View from J's apartment.
We left about 8am for what turned out to be about a 3 hour walk. J. lives in an affluent section of town. Although most of Singapore lives in public housing, there is also private housing. Since J was going to school, but had a dog with him, he had to live in private housing which is considerably more expensive. He's in a building scheduled to be demolished and replaced with more high end stuff. So the three bedroom apartment has been divided into three different apartments. He and his roommate are still spending 10 times what we paid for our much smaller and less fancy apartment in Chiang Mai.
It was Sunday morning early, so not many people out yet.
I could hear some church sounding music up ahead and sure enough, there in the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd set up in 1849 or so were people at Sunday morning service.
This is old Raffles Hotel, one of the few things I really remember from my last trip to Singapore (in 1968 or 69), but this is now an arcade and not what it used to look like.
Cricket practice was going on not far away.
Singapore has become a very phallic city since I was here last.
The statue of Sir Thomas Raffles reminded me a lot of Anchorage's Captain Cook statue. But there were four signs - one in English, one in Chinese, one in Malay, and one in an Indian subcontinent language.
The Singapore River, a center for tourists. These boats ply the river in the tourist trade.
Kona entertaining a Chinese tourist.
Despite the spiritual dominance of money here, there are still people who hedge their bets with offerings to other gods.
I stepped into a super market to see how much more the mangoes were than in Thailand. I couldn't quite figure it out.
Then we had breakfast in an old little coffee shop that had various kinds of foods. We chose the Indian Roti Prahtas.
All the cars coming into the downtown section of Singapore, if I got this right, have to have one of these meters in their cars because driving into downtown is restricted.
The ERP sign has readers on it, as you can see in the picture below, to record in the car meters every time the enter and exit the city,
When we got back to the apartment there were phone messages from WX, a former student of mine, who now teaches here in Singapore. So we met him for lunch in a giant mall and then he and I got in line for a taxi here while J went back to study for tomorrow's, (well, it's now today's ) final exam.
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