Here's a few items that are noteworthy.

NOTE - these comments were composed over a long period of time, so they may seem out of order. Some were written while we were staying in a hotel, others from an apartment, and more after we moved into a house. So the tenses change abruptly and may sound kind of funny at times.

CITY/ISLAND/COUNTRY

It's also worth noting that Singapore is a small island. This can present feelings of closeness or even claustrophobia. It felt funny when I had to send in my passport to get a work visa... I felt land-locked. The weather forecast actually predicts showers on one side of the island or the other! Still, some people might find the island quite cozy and comfortable. It still sounds funny to me to say "the other side of the island". It makes me feel like Gilligan.

LANGUAGE

A lot of times, the local abbreviated form of English can be hard to understand. Singaporeans tend to leave out useless syllables, so you hear sentences like "on the light" and "water can not in". Proper Singlish should be spoken in a very choppy manner, with sharp staccato syllables. The last two syllables of a sentence should be drawled out, almost sung. It sounds ridiculous.

CULTURE

Since Singapore is a very modern city, and since it is small enough for the class divide to be kept under control, the people have enjoyed a high standard of living. The minimum standard is very good... housing and food and basic entertainment are very cheap. Luxuries cost dearly (cars, sports clubs, private housing, etc). That being said, there are a lot of rich people in Singapore, and they like to flaunt their good fortune.

VICTIMS OF EVOLUTION

In a recent survey, they asked Singaporean school children where milk came from. The answer? The fridge. Where do eggs come from? Again, the fridge. How about before that? From the store. I'm sure that this survey has been exaggerated to illustrate the point. However, it's interesting to see how these kids are vicitms of their own evolution.

This same "urbanization" trend can be seen in more subtle places as well. In the 1960's the people of Singapore were a filthy bunch. In order to make the city a clean and decent place, the goverment imposed fines for littering, spitting, peeing in the elevators and for failing to flush the toilet after use. Gradually, people learned to mind their manners. But then someone decided that the wave of the future was automatic flush sensors. So now every public toilet is outfitted with a sensor. Now Singaporeans are back to their non-flushing roots, because that job is usually handled for them. Let's hope that we don't gradually forget why we stopped peeing in the elevators!

Another feature of this evolution can be seen in the number of household servants. At first, only the rich could afford domestic help. But with the import of labor from neighboring countries (primarily Indonesia and the Phillipines), it is becoming the norm to have a live-in maid. I wonder if the kids develop lazy tendencies, knowing that the maid will clean up after them? If so, can this be called "progress"?

I have often thought that in the event of a catastrophe, Americans would be the first race to die out. Watch a group of travelling Americans, and see how picky we are about our food, and see how we get sick from the local water. We're like Mr and Mrs Thurston Howell from Gilligan's island. I think it's safe to say that Singaporeans will take their place right next to the Americans. Life is good in Singapore, and the people have learned to rely on this.

HOTEL LIFE

Our hotel was in the middle of the busiest area of Orchard Road. It had a free car park for guests (although I paid to enter for a week before the man told me that hotel guests park free -- duh). There was a pool and two nice restaurants (which we only visited twice... too many other places to eat on Orchard Road). Plus we had a mini-bar with a fridge and complimentary drinks.

I brought some binoculars from home, thinking that we'd have a spectacular view of the city. Instead, our room had a lovely view of the back of some other high-rise building. Just a car park. (We ended up with a much nicer view in our temporary apartment).

The worst part about hotel life is the lack of a permanent address. When I opened my bank account, I had to use my company's address. Same thing with my work permit, my credit card, our medical bills and everything else. By the time we moved into our house, all of our mail was already being sent to work. So I never get any mail at home.

There are never enough electrical outlets in hotel rooms. I found one where I could plug my laptop in, and a second one where I could charge my phone. Of course, there's that special 110/220V outlet in the bathroom "for shavers only" which did wonders for my AA/AAA battery charger and my electric toothbrush. One of the first things we bought after we got here was electrical power strips (which, for some reason, are always very low quality and highly priced).

Speaking of power, the wall switches in the hotel room are strange. There's this master switch near the door where you're supposed to put your key. When you leave the room, you take the key and the switch cuts off everything in the room. Not just lights, but wall outlets as well. Thing is, I would leave some batteries charging and they would never get charged while I was gone. It turns out that you can just stick a piece of cardboard in the key slot and it will leave the outlets turned on while you're gone. But at night, most of the power outlets would cut off when you turn off the room lights. You just can't win.

ELECTRICAL STUFF

Singapore uses British-style electrical plugs. These plugs have been designed to be extra safe against fires and electrical shocks. The wall outlets have protective covers built in, so you can't stick a plug into the hole unless the grounding pin is inserted first. The prongs are thick and solid to accommodate high currents without getting hot (plus, higher voltages mean lower currents). Plugs have fuses in them. And my favorite feature, all wall outlets have a switch to turn them off before plugging or unplugging a device.

However, in spite of all of the safety features built into the electrical plugs, the presence of a competing standard makes things extremely hazardous. About half of the stuff that you buy here comes with "European" plugs, two round prongs that almost fit into the British 3-hole sockets. In order to jam a European plug into a British socket, you have to stick a pencil in the ground hole to open the plastic guard. They don't fit very well, so sometimes the plug will only be half plugged in. Finally, if you get sick of the half-fit of a Euro-plug in a Brit-socket, you can cut the cable and wire up a local plug.

Aiyah! Now I am encouraged to jam stuff in the holes, leave the plugs halfway in, and rewire stuff myself! So much for safety!

To make matters worse, the colors of the wires are not intuitive! In the old days, they used red for "hot" and black for "neutral" and green for "earth". Given a few seconds, anyone can deduce what the logic is. Red hot, green grass (earth), etc. But somewhere along the line, they changed things. Now, "live" is brown, neutral is blue and earth/ground is green with yellow stripes. How am I supposed to remember that brown is live? Hmmm, maybe if I touch it, I can relate to brown.

Electrical plugs must rank very high on the list of frustrations here.

SHIPPING OUR STUFF

While we were in the hotel, we had to do without this stuff and just live out of suitcases. This was tolerable, but inconvenient. During our "transition month" in the temporary apartment, our shipment arrived and we got to enjoy our music CD's, my tool box, a wider selection of clothes, some cookware, and lots of other stuff.

Advice for the would-be expat: I sorted through everything in the house, separating it into TAKE versus STORE. I even sorted my books... the only ones I brought were computer books "that I thought I would need". If I had it to do over again, I would be a lot more liberal in the books that I brought along. I keep going to the bookshelf, thinking "I know I have a book on that topic". I do, but it's in a warehouse somewhere back home.

FOOD

EATING OUT

A more cost-conscious way to eat is at the many hawkers centers. These are the Asian equivalent to the Food Court at the mall. There are common facilities with several vendors in one area. One vendor may specialize in soups, while others might serve noodles, fruits, drinks, rice dishes, etc. You can find these hawker centers everywhere. Newton Circus is one popular place. Chinatown has several. And even on Orchard Road, you'll find them in small basements underneath the big shopping centers. The best part about the hawker food is the price. I can usually eat a whole meal for about S$4-6. This is comparable to McDonald's. But the food is much better than Mickey D's.

FAMILIAR FOOD

I found a Kenny Rogers Roasters and a few Ponderosa steak houses. To my delight, there are six Taco Bell's in town (most are KFC / Taco Bell / Pizza Hut combo shops, which only serve a couple of items from each chain). So I can get my junk food fix, as well as a good American grown USDA steak from time to time.

After we moved into our house, we got a telephone book (three large volumes), and I flipped through it looking for familiar names. I got all excited when I found Bojangles (three locations!). But after we drove there, we found that it was an Irish pub. No Cajun chicken and biscuits there!

All of this familiar food may come in handy as some of my friends come to visit... you could stay here for two weeks and never have eastern food, if you had such an aversion.

FOODS THAT ARE DIFFERENT

I know that in Asia, milk is not as popular as it is in the west, and therefore they tend to use more UHT milk. UHT milk has been pasteurized using an Ultra-High Temperature treatment (which was, incidentally, developed at NC State University). This milk can be stored on a shelf for long periods (years) and can remain open without refrigeration for a short while. You don't see it much in the US, but it is very common here.

COKE LIGHT

I never noticed the difference when I transitioned from Diet Coke to Coke Light. The change in taste was so subtle that I figured that the two drinks were the same. However, after I had gotten used to Coke Light, we took a weekend trip to Malaysia and I tried Diet Coke again. Yuck -- it tasted like motor oil!

For reference, here is a side-by-side comparison of the ingredients, taken straight from the cans. The Coke Light is from Singapore, and the Diet Coke is from the US (the Malaysian can lists the ingredients in Malay, so I am not sure if the US and Malaysian Diet Coke formulas are the same or not).

There's lots of information on the web about acesufame-k (also called acesulfame potassium).

SHOPPING

They play loud (and low-fidelity) music, hoping to entice shoppers in (to do what? dance?). Usually, it sounds like the store manager has tuned his radio near, but not on, a local radio station and then turned the volume way up.

SELECTION

SERVICE

One restaurant finally managed to bring our appetizer out after we had finished the rest of the meal.

Two nice things about service in Singapore: (1) No tips. I believe that the wait staff should be paid by their management, leaving me out of the loop. (2) No self-service garbage cans. Unskilled labor is relatively cheap, so all restuarants, including fast food places and hawker stands, have someone to clean the table after you are done.

One really weird service that takes some getting used to... when you go to a store and buy something like a blender, they take the box and open it up and show you that all of the parts are there. They'll plug it in for you and show that it works. Of course, that means that you can not get anything in a "factory sealed" box. Personally, I feel more comfortable buying something that is factory sealed. You're less likely to find some important piece missing.

Once or twice, I have taken an item back to be exchanged. Say I return a walk-man. The guy will take my defective walk-man. Then he'll open up a new box and give me the walk-man (without accessories) from there. I guess this way, he knows that I am not getting a free set of headphones or a charger out of the exchange. But if he gets the new item out of a brand new box, does he put my broken one back in that new box to sell to someone else? There have been a couple of times when I suspect that they guy simply walks into the back room and returns with the same broken unit. For this reason, I suggest marking the broken unit or recording the serial number.

This is one of those cases where "extra service" is actually an extra inconvenience.

LUCKY DRAW

These things are everywhere. Apparently, Singaporeans will do anything for a small chance to win something.

BANKS

It took about two weeks for the ATM card to work. In the US, sometimes they make you call a 1-800 number to acknowledge receipt of your card. Here, you receive the card and PIN, then you mail a form back to them, telling them that you received it (I guess in theory they are manually checking your signature against the signature card at the bank). Slow, slow, slow. One nice thing, though... you can change your PIN at the ATM machine. In Singapore, you never have to walk far to get to an ATM machines -- they are on every street corner.

Banking hours vary wildly, some being as tight as 11am until 3pm, others stay open until 7pm (I visited one such open-til-7 branches at 6pm one night, and it was closed). Most branches are also open on Saturday morning. Apparently, they need to be closed for several hours during the day to process all of the paperwork that they generate during the open hours (like that mailed-in ATM receipt, right?). It sounds like they took the banking customs from their British roots.

Several of the banks here are called something like "Oversea Chinese Bank" and "Union Overseas Bank". Apparently, the early Chinese settlers set up these banks so that Chinese immigrants could send money back to China. The names stuck.

In the first few weeks that we were here, I felt that it was very important to get a local credit card. This should make life a lot easier. It turns out that EVERYWHERE accepts "NETS" cards, or local ATM cards. They have terminals where you enter your 6-digit PIN number to authenticate a transaction. It's quite nice. So it turns out that the credit card is rarely used, other than in restaurants. Restuarants do not use NETS because the NETS reader is on-line, attached to the cash register with a cable. At a restaurant, you typically pay at the table, rather than at the cash register.

Most credit cards charge a big yearly fee, but several of them waive the fee for the first year. We managed to get a card within a few weeks of arriving here, even though we did not have a "permanent" address. They must think that my job at Ericsson is secure enough that I am not a risk.

MONEY

Gas costs S$1.50 per liter (for the good stuff). That's (US)$3.15 per gallon!

Milk costs S$4.50 for 2 liters. That's (US)$4.75 per gallon!

Pizza costs S$30 for two people... that's (US)$16.66. That's substantially more than McDonalds (S$10 for two people) and hawker center food (under S$10 for two).

THE ROADS

The traffic patterns and road markings are extremely well thought-out. Even when the traffic is heavy, I can still make right turns (the ones where you have to cross opposing traffic) fairly easily. They have these big yellow boxes painted on the roads at intersections. If you are caught standing in a yellow box, then you get a S$500 fine (as with all fines in Singapore, I am not sure if this one is enforced). Instead, you are supposed to hang back a bit until you have room to cross over the box completely. That clears the way for other people to turn right into a side street.

The one place where they could improve is in labeling the roads at intersections. You can always tell what road you are driving on, because the bus stops have clear signs with the name of the road on them.

The roads in Singapore have funny names. All of the highways are named with three letters. There's the PIE, the CTE, the AYE, the SLE, the ECP, the BKE, the KJE and the TPE. Whew! My goal is to be able to draw a freehand map of all of these intertwined highways from memory.

In town, the road names change every time you go through a major intersection. For example, there is one major road that changes name from Queensway to Farrer to Adam to Lornie. To me, it's just Queensway/Farrer/Adam/Lornie. The actual name you use just helps you narrow down how far along the road you are. It's a lot like in Silicon Valley, where all of the towns just blend together.

The worst name-changing road is Bukit Timah and Dunearn. The road is a divided highway with a canal running between the two lanes. Or, some might say that it is two parallel one-way streets. One direction is called Bukit Timah and the other is called Dunearn. This makes reading a bus schedule a little bit more difficult.

Driving in Malaysia carries its own set of challenges. We often take a three hour trip up to Malaysia to stay with my in-laws. The highway has two lanes. There are a lot of slow-moving trucks that use the left lane at about 60 km/hr, and a lot of very fast cars that use the right lane at over 120 km/hr. My poor little car can just barely reach 110-130 km/hr. Thus, I spend most of my time in the right lane with my eye on the mirror.

DRIVERS

The drivers to watch out for are on motorcycles (or more commonly, small motor scooters). They ride on the white line between lanes. The worst drivers on the road (in my opinion) are bus drivers. One lane is just not enough for them.

CARS

All cars in Singapore are equipped with these special card readers that are mounted on the dash. You insert a smart card into the device. When you're driving down a road and you pass into a busy area, you'll drive under this big sign that hangs over the road (these are called ERP gantries). The sign has a special radio link in it that talks to your card reader when you drive under it, and it automatically takes a dollar off of your smart card. If you do not have a reader installed or if you don't have an ERP card inserted, then there is a camera that takes a picture of your license plate, and they mail you a fine. The ERP card is a debit card, so you have to "top up" your card when it gets close to being empty. You can do this at 7-eleven stores or at an ATM machine.

There is another card called a "cash card". Like the ERP card, it is a debit card that uses a smart card chip to keep track of your balance. However, this card can be used to buy things all over town. You can pay the fines for overdue books at the library. You can pay the fees for some government services like taking the drivers license test. I discovered this card when I crossed the border into Malaysia. Apparently, the only way to pay the toll at the border toll booth is with a cash card. I didn't have one, so I had to park my car and walk to the office and pay with cash, and it cost S$12.50 instead of the normal S$2.50.

Cash cards can also be used in your car's ERP reader.

DRIVERS LICENSE

Absurd:

You are approaching a T junction. What should you do?

(A) Speed up so you can leave skid marks on the road when you turn.
(B) Stop in the middle of the road so you can see in all directions.
(C) Approach cautiously, stopping before the intersection. Wait until the way is clear and then proceed safely.

Esoteric:

How many RIF points are accumulated when a class 3 driver stops his car in a non-TFD zone?

(A) 1
(B) 3
(C) 4

[later] OK, I have taken the real test, and it was not quite as bad as I illustrated above. The absurd ones were there, but they took it easy on the esoteric ones. Only some rule about replacing tires when the tread is 1.6mm and something about blood alcohol content. But these can be expected. The results were mailed to me two weeks after the test (I passed, whew). I'm not sure why it takes so long. The test was offered at night -- the office is apparently concerned about convenience, but not efficiency.

PARKING

In town, there are pay lots everywhere. It usually costs about S$2 to S$3 to park in a car park for a few hours. If you need to park in a medium density area (where there's no car parks, but land is still scarce), you can park on the street. Instead of parking meters, they have these booklets of punch cards that you can buy at 7-eleven and other places. You take out one card for each half-hour that you plan to park, and you punch out the date and the time, and leave the card on your dash. It's pretty simple.

You need to be careful, though. One time, I parked in an office building where we had an off-site meeting. Since I grew up in the land of free parking, it did not occur to me to check the prices. At the end of the day, I had a S$42.50 charge! S$2.50 per half-hour! For that price, I could have taken a limousine.

CAR CRAP

With so much pampering, you would expect the car interiors to be kept equally as tidy. But the most popular thing to do is fill them with "car crap"... tacky decorations that you would expect from street gangs.

The most popular form of car crap is the bone-shaped pillows that attach to the headrests. They are colored white with black dalmation spots. The second most-popular car crap is the Tweety Bird or Tasmanian Devil headrest covers.

Also popular are the blinking LED lights in the windshield (since every car already has an ERP reader on the dash, this is the easiest place to tap an electrical connection). You'll also find plenty of little plastic toys that clip onto the A/C air vents, spinning in the breeze. One other popular thing to do is to take a T-shirt and slide it over the seats as a home-made seat cover (clean and cool).

You'll find the other standard junk: fuzzy steering wheel covers, tree-shaped air fresheners, the dogs that bob their heads while you drive, etc. Most grocery stores and hardware stores have one full aisle reserved for car crap. It must be a booming business!

However, there are a couple of forms of car crap that are not so common. Thankfully, hot pink windshield wipers are not widely found here, as the heavy rain demands no-nonsense wipers. Also, you don't see those license plate covers with rotating Christmas tree lights. Unlike American state-issued plates, Singaporean cars simply have a rectangle of plexiglass with plastic letters glued to it.

License plates are always either white on black, or black on yellow. There are also special white on red plates, which signify a "night and weekend only" vehicle. You can buy the plates anywhere, usually at a hardware store or car accessories shop. In Singapore and Malaysia, the number is important, and not the plate.

SPECIAL CAR RESTRICTIONS

If that's not enough of a deterrent, some prefessional vehicles have a yellow "hazard" light on the roof. The light starts blinking when the vehicle is going too fast! That should make it pretty easy for the traffic police to pick speeders out of the crowd.

MASS TRANSIT

The taxi is the best way to get from point A to point B. It's not too expensive. Just S$2.50 for a short ride and maybe up to S$20 for a ride across town. It's very easy to find a taxi in town. You simply go out to any major road and hold out your hand when they pass by. In town, you need to stand in a taxi queue (which move pretty quickly because taxis line up to get to them as well). The hard part is getting back to town from a lesser-populated area, where there are fewer taxis.

The MRT is the local name for the subway. There's MRT stations near most major shopping areas and a lot of higher-density living areas. Unfortunately, the MRT does not go REALLY close to a lot of things that you want to visit. For example, I could take the MRT to work, but it would still be a 15 minute walk from the station to my office. Most of the houses that we looked at were at least 15 minutes walk from an MRT station. Many were much farther.

The most widely-deployed service is the bus, but it is very hard to figure out which bus you need to take to get from point A to point B. We were in a book store, and we found a bus guide (for S$1.50). From there, you can look up the road that you want to start at and find all of the bus numbers that pass that spot. Then you look at the routes for those buses until you find one that passes your destination. Of course, after you're settled into a place, it's pretty easy to remember that number 132 goes to work and number 54 goes to shopping. There's also a web site where you can enter your FROM and TO info and get a list of bus routes. Along Orchard Road, they have these kiosks (they look like phone booths) that have access to this same web page, so you can find a bus when you're already in town.

HOUSING

Housing varies wildly. Some areas have reasonably sparse housing, while others are just packed like sardines. We got to experience a little bit of each, because the house that we chose was not available immediately, and we stayed in a high-rise apartment for five weeks until the house was ready (see the separate page devoted to "our home").

High-density housing is convenient because there are a lot of shops nearby. In fact. In the few weeks that we stayed in the high-rise apartment, we only cooked at home a few times. It's so much easier (and cheaper) to buy food at the shops right across the street.

However, being so close to one another has a price. People are always moving in and out. And before an apartment can be moved into by a new tenant, they always do major renovations. I'm not exactly sure why, because a lot of times the apartments are in OK shape. But it is customary to sand the floors and install something new each time the unit changes hands. That means that there is always some sort of renovation going on. And in Singapore, all renovations are done with a jack-hammer. Since the structures are built out of concrete, a lot of things like wiring and plumbing really do require blasting holes in the walls. Personally, I think Singaporeans just like to see some sort of forceful construction going on so they'll feel like the place has really been upgraded. Bottom line, the apartments are often noisy during the middle of the day. At least they quit making noise at night (conversely, they only do renovations to office buildings on the weekends and at night, when most tenants at home).

High-density housing is spectacular to see. From my office building, we have a great view of the Toa Payoh neighborhood. I can see several hundred high-rise apartment buildings from that one spot. Each one has about twenty to thirty floors, and each floor probably has ten to thirty families. I wonder if I can see a million people from that one office window.

OUR HOUSE

Our house was built in 1979, and building codes were different back then. So there are not a whole lot of electrical outlets (same problem as the hotel). There's also a separate set of telephone and cable TV connections for each tenant that has lived here. Apparently, every few years, the cable and phone companies change the way that they wire things, so they end up re-wiring as tenants move in and out. Since the place is old, I spent most of the first month doing little fix-it jobs like gluing stuff into place, fixing small wiring problems (like TV antennas and light fixtures) and spraying WD-40 on anything that moves.

FACILITIES

In the apartment, we had one facility that was really cool... the garbage chute. In the laundry room, there was a small door in the wall where you could dump your garbage. Why stink up the kitchen with some garbage smell? After your meal, just dump the garbage down the chute! It's fun to drop a can down and hear how many times it bangs around before it finally hits the bottom (it takes about 15 seconds, with all of the bouncing). Sometimes, you would hear something that sounded like rain, but it was only the maintenance crew spraying water down the garbage chute.

I figured that I'd really miss that garbage chute after we moved into the house, but it turns out that the garbage truck comes to our neighborhood every day! Even on Sundays! That explains why everyone's garbage cans are so small (the cans that you take to the street are about the same size as a "kitchen can" in the US).

PETS

Maggie travelled OK on the plane. Northwest Airlines has a program called "Priority Pet", which is designed to make sure that the pet and the owner are both kept comfortable. I felt much better when we changed planes in Detroit and the van with the big paw print on the side pulled up to take care of her. I watched them give her water and then take her to the next plane.

After we landed in Singapore, I was disappointed that we could not look in on her after her long ordeal. Instead, she had to stay in the airport for a night and then go to quarantine for the next 30 days. So after that first night, we visited her at the quarantine kennel. She was very happy to see us, and she did not even seem to mind when we left. But the second time we visited the kennel, she was very upset. I think she was mad at us for leaving without her on the first visit. She thought we were coming to pick her up and take her home! After that second visit, we decided to visit less often, so she would not get her hopes up. How sad.

Since Maggie has always been an indoor dog, we paid (significantly) extra for an air-conditioned kennel for her. However, I have my suspicions that the air-conditioning is only turned on during visitation hours -- a very Chinese way for the manager to save a few dollars. We were also disappointed to learn that we could not take her for walks at the kennel. Instead, the enterprising manager said that we could pay extra for one of the staff to walk her each day. Hmph!

March 12th was the day of freedom. We had a happy reunion. She adjusted well to the high-rise apartment (although her walks in the yard weren't as frequent as they were in the US because of the long ride in the elevator). After we moved into the house, Maggie seemed to settle in very well. She had a cool marble floor to sleep on and a large sliding glass door to look out of. And she enjoyed going for frequent walks in the suburban neighborhood. With the exception of some allergies to the local grass (and a subsequent visit to a "quack" veterinarian), Maggie handled life in Singapore quite well.

TELEVISION

There's one or two stations from Malaysia. Skip these. They show mostly Malay language shows, and most of them are locally produced (meaning low budget). These people love to sing, so there's almost always some music video show. Many times, it's more of an amateur karaoke singing show or a talent/beauty pagent. [later] After a couple of visits to Malaysia, it occurred to me that the Malaysian government probably requires a certain percentage of television content to be in the Malay language, as part of their (somewhat artificial) program to promote the Malay culture. It's similar to laws in France that require French web pages to be primarily in French. So this would explain the Malaysian singing. If there is a quota, then the local stations have to produce a huge number of hours of programming on a limited budget. And karaoke is the cheapest thing you can produce.

There's at least one Indian channel. If you've never seen an Indian movie, you should. The genre changes faster than the twists in the plot. One minute, it's a love story -- the next, they're fighting kung-fu style. And Indian music videos have a style all of their own, with some deep roots in 1970's disco fashions. After you've seen your token Indian movie, you can program this channel out of your TV, because the rest is the same.

There's some Chinese shows, many imported from Hong Kong and China. They show a lot of dramas, like soap operas. The Hong Kong ones are fun to watch because the women whine and pout in Cantonese (which has a unique whiney tone to it anyway). There's this one Chinese show that takes place in some ancient dynasty, where the servants shave the front halves of their heads and the women dress like Chinese opera singers. The plot and the mood seem to follow "Xena, Warrior Princess" from the west, but I can't understand what they're saying. So I could be way off.

So what is in English? There's the nightly news at 9:30pm. There's always some sports on, but it's the wimpy european-style sports like "World Champion Snooker" or maybe "curling". There's also Channel NewsAsia and CNN-Asia. They tend to obsess with financial analysis, so that gets old in a hurry.

In the hotel, we had HBO. We don't get it in the apartment. There's also a movie channel (actually a pair of channels) called Vision Four. This looks like a very low budget automated movie channel. They show segments that are three hours long on a fixed schedule. One segment might contain a movie, a nature documentary and a sitcom episode. You can check the schedule to see what rotation they are showing each day. They show the same commercials (for a jewelry store called Roy Eastern Watch and a Malaysian insurance company called "MAA") over and over. The whole setup looks like it is being run by a computer at the studio. The commercials are bad, the graphic lead-in's are extremely bad, but the movies are OK.

After we settle into our house, we will certainly subscribe to every channel they offer just to be able to get a little bit of choice. The government does not allow satellite TV receivers, so it's cable or nothing. I'm not even sure if they tranmit terrestrial over-the-air television. [later] It turns out that the basic cable package is probably the best. About 40 channels, complete with BBC and CNN, Discovery and National Geographic, many local channels and a few imported ones.

MOVIES AND VIDEOS

MUSIC

RADIO

The pop music station is actually located in our office building. Their studio is in the basement, and the transmitter tower is on the roof. Since our office is a 19-story high rise on top of a big hill in the middle of Singapore, this is an ideal location for a transmitter. One thing that really caught me off guard, however, was the blatant government sponsorship, made to sound like commentary. Our building is called the "SLF building", for the Singapore Labor Foundation. It's basically a branch of the government that acts like a national labor union. On some mornings, the normal techno-pop programming is replaced with a show called "better knowledge, better life". They mix a few songs with special commentary on how the labor union can help you out, and contests where you can win a $50 voucher good for healthcare services. Weird. There is another show in the evenings called "Time With Income", which mixes music with discussion about the events and policies of "NTUC Income", a savings plan run by the government. Equally weird.

It's very cool to have an FM radio station rebroadcast BBC World programming. It's the same program that you'd receive on shortwave, but it's crystal clear. I like the world news from a respected source (and without the ads for local government services intermixed).

THE LITTLE THINGS

This page is a living document, and will change as I gain more impressions of my new environment, and as I find time to publish them.

last updated 2003.09.07