Visit to NUS

Monday, April 28, 2008 almost midnight: J gave me great instructions how to get to the National University of Singapore. J's exam wasn't 2pm and he needed to stay home so he could walk the dog before going to the exam. So I walked down the street to the bus stop.



So far, all the neighborhoods I've seen - and mostly I've been in the private housing areas apparently - have been lush and garden like.



This sign at the bus stop was a little disturbing. No, the need to be on top and the promotion of that way of thinking is a big problem for people. On the other hand, hierarchy is found all over the animal kingdom, so I suspect it is a genetic inheritance and fighting the notion can sound quixotic. I wonder how many of the those who believe in life being about getting to the top don't believe in evolution...


On the other side of the sign were these girls in their student uniforms, or so I assumed.
You get on the bus and touch your card to the pad and move on to your seat. The bus stops are all numbered and I knew the University stop was 21. All very easy. The man sitting next to me was reading a newspaper in a script that looked a lot like what was on the sign yesterday for Sir Thomas Raffles, so I asked him what language it was. Tamil, one of the southern Indian languages.

I got out at 21 and there was the entrance to the University. Actually, this is not the main campus.



WX and I had lunch with another faculty member I knew - JJ. I asked JJ, who had been with the Asian Development Bank when I first met him, about good sources on land reform in Thailand. Which got WX to think about another faculty member he introduced me to after lunch. Dr. O, a Thai with a PhD from Syracuse. We ended up talking a long time and I never got to walk through the botanical gardens and the orchid garden as planned. J showed up after his exam and took me around to meet other professors and classmates. The students above were in a little lounge called the Thinking Corner.

And chocolate is the international thinking fuel of choice.

I met a whole group of students from all over - Burma, India, Thailand, Italy, Pakistan, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, China - and we went for dinner together at the same Indian resstaurant just off campus. So the pictures I forgot to take at lunch, I could take now.

The Singaporean in the orange shirt below went home with us. We picked up Kona and then walked down to this building to pick up his girlfriend. He works for HDB, Singapore's public housing department, so I learned a little more about the issues raised in the article I linked to earlier today.




The Public Utilities Board is in an environmentally prize winning building.