Flying Wizards of Satan

Nothing to do with Singapore, indeed much closer to 'home'. The Surrey Comet wrote a serious story about a pigeon cull, but being Xmas, people have had a little too much to drink at lunchtime, just check out the comments. I especially liked Mr Dallingers suggestion made at 9:57pm Wed 29 Nov 06...

Click to read the story

Nothing stops the Shopping

Decorations on Orchard Road

If you've ever been to or read anything about Singapore, then one subject that comes up pretty often is the huge array of shopping opportunities available in Singapore. Orchard Road is justifiably famous for the plethora of shopping malls down its not inconsiderable length. A couple of nights ago, forgetting that we're in the run up to Christmas I suggested walking from Raffles to Tangs department store as it should only take 20 mins or so. The road was so packed with shoppers that it took about 45. It makes Oxford Street in December look tame and sane. And the Singaporeans don't seem to have got the hang of avoiding people (or is it just me?) leading to several ramming incidents. Shops don't open here til about 11am, but at the moment they all stay open til about 11pm. This is actually pretty good (unless you are a shop assistant) as it allows you to go to work and then do any shopping afterwards. Although getting a taxi can be an exercise in queuing patience.

Anyway, as if any further proof was required that Singaporeans are shopping addicts, yesterday Tangs department store roof caught fire. But no-one felt the need to actually leave the store and stop shopping. People were saying things like 'we felt perfectly safe, there was an official announcement to keep us all informed'. What like 'Will the gentleman on fire in the underwear section kindly proceed to level 2 where he can wait in line to be extinguished'. It's an interesting insight into the local psyche.

This from the Today newspaper "There was no panic," said the civil servant, who was part of a crowd who gathered to watch the smoky scene outside Orchard MRT station. "When the fire was doused, in quick fashion, everyone clapped."

Slumming it..

I've not been feeling so well today, some sort of stomach bug. It seems that I ate something dodgy at one of the food places and now whatever it is won't go away. This has caused a disturbance in the maids cleaning schedule, as we have by now reached some sort of agreement where I get out of the room and go to the gym or for a walk to do some errands etc and she cleans the apartment. She seems very put out that I won't let her in to give me new towels or do the washing up, frankly I thought that she'd welcome the change. Much as I welcomed the new toilet rolls.

Our time in the serviced apartments is coming to an end, so I thought I'd add a few pictures of where we've been living for the last few weeks.


This is the best thing about the apartment, King size beds in Singapore are 6'3" wide, which means a really good nights sleep.

Small living area.

Nice little gym. I usually have this all to myself.

Roof top swimming pool and jacuzzi.

The jacuzzi isn't heated though, so you have to do a few laps of the pool to get used to the water before you can actually sit in it. It's a hard life.

Note also that we won't have Internet access for a while once we leave the apartment until we get it sorted out, not sure how long this will take, so will be incommunicado for a few days unless we can get Wifi'd up, though with the early launch of Wireless Island wide it may be easier than we think. Wifi everywhere for free. London - are you listening?

Sea to Singapore

So we've finally arrived in Singapore. Looking at the calendar, it's only been a couple of weeks, but it seems like an age already. As some of the initial headspin spin settles, Beatrice has started working and I've been looking for a flat, which is pretty much a full time job. As well as looking for a full time job. So we haven't had that much time to really explore etc.



Once the flat was all packed up, it looked very odd, like something was missing, but you couldn't quite put your finger on it. The other galling thing was that prior to letting it, I finally got round to all the DIY and upgrading chores I hadn't done in 5 years, and it looked quite amazing!



We had the packers in a week ahead of our departure, which was fine for Beatrice who was off to France for the week, but I ended up surviving on sandwiches and things that you could cut up with plastic cutlery as everything had gone into the container. It all fitted easily into the container, which is odd because the flat always felt quite full. I guess the answer is to just rent a container to live in.

(Saying goodbye to the flat and the park)

The container is currently somewhere on a ship between the UK and Singapore, and then it gets impounded whilst customs search it for alcohol and porn. We had an allowance to send some possessions via airfreight, so we just got our clothes. We packed these so that they would arrive a couple of days after we did, but due to 'local inefficiencies' they only just turned up. As we'd only packed enough for just over a week this meant that we've been washing and drying nearly every night. When the clothes did arrive, it was like getting back from the worlds biggest shopping expedition and suddenly having millions of 'new' things to wear! Very exciting. Although the 4 season sleeping bag and fleeces are a tad superfluous to requirements.

For me one of the hardest things was having to give away my world famous alcohol collection, literally tens of bottles of premium spirits collected over time. Singapore duty on alcohol is very expensive and you can only bring 1 litre each. Note that all guests will be required to bring a bottle with them so we can replenish stocks. In a way, saying goodbye to the spirits was like saying goodbye to fond memories, as each one had a special experience associated with it. The two I chose to keep? The Ardbeg 19 year old and the Hendricks gin (website well worth browsing) survived the cull.

Many thanks to all of you who showed up and making it to our final leaving party (pics link). I totally lost my voice afterwards from all the talking. You are all invited to stay if we have a guest room. Everyone who promised to come and then piked, you can all come too, but you have to sleep on the floor...

We're hoping to make it back for Glastonbury 2007 (assuming we can get tickets) so if you want to see us next year, either start looking for flights or buy your wellies now while they're cheap.

Stop the world, I want to get off...

Let's consider the Earth's rotation. The Earth's radius at the equator is about 4000 miles (3963 miles actually). Then the circumference of the Earth's equator is 2 * Pi * 3963 = 24,900 miles. This is the distance around the equator. This is also how far the Earth's equator moves in 24 hours. Then the speed of rotation at the equator = 24,900 miles divided by 24 hours = 1040 miles an hour. Since I don't live at the equator but about latitude 1 degrees here in Singapore, there is a reduction of the distance that is given by the cosine of the latitude. (Cosine(0 degrees) = 1, while Cosine(1 degrees) = 0.999.) Taking the equatorial rotation speed and multiplying by the cosine of our latitude gives us a local rotation speed of nearly 1040 miles an hour.

Let's take London. A latitude of 51 degrees, Cosine of 0.629. Moving at a mere speed of 655 mph. And who said that life in London was life in the fast lane. No wonder I feel bloody giddy. Does this mean that I'm getting older quicker or slower than I was before? Welcome to Singapore...

If you want to see where I currently am click here. That's me, the tall white tower in the middle. You can see our pool. If the satellite is overhead, I might be waving at you.

Dear Nephew Gobo...

Greetings from Singapore. Things are a bit more settled now and it's about time I kept you up to date with what's going on. A lot of people said to me before I went 'are you going to start a blog' and I laughed at them and said no chance, but that was mostly becaue I didn't really get it (I'm too old to learn all this web 2.0 stuff). Having looked into it, it seems like the right way to go, and I'm reasonably confident I can get it all to work as I want it. Think of it like a regular postcard if it helps. Which leads me to unveil:

Great Uncle Travelling Matt.

Now pedants will say that it should be 'Uncle Travelling Matt' but that had already gone (and he's taken it all very seriously, see http://www.uncletravellingmatt.com/), so I skipped a generation. The rest of you won't of course get what I'm talking about. You can learn about it here.

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Uncle_Traveling_Matt

Of course it will be great to get emails from you telling me what you're all up to, it will be a strange world where we all trade blogs like photocopied circulars at Christmas (this year Jake learnt to play the bassoon and Miranda drowned Aunty Clarissas sainted budgerigar. How we all laughed...Anyway, Happy Holidays etc).

How it works:

Web: http://greatuncletravellingmatt.blogspot.com/

Email: You can subscribe at the website to receive updates via email. Email will come from Great Uncle Travelling Matt (rssfwd@rssfwd.com), please make this a known sender to avoid it landing in junk mail.

News: for those of you using Newsreaders:

* RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GreatUncleTravellingMatt

* Atom: http://greatuncletravellingmatt.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I'm not about to post my contact details, you should have got them from the mail, but if you've lost them, just drop me a line.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

Matt