Category: Singapore

I am American. I moved to Singapore in October 2008. Here’s a post with some general information about Singapore.

The Three Circles of English edited by Edwin Thumboo

The Three Circles of English is a collection of conference papers published in Singapore on 2001.

The title refers to the varieties of English in the inner circle, outer circle and expanding circle of the “three circles” model invented by Braj Kachru.

I’m glad I read this book, though parts of it were eye-stabbingly inarticulate and other parts contained opinions that went all the way through defensive and out the other side…

I now have more sympathy for people who feel that although they have grown up speaking English, they can never really achieve a respectable level of English, simply because they weren’t born and educated in places where the local variety of English is automatically respected. I mean, how unfair is that? Especially since all our enshrined standards are nothing but historical accidents. I’m not saying that we don’t need standards, or even, necessarily, that they should change or multiply, just that it stinks if you’re on the receiving end of one, so to speak, through no fault of your own.

For a list of the papers and what I found interesting about them, keep reading. (TL;DR? Try this summary instead.)

Continue reading The Three Circles of English edited by Edwin Thumboo

National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens

The National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens is my favorite local tourist attraction. It’s centrally located but feels like a universe apart from the skyscrapers and shopping malls.

Below are 23 photos from my latest visit.

Continue reading National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens

Just another Ferrari

In part because those living in Singapore have to bid for a ten-year “Certificate of Entitlement” that can cost thousands of dollars even before buying a car, the cars tend to be pretty fancy. (If the COE costs $10,000, you’re not going to buy a car worth $20,000, are you? You’re going to buy an expensive one or skip out and rely on public transit instead.)

There are some people with serious money living in Sinagpore. In addition, showing off your money is not necessarily considered to be in poor taste here. I get the impression that prosperity in the form of wealth is not a shameful thing to wish for, or to achieve, in Chinese culture. This especially seems to be the case during Chinese New Year, when people put up decorations featuring traditional forms of money.

I’ve seen more fancy cars in Singapore in the last seven years than I ever thought I’d see in a lifetime. Such as, for example, this one, chillin’ in front of Orchard Parade Hotel.

ferrari-front

Once, I saw a car like this (another a red Ferrari) parked in Chinatown on the street where we used to live. It was parallel parked just in front of a backpacker hostel. There’s a combination you don’t see every day: $30 lodgings and a $1,000,000 car within a few feet of each other.

What I don’t understand, aside from how people can ever trust themselves to drive such expensive machines, is why all new cars, not just sports cars, have angry eyebrows. All new cars look mean.

I think it’s more noticeable in Singapore than in other parts of the world because cars here live short lives. Turnover is high. There have been at least three different generations of Toyota taxis in the last 7 years. And the new ones look mean.

When we arrived, there were some really boxy taxis. Then there were some slightly frowny ones. And now they’re full-on mean. See?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_Singapore

Haw Par Villa

Since moving to Singapore and reading about Haw Par Villa in the Singapore Lonely Planet Guide, we’ve always been intending to go. It took us more than seven years, but we finally paid it a visit.

It’s known for the Ten Courts of Hell attraction, a graphic depiction of a quasi-Buddhist Chinese afterlife of judgment, punishment and subsequent reincarnation.

The park, whose attractions are in states of repair that vary from recently repainted to cordoned off, has itself died and been reborn several times. It was fairly quiet but not completely empty when we went.

The park parts of the park are kinda nice if you can get over the creepy didactic sculptures, but I’m not eager to go back anytime soon.

Learn More about Haw Par Villa

Below are 25 photos.

Continue reading Haw Par Villa

National University of Stairs

clementi-woods-steps
at Clementi Woods Park

“Walk 10,000 steps a day! Here are 70 steps to get you started! Have some scorching Singapore sunshine and a healthy dose of humidity, too! Oh, you’re carrying groceries? Fantastic! You can build arm and leg muscles at the same time!”

I live at Kent Vale at NUS. Since the word ‘vale’ means ‘valley’, and ‘NUS’ obviously stands for National University of Stairs, sometimes life seems like an uphill battle.

The “mystery” of the Cold Storage logo is solved.

You know the logo of the Cold Storage grocery chain? No? It looks like this:

cold-storage-logo

I always assumed that green thing was an olive. In fact, I would have SWORN it was an olive. You could have won money from me on this. Now you’ve missed your chance.

Sometime within the past week or so, I asked my husband what he thought it was, and he said it was an apple. The penny dropped. An apple with a leaf makes so much more sense than an olive with a flame-shaped pimento…

I visited the Cold Storage website, and found this giant green-apple/red-leaf banner. So my husband’s eminently reasonable theory was confirmed.

I don’t understand why the leaf is red and the apple is green, because typically it’s the other way around, and it’s the weirdest-looking stylized apple I’ve ever seen, but an apple is undeniably what it is.

Schindler Lifts

This is the sign in the lift at Huber’s Butchery and Bistro. (In Singapore, where elevators are almost universally called ‘lifts’ because that’s normal in British English.)

It’s a laugh-inducing shock when you see a sign saying “Schindler Lifts” for the first time, since what immediately springs to mind is Schindler’s List, the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie about a German who saved the lives of over 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

You brain goes: “Hey! That’s almost a famous movie title! Did they do that on purpose? Are they making a joke about the Holoc—Aw, it’s probably just a normal family name in Europe and totally a coincidence.” Which it is. But then you take out your smartphone and take a photo anyway.

Then you realize that hundreds of people on the internet have already done exactly the same thing.

And then you think, so what? It’s all been done. That doesn’t mean nothing is worth doing.

Randall has the right idea in this webcomic.

There will always be happy opportunities to share things with people who don’t know what you know, especially if you spend time around small children. Practically everything is new to them! That’s one of the joys of teaching.