The touring day of Singapore.

So the group of us spent a day touring around some of the more famous spots around Singapore. I was sad that we could only spend one day but such is life.

The first up on that tour day was a trip to an island that had formerly been a gun emplacement for the British when Singapore was a colony. On this island there was a bunch of the standard tourist traps but there was also a bunch of good scenery.



This is the merlion, what I call the mascot of Singapore.

Then we went down to the beach and out onto a smaller island which according to the sign is the furthest southern point on the Asian continent. Which also makes it the furthest south that I have traveled (Surpassing Shreveport Louisiana).





While walking along the beach we found a coconut that had fallen from the tree. Some how I got the idea to break it open, whether it was someone else who suggested it or not I can't remember. So here is some of the pictures of me doing that and the results.




It would have probably been better to use a sharp machete but all I had was the corner of a concrete block embedded in the ground.

After this we took a gondola ride back to Singapore and then up to a mountain. Here are various shots of the harbor from inside the gondola. Mind you some of these pictures were taken through the plexi-glass of the gondola so the quality might not be that good.





For the last part of the trip we went to a botanical garden that had a dedicate orchid garden. So I used up a bunch of pictures on that. Here are some of the highlights.












Finally that night we went to little India for dinner. Here is a picture of dinner. mmmmm... mutton.



As always there many more pictures on flickr. For starters looks under Singapore.

Merlion & the CBD

Merlion & the CBD
Originally uploaded by voux.

This is the merlion that I showed in the previous post. This showes what I hoped to see when I took my pictures.

The First Set of Pictures from Singapore

In this post I will include some of the pictures that I took during the conference. Sadly I did not have a lot of time during the conference to take pictures or walk around much. These are just some snap shots that I took as I was walking to and from the conference. Notice the architecture there. It was all I think very new but what I liked is that typically designers tried to not make all the buildings either simple rectangles.







This next set is some shots that I took while walking around at night after the last day of the conference. Some of the shots are not great but that is the only chance I had t get some of that stuff.









One of the sad things about the timing of this trip was that the tiger thing with water coming out of its mouth was being cleaned so we couldn't see it. Here are a couple of pictures I got of it but they are not all that great.

The first Singapore Post

Hello everyone again.

I am actually typing this on the plane coming back from Singapore. Not that I won't get a chance to post it until I get on the Internet again.

So first off why was I there?

I was in Singapore to present a paper on my research (APCOT2006.org). The presentation I guess didn't go as bad as I thought it did and I met a bunch of interesting people doing other types of research or dealing with some of the same topics as I deal with.

In some later posts I will post pictures from the trip.

For now i will leave you with a link for googleearth to go Singapore. If you are like me the first time that I realized that I was going to Singapore I could not place it on a map so this should help some what.

Googleearth (tested in v4 however it might work in v3)(This is a collection of links that I found. Depending on how I feel and ambitious I am I might set up my own site for storing kml file.)
maps.google.com

Here I will put some of my thoughts of Singapore. I always thought that Japan was known for its clean cities. Singapore puts Japan to shame. things were really clean there. The second thing to note that for me was odd the first day or to was that we were basically on the equator the sun did not come up as early as it does in Sendai in the summer. There are two official languages there, English and Chinese. Guess which one I used. It was really nice to be in a country again where I could speak English with people. Singapore also seems to be a very international city/country. This made it feel like I didn't stick out as much as I normally do in Japan.

As I will mention later the architecture there is probably all new but I liked it. To me the prices were not that bad compared to Japan even though it was listed in the top 20 of the most expensive places to live in the world. The food was good there even though I really don't know what is truly from Singapore. But again because people understand English I could always ask for not spicy. Also the variety of food was quite good also.

A few of the points that I didn't like about the city but there is really not much that can be done about some of them. One was the humidity. The second was related to the first and that is the amount of electricity that must be used for cooling. During the conference I was in a suit and tie every day and as long as I was in AC building life was good. When I went outside I began to pour sweat out. The third thing that I didn't like was pushy restaurant owners.

Otherwise I really liked the city and highly recommend it to people for a visit at the least. I don't think it would be all that bad for somone who was single or as a retirnment home either.