the writer. The medical service in Singapore certainly hasn’t been getting very good press. In recent memory, there’s been news reports of clinic partners falling out and airing their dirty laundry in public, practitioners who offer treatments outside their areas of expertise, and administering drugs that their patients shouldn’t be taking.

As for the issues raised in this letter, I think it boils down again to the issue of expectations on three branches of public service that typically see argument over. The three, in my opinion, are the teaching service, the medical doctors, and the police force. When does a person in one of these services draw a line as to what’s well above and beyond what the person can legitimately offer before it cuts significantly into his own time?

Let’s say for instance, a child who isn’t doing well and the teacher tries to provide closer guidance during class. The child still doesn’t improve, and parents demand that the teacher does additional remedial work after school hours. Said teacher wants to devote time after school hours to her child, and parents write to The Straits Times complaining about MOE’s school system and why it failed to provide for their child.

There’s clearly a difference when it comes to expectations between the different branches of public service. I think that in the case of a civil servant in say an administrative body, while people might still grumble loudly if that administrative civil servant refuses to process an application past a closing hour, they would at least be at least understanding (maybe) that it’s already off-hours.

But for those of us in these three services, it’s a different story. We’re not just employees: somehow, we’re regarded – fairly or not – that we’re members of the ‘Higher Calling’, whatever that is. And hence, we have to prepared to not just serve to our job specification. We have to go above and beyond. Heck, we better prepared to take bullets in front of our students if they are fired in their direction too!

This though begs the question: even if we’re in the service for the higher calling, I still don’t think it circumvents the fact that it’s also employment for us that puts food on the table for us. And because it’s employment, we necessarily seek to balance between work and our own time for ourselves. Otherwise, you’d work for free and live like nuns in the monastery – and even those nuns I suspect would want off days now and then, and time for themselves when they need to.

So, for this letter writer, I’m sorry to hear that the incident happened. However, I wouldn’t had been so hasty to have rendered judgment on the GP who failed to meet the expected level of service.

About 5 years while in Perth in 2005 I had an accident at home that came scarily close to permanent facial scarring. One evening I was preparing dinner in the kitchen, when a couple of my housemates came over to boil water in the mean time.

The boiled water was placed on a kitchen ledge at about elbow height, and perhaps he got distracted while talking to another housemate, he got animated and accidentally swung his arm against the kettle. The kettle flew off the lodge, and the boiling water contents emptied itself right into my face and arms.

To cut a long story short: it was excruciating painful, the Aussie on-call doctor said I was incredibly lucky not to suffer permanent scaring. By sheer luck, my left arm was partially in the direction facing most of the water’s outflow, so I got hit mostly on just the left side of my face. But sleeping in the next couple of days was hard.

—

A recent letter published in The Straits Times here pique my memory of that accident 5 years ago. Here’s the letter published on 8 Jan, formatted to save space.

Jan 8, 2010
Strangers helped dad, 80, but not doctor

MY FATHER is 80 years old and suffered a sudden back sprain while walking at IMM shopping mall on Wednesday. Fortunately, two kind men carried him down the stairs and into a cab to head home. In great pain, he inched his way home from the cab with the help of our maid.

After a shower, he could not even get out of the bathroom by himself due to the excruciating pain and weakness in his legs. I decided to take him to Toh Guan Family Clinic, in the block next to ours. As it was 15 minutes to closing time, I sent our maid to register with the clinic first.

Ten minutes later, seeing how difficult my father found it to inch his way to the main door, I went to the clinic myself to explain the situation and ask for the doctor to make a house call. The assistant told me the fee would be expensive – $150 – but I said I had no choice even though my home was in the next block. After a few minutes, the assistant checked with the doctor and told me he was not free to make a house call. It was already 9pm then and I had no other clinic to seek help from.

I understand the doctor is not obliged to make a house call, but it would have been so helpful if he had. An injection and some pain killer would have eased the pain in the night for my dad. At least the doctor could have given some advice, such as calling an ambulance, instead of simply saying ‘not free’.

The two strangers who helped my father at IMM were also busy people, but they were more compassionate and selfless than the man who took the Hippocratic Oath.

Continued in the next post.

The domain transfer is about nearly done, though there are still a couple of comments that were posted just before the transfer that didn’t correctly export itself. Oh well.

There was a news paper article this morning in The Straits Times though that pique my interest: the headline says it all; truncated and formatted to save space:

Jan 15, 2010
Teacher sues MOE after fall in school
High Court case one of more than 13,000 filed last year up to Nov
By K.C. Vijayan, Law Correspondent

A PRIMARY school teacher is taking the Ministry of Education (MOE) to court after she fractured her right ankle by jumping from a height of 3.7m to get out from her school premises.

The 38-year-old found herself locked in the school on a Saturday morning in Feb 2006, screamed for help for 30 minutes and then decided to leap to freedom. She climbed over a ventilation gap between the first and second floors and jumped out onto a grass patch, but injured herself badly enough to need 100 days of medical leave. As a result, she is suing the MOE, holding it indirectly liable for the school’s alleged negligence and lack of duty of care.

…

According to court documents, the teacher went to the school in Tiong Bahru on a Saturday morning to do some work in her classroom. She was stranded when she realised the staff room had been locked with her bag and cellphone in it, leaving her unable to call for help, and all the exits were shuttered and closed.

The mother of two needed surgery after the incident and still has difficulty climbing staircases, squatting or standing for long. She also walks with a limp. Through lawyer S. Perumal, she is seeking damages from the MOE, which oversees the school and is defended by the Attorney-General’s Chambers.

The MOE is denying the claims, and argues that it was her own choice to go to school on a non-work day. There is also a standard operating procedure for teachers to sign in, which she did not do, so no one knew she was on the premises. The MOE also argues that she could have tried other routes, or raised the fire alarm.

…

Thought provoking to say the least, since this incident gets into the terrifically fuzzy area of job hazards and what exactly is your employer liable for. Falling injuries like these really do seem the extreme, and did the lady really fully exhaust all other means of getting out before taking a jump off a height of 3.7m. And to begin with, when you’re coming to work on a weekend, you should be fully aware of the security placements on doors and gates i.e. if you’re still walking around without your staff access card or handphone, you’re asking for trouble.

Still, I can empathize with her because 7 years ago I was in the same position, though at University in Perth. On a February Sunday morning I returned back to the research office to get some work done. I was still new to the campus and was figuring out the security systems, and accidentally found myself locked along a third story elevated platform that links two buildings together. The door behind me was autolocking, and the door in front of me I couldn’t open because my security access had not been fully activated yet. The platform looked like this:

In case the picture’s unclear: this interconnecting link was on the third floor – i.e. a drop of about 10 metres down if I decided to try what this lady here did with her school yesterday.

Fortunately, I had my mobile with me (unlike this poor lady) – so I ended up calling my Ph.D supervisor, and he came from home – he was fortunately intending to come to work over the weekend anyway – to rescue me.:)

There’s a bit of local news here that I suspect will again have readers either shaking their heads in disgust or again crack more jokes about taxi companies in Singapore. Formatted to save space, and italics mine:

Jan 12, 2010
RESORTS WORLD SENTOSA
$3 cab surcharge at RWS

VISITORS to Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) will have to pay a premium to take a taxi from the integrated resort when it opens next week.

Four taxi companies have confirmed that they will impose a $3 surcharge for trips that begin at the IR. Premier Taxis will be the first – it will start charging on Jan 18 – followed by SMRT on Jan 20 and Prime Taxis on Jan 28. Trans-Cab will follow suit, but has not confirmed a start date. Smart Cabs said it will join in, if most of the other companies impose the surcharge. The lone exception: ComfortDelgro, which is far and away the largest taxi company in Singapore.

The companies that are imposing the surcharge say they are doing it to ensure taxi drivers will find it worth their while to cross into Sentosa.

The line that takes the cake of course is the last one: that the taxi companies are doing this as a carrot for taxi drivers to drive into Sentosa. Not that I have any intention of visiting RWS soon when it partially opens later this month. But the introduction of yet another premium to be paid only underlines the almost paternalistic treatment of taxi companies towards it drivers.

The logic gets a big Fail when one considers that there are already a lot of cabs in Singapore. In any other service or product-centric industry, the situation would have naturally resolve itself: because there are so many service providers around, they would naturally compete among themselves to get business without needing additional incentives. But hell no – taxies in Singapore operate with their own laws of logic. Many service providers who elsewhere would have healthily compete, but for taxies, incentives must still be employed to tempt the providers.

As though the surcharge and fare structure in Singapore isn’t already convoluted enough. You don’t just pay for the distance traveled by your cab. Here, you pay for waiting, booking (and booking surcharges varies depending on time and day), peak hour, late night, public holidays, and entry into specific locations.

There’s a couple of country-specific blog and news aggregate sites that I keep an eye on, and one of them is the The Malaysian Insider.

One current news thread up north that’s been running for weeks and not widely reported in The Straits Times but is still nonetheless disturbing has been the severe reaction of several Muslim groups to a court decision to allow the use of the word ‘Allah’ in an Catholic publication intended for its believers. Specifically, eight nine church and convent school premises so far have been attacked, with one being razed to the ground even.

What’s shocking is the fact is that this isn’t Palestine we’re talking about. It’s just a couple several hundred kilometres from where we are in Singapore.

Putting aside the historical precedence, religious sensitivities and political parties mining the controversy for mileage in Malaysia, I wonder if this sort of thing will ever happen in Singapore. Tread on a few religious toes, the faithful get whipped into a frenzy, and instead of turning to negotiation and discussion, places get burnt down.

There is some comforting news though: there are still sane voices of reconciliation, and reading what they have to say calms the soul, so as to speak. Like this post “Jesus Wept” written by a Muslim woman in reaction to the incident, or “Confident People Do Not Get Confused“, by Marina Mahathir, daughter of the famous father.

It was my last day guest lecturing at the college today. The lectures and workshops I did with my Japanese students covered a lot of material.

And when there’s such high content density, so much memories have been created during the last five days that even though it’s just been five (intensive) days, each day has actually felt long – and in the good sense.

I finally got round to bring the D300 to work and taking pictures during my lunch hour today too. Didn’t get to take much as the weather was crazily freezing. At noon with the sun right up overhead, the temperature was still a frosty 4 degree celsius… with wind to boot!

I was no longer playing hero: I didn’t bring winter pants, but wore a thicker polo-shirt, a sweater, and my jacket as a third layer when I was outdoors.

So, there really aren’t too many pictures I took of the college compound as I was too cold to venture walking further than the immediate vicinity of my block to take better pictures. The first picture was taken right beside the cafeteria building with some students milling about during their lunch hour.

The picture below is a HDR composition:

Lots of students cycle to work – and all the bicycles aren’t secure chained. Theft of bicycles clearly isn’t a problem in this part of the world:

And lastly, here’s my class of students, with the college professor I’ve been liaising and working with this whole week (these are also his own students). This was taken just before we said our good byes. In addition to their daily bow at the end of each teaching day, the class – led by their class representative – also thank me in unison in English for my teaching this week. It was really moving, especially considering many of them aren’t confident English speakers:

Well, the rest of my stay here or at least for tonight and most of tomorrow morning will be spent marking their test they sat for just now. Hopefully I’ll finish by noon time though, and also that the weather holds – just so I can visit Suizenji Gardens.:)

I’ve remarked on this blog here that Restaurant Matsuri at my hotel enjoys a magnificent view of the castle both by day and night.

I haven’t been able to show pictures of this from within the restaurant itself so far, as I’m usually just rushing out of the hotel each early morning to make the 7:40 AM train, and the restaurant itself only opens at 7:00 AM for breakfast every morning – and that’s not counting the 18 minutes it takes for me to walk to the train station itself. Breakfast, in other words, for all my teaching days is a mad rush.

Still, my Thursday activities started an hour later than normal yesterday, so I managed to enjoy a more leisurely breakfast that morning, and also take a few quick pictures. Most mornings I get to occupy my usual table, which is a nice private spot at the corner of the restaurant with a great view of the castle and it near the breakfast spread too.

The other picture below is a HDR composition merged from 5 pictures, taken from the balcony garden beside the restaurant. Yep I had to step out into the freezing cold for a couple of minutes, put the D300 on bracket + high-speed drive mode exposures, fired away, and ran back into the warm restaurant interior.:)