tell me about it

Exhausted, but those who want to check out my Flickr can have a looksee at my England photos first. Otherwise it will take me awhile to get them up here.

A brief update on my days:

1. I gave in and purchased a pro account for Flickr.
2. I’ve just received my 2009 teaching timetable. One word – sian.
3. Dealing with accounting seriously pisses me off.
4. Being forced by external factors to break my promises to my students really, really pisses me off.
5. I have a bad sore throat. Really bad. How am I going to sing tomorrow at BBPC :(
6. Have finished buying/wrapping/making presents. More or less. Hope we’ve not forgotten anyone.
7. Oh shit I just remembered two people I haven’t bought presents for. Gah.
8. I will be leaving for Kota Kinabalu with the family on Friday. Last gasp break before 2009. Siiiigh.

*yawns* sleepy time.

In response to this article, wherein he concludes:

In summary, Singapore is a shopping destination and nothing much more. There is really no Singapore history beyond the 1800’s. There really isn’t a Singapore culture. No rain forests. No ancient temples. Heck, because of land reclamation, there really isn’t even a natural beach on the whole island.

While it was nice to go someplace where English is one of the official languages, I really don’t think I will make a return trip to Singapore.

Wow…I mean, wow, I really just couldn’t leave this alone. Gotta be a passionately patriotic SG citizen (yes, we exist!)! I’m not sure if you followed a guidebook in doing the things that you did (sure sounds like Tourist 101!) but what you got was pretty much the distilled tourist version of Singapore. Plus, you did it alone, without a local to give you background info (oh, screw that, most Singaporeans don’t really know much about their own history anyway).

But just for your information. Yes, majority of food in Singapore is, as you would put it, Chinese, or Malay, or Indian. However the type of Chinese food you get in Singapore just isn’t the same kind of food you would find in China, for example. I’ve gone to China and I have never been able to find any of the dishes we serve in local hawker centres. Chilli crab is uniquely Singaporean, for one thing – and as you were staying right in the midst of Geyland (FOOD HAVEN!) you’d have ready access to Chilli crab, Crab noodles with XO, frog leg porridge, dim sum, etc, all of which are Chinese dishes which have evolved to be quite different in Singapore.

Take Chinese food in the US for example. There is nowhere in Singapore (or China, for that matter) where you would ever find such strangely named dishes as moo goo gai pan, or chop suey. It’s Chinese food, evolved to suit American tastebuds. But it isn’t really Chinese food. Chinese-inspired perhaps, which is probably what Singaporean food could plausibly be really called.

You missed our nature preserves – Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Sungei Buloh, Chek Jawa and the rest of Pulau Ubin, Kusu Island shore walk, Chinese Garden, and many more. There’s plenty more to Singapore than the neatly packaged tourist bit you did. You say you visited Chinatown, Little India. You could have gotten a day tour – Singapore Walks (www.singaporewalks.com) does fantastic day tours with brilliant background information and spicy stories that show you Singapore’s character.

We also do have farms – veggie and hydroponics farms mostly, goat farms (Hay Dairies Goat Farm in Boon Lay), fish farms (Qian Hu Fish Farms among many). 277 farms in Singapore to be exact! (He says he has Internet access at Hotel 81, but fails to realize if he merely Googles “Singapore farm”, a wealth of info is at his fingertips.) Of course we don’t have cattle farms! We are far too small to rear most animals, especially cows, commercially – again, cows, I hope, are not the be all and end all of farming. Though if you’d popped down to quiet Sembawang I do recall that you could actually see cows wandering around the grassy areas a few years back. With our small land space it is much more efficient to import our meat. We simply don’t have the huge space needed for viable farming, as your country does.

We don’t have much visible history before the 1800s because there are few stone quarries in Singapore – anyway, our ancient people built with wood rather than stone due to availability (and heat). So few of these constructions have survived, due to the material used. But I hope that old buildings are not all that make a country – certainly they do not make ours.

We Asians are very much a collectivist culture rather than individualistic as most Europeans are and so I take no umbrage at your opinion that we should have our own, easily recognizable features. Rather I do like that as an immigrant country and a young one, at that, we are still very much a beautiful melting pot of cultures, races and religions that are slowly beginning to find our common ground. What we do have, as we’ve obviously shown, is a passionate love for our country (no matter how much we bitch about govt, taxes, etc, we are the only ones who are allowed to bitch about our country – let anyone else try and tomorrow.sg readers will crucify ‘em!).

I tried to post on your blog and even registered but for some reason my comment cannot be posted. Well, perhaps Singapore doesn’t appeal to you merely because it is not a place that is aligned with your particular interests. I hope though that I’ve corrected some of your false impressions, and maybe you’ll come back another time to give Singapore another shot – and this time, get someone who knows his/her stuff to take you around. I volunteer.

A selection of pictures from the Paris bit of the Literature trip

Airport tunnel

La Pyramide Inversee – readers of The Da Vinci Code may commence to spaz out (like I did)

If you’ve watched the Doctor Who episode titled ‘Blink’, you will wet your pants when you step into this gallery at the Louvre. Too. Many. Statues.

Many naked men.

“We’re having goose for dinner.”

A cherub…pulling…a centaur’s hair?

Is it just me or is that little hand just…really…spooky?

Looking through the barred windows of the Louvre – art in captivity

For Shyam! Again, Da Vinci code readers – this is part of the Rose Line

In front of the Winged Victory

The kids and guide in front of a painting that’s bigger than a 2-room HDB flat

And there’s my back view

From inside the glass pyramid

Champs d’Elysee with the Arc de Triomphe at the end

French flag

War memorial

Those boots I’m wearing held up for only one more day before I gave up wearing them and got myself new leather boots for only 15 euro. Gorgeous boots for Singapore weather – but in France my toes were blocks of ice

You can vaguely see the Eiffel Tower in the background. This was as close as we got at that point – later you can see my drunkenly adoring multiple shots of the tower

Palace of Versailles

Ping and I

Exhausted teachers need a break

Jeff Koons’ Balloon Flower (don’t the buildings behind look like they’re a painted backdrop? :/)

We grabbed a random cute child to take photos with. His mother was wearing white furry boots with pompoms on

Our French guide could speak better Mandarin than I can, and is also cousin to Juliette Binoche – putting me THREE STEPS AWAY from Johnny Depp!! Me -> Aude -> Juliette Binoche -> Johnny Depp SQUEAL!

Boy they love their statues. Look at that gorgeous sky

Gardens reflection

Nourishing yogurt and fruit cup breakfast

Taking the metro

Le Tour Eiffel

Over the Seine River

Riding the Metro

Bare, twiggy trees

French Portaloo – you put in one euro to use the loo, and the automated loo locks itself and washes itself down with water in between uses!! Like any good tourist we stood about for a good five minutes gawping at the toilet in mawkish amazement, taking many pictures, and sincerely debating paying to use it

And here we are again

I think I might go back and buy those boots again. They were inexpensive. I miss them already – my leather boots would slow-roast my feet in Singapore weather

On the Tower. Fabulous 360deg view from up there

Train station – double storey trains!

Hilarious zombie ad. I actually understood the French. It kept me giggling for quite awhile

This scene looks straight out of a Tim Burton movie

Jeanne d’Arc

Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris

Zero point, Paris. From here is measured the distance of Paris from other countries’ zero points. I wonder where SG zero point is? Probably LKY’s house

Pigeon pie pls! Super fat pigeons (they were much fatter in real life :/)

Drenched after puttering about in les puces (flea market) for an hour in the cold drizzly rain. At least I had my newsboy cap on

In the middle is La Pied Un Cochon (The Foot of the Pig), THE famous pork restaurant in Paris

Our bakery windows do not look half as good

Le Moulin Rouge

Elysee Montmartre (you can see the famous cancan girl on the white plaster)

Group shot in front of the Sacre Coeur

These boots were much warmer though they ended up hurting my bunions after walking 90+km in them. Guess these boots weren’t quite made for walkin’

You’d recognize this if you watched Amelie

The Sacre Coeur Basilique

Smushed bird on cobblestones

Artist’s Square

Funky Indian shop

Gorgeous painting in a window. I would have bought this and lugged it halfway round London with me if I could :(

Gare du Nord Eurostar station

Snoozing and hidden (almost) amidst the bags while waiting for our train

Part II coming up *wipes brow*

Should we? Could we? Shall we? Will we?

Dreams and whizzbees in my head.

Such plans :)

I think the daughter’s name, if anything, incriminates the father even more. I can (sort of) appreciate the sentiment of reclaiming a name and making it something different (even if the child will suffer a lifetime to do so!) but naming your daughter Aryan Nation? That really, really smacks of an agenda that’s not quite so hidden. Shudder.

EASTON, Pa. – The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance. Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the Greenwich ShopRite, but with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article over the weekend on their flare-up over frosting.

“I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they’ve been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past,” Heath Campbell said Tuesday in an interview conducted in Easton, on the other side of the Delaware River from where the family lives in Hunterdon County, N.J.

“There’s a new president and he says it’s time for a change; well, then it’s time for a change,” the 35-year-old continued. “They need to accept a name. A name’s a name. The kid isn’t going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did.”

Deborah Campbell, 25, said she phoned in her order last week to the ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son’s name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.

Karen Meleta, a spokeswoman for ShopRite, said the Campbells had similar requests denied at the same store the last two years and said Heath Campbell previously had asked for a swastika to be included in the decoration.

“We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate,” Meleta said. “We considered this inappropriate.”

The Campbells ultimately got their cake decorated at a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania, Deborah Campbell said. About 12 people attended the birthday party on Sunday, including several children who were of mixed race, according to Heath Campbell.

“If we’re so racist, then why would I have them come into my home?” he asked.

The Campbells’ other two children also have unusual names: JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell turns 2 in a few months and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell will be 1 in April.

Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because “no one else in the world would have that name.” He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated.

Campbell said his ancestors are German and that he has lived his entire life in Hunterdon County. On Tuesday he wore a pair of black boots he said were worn by a German soldier during World War II.

He said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.

“Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That’s fine, I don’t really care,” he said. “That’s his choice.”

that depends on her body to attract attention; the kind who never fails to turn up at events or outings in something bare-shouldered or low-necklined or figure-hugging or booty-skimming – and too commonly a combination of these. I saw a girl the other day in a tight tee with tight denim shorts around her chunky thighs AND wearing high heels, and I nearly laughed out loud. She looked like a maid out in Lucky Plaza looking to get laid by a construction worker.

People look at girls like that, for sure, but often it’s with a raised eyebrow, or a twist of the lip, as if to say, really? I wonder if these girls know they just look cheap, and desperate, and people stare because it’s a shared thought jostling in the common consciousness that sadly, those girls seem unable to tune into.

I used to think that baring skin was attractive – way back when I was 15 and had just discovered halters and spaghetti straps and bareback handkerchiefs (blame Miss Selfridge and their $9 tops!). Now I know better. You don’t have to show off skin to be attractive – far from it! The kind of attention you garner while in skanky outfits just isn’t the kind of attention you need. Without sounding old-fashioned, seriously, being sexy just isn’t about showing off as much skin as possible. It’s a mixture of balance and of wearing the right thing at the right time at the right place. You don’t wear a tight tube and a mini skirt together – and definitely not to church! If you bare on the top, go easy on the bottom, and vice versa – and the shorter your skirt, the flatter your heel should be (unless of course you’re Heidi Klum, then kindly do ignore all I say!). I suppose some women can pull off the bare-skin look without looking skanky (Heidi Kluuuum!) but some body types (and personalities, sadly) just cannot pull it off without people wondering how much they possibly charge by the hour.

The other night C said he couldn’t understand why women dress skankily and then complain about being stared at. At first I defended that – being stared at is really, really horrible (and I mean stared at in a old-uncle lustful drooly way) – especially when I’ve been the target of such uncle stares myself (once when I was in a cardigan and jeans no less, and it certainly wasn’t as if I was hanging my boobs out on display). Yes, some men lust and stare no matter what (and these men ought to have their eyes put out with blunt forks). But I have to agree that if you dress skankily, you better expect to be stared at by lustful uncles and by disgusted passers-by – and sometimes the surreptitious what-was-she-thinking? glance of your own friends.

So kids, let that be a lesson to you. Not to be prudish! But there’s a great thick line between being sexy and being skanky. You want sexy. Not skanky.

When I can finish sorting, editing, and culling my extensive photo library for my Paris/London trip, I’ll have them up in a jiffy. Till then, here are three to whet your appetite :)

Le Tour Eiffel

The Land of Shakespeare

The Hyde Park German Christmas fair Ferris wheel

Stonehenge at dusk

All photos taken by me (well, except for the Shakespeare one, obviously)

After 9 years of membership at PSPC (8 of which were in absentia), I’ve transferred membership to ORPC.

are possibly the most beautiful flowers on earth.

Flowers make me happy.

Grief resounds like an echo, and grows as it feeds off others, a fertile contagion with creeping fingers cold as ice. How can one stand this pain?