I am American. I moved to Singapore in October 2008. Here’s a post with some general information about Singapore.
Doesn’t this just make you want to laugh? I mean, it really looks like those signs are purposely standing there in a clump talking to each other, right? And they’ve been doing that for weeks!
What do you think they might be talking about???
Remember how I failed to identify the botanical object in the Cold Storage Logo as an apple?
Yeah. Well, here’s another object I misidentified.
I more or less assumed it was a postmodern take on the aerodynamic bicycle helmet. Look at this actual bicycle helmet and tell me you don’t see the resemblance.
But no, that giant sculpture by the escalator is a nutmeg seed. Nutmeg. And apparently the red stuff is called mace.
Who knew? I mean, in my experience, nutmeg usually looks like this:
Well, maybe people who grew up in this part of the world would be more likely to recognize nutmeg than I would, since the spice islands of Indonesia are not too far from here. If not, the fact that nutmeg trees are local at least explains this particular art installation at Orchard Road.
Learn something new every day.
I walked down Orchard Road and took photos when I got to a bit of sidewalk that featured matching repeating pairs of these seven tropical fruits.
Did you think that first one was a durian because of the texture and because durians are so famous in Singapore? That bean shape seems wrong for a durian, though, as do the attached leaves. I’m betting it’s actually a mango.
The pineapple has leaves on both ends, even though canonical representations only have leaves at the top, but let’s assume this is realistic. In fact, some pineapples are reddish on the outside like the paper ones people hang up during Chinese New Year!
I have eaten all of these, though I may never have peeled a rambutan myself. (I like to think of rambutans as velcro fruit.) They are internally similar to lychees and longans, which I also like.
I think the mangosteens are the strangest of these seven.
I love hand-carved traditional signs like the one over Ah Chew Desserts on Liang Seah Street.
And the desserts themselves are nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah, okay, so I’m not the first one to make that joke. But give me some credit… I’m pretty sure I thought of it all by myself.
Just like Schindler Lifts.
The word ‘alight’ didn’t used to really be part of my vocabulary, probably because in the US we had a car and we drove ourselves everywhere we couldn’t walk or fly. In Singapore we use buses, trains and taxis to get around. So now I hear automated announcements that say something like:
The next stop is XXX interchange. Passengers traveling to YYY, please alight at the next station.
Please allow passengers to alight before boarding.
That’s all very well and good. I have nothing against the verb ‘alight’. I don’t think there’s necessarily a better word to use, if you want an expression more formal than ‘get off (or out of) the vehicle’.
No, what amuses me is when ‘alight’ is used transitively to mean ‘drop someone off’. Or when someone means ‘drop you off’ and only says ‘drop you’.
May I alight you here?
May I drop you here?
I don’t think it’s just taxi drivers who use ‘drop’ to mean ‘drop off’, though. I think non-Singaporean native English speakers say that too, don’t we?
This is language evolution in progress. Why shouldn’t any verb be able to take an object? Why shouldn’t we just kill off—I mean, um, kill—all those pesky phrasal verbs? Maybe this is the future.
I was intending to try to buy a bench, display shelves and maybe some jeans. Instead I wound up buying 17 books.
I accidentally bought two copies of The Craft of Research. I think I would have noticed if I hadn’t been rushed out of the store at closing time. I think I spent two hours looking at books, and still only had time to look at maybe 75% of what they had.
I was doing so well chewing through the cheap books I bought the last time I got ambushed by a sale. Now I’ve got a whole new batch. Half of them are reference books, but it’s still hundreds of pages added to the stack. An endless stack of which I expect never to see the bottom… I still have but have never read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Arthur story, The Mists of Avalon, which was given to me as a birthday present when I turned 16.
I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to than used books.
Broken idiom alert. This sign at the National Skin Centre pharmacy says:
CAUTION!
Tripping Hazard.
Mind Your Steps!
I think in the US we’d be more likely to say “watch your step” rather than “mind your step”, but pluralizing ‘step’ would be wrong in either case.
Sure, it’s logical that you’d want to be careful over the course of many steps, but conventionally, that’s not what we say.
I think we use the singular noun because this ‘step’ really means ‘manner of walking’. Here are some examples that showcase this singular sense of ‘step’.
The job promotion put a spring in his step.
The dancer has a graceful and lovely step.
The thief listened for the confident step of the policeman.
There is room for confusion because ‘step’ more often means ‘footstep’, and footsteps are often potentially plural, even when they are not syntactically plural.
The craftsman hoped his son would follow in his (foot)steps.
The sound of (foot)steps faded away down the hall.
Every (foot)step brought her closer to her goal.
Now that I think about it, the noun ‘stride’ has a similar duality: the singular noun means a manner of walking and the plural noun is used to refer to a series of individual movements.
I think there’s also pressure to pluralize ‘step’ coming from the common use of ‘steps’ to mean ‘stairs’.
The spilled water cascaded down the steps.
Anyway, the upshot is that the warning to “watch your step” or “mind your step” means “pay attention to your manner of walking”, not “pay attention to each of your footsteps”.
When I spotted this Korean drink called baekseju (百歲酒) on the menu at the very excellent and formerly close to my house Jang Won Korean Restaurant, I thought it might be a version of the famous Chinese alcohol called , which is sometimes called ‘white wine’—though not by anybody who’s ever had any.
Nope. The Chinese word
Silly ang moh, those are obviously two totally different words.
Wait, hang on, that text on the Korean menu looks, um, rather similar to what’s currently on Wikipedia…
I didn’t photograph the whole menu page, though, so it’s not clear whether those prices are subjected to service charge and tax.
That’s New Bridge Road at Cross Street, the focal point of Singapore’s annual Chinese New Year celebration.
This is South Bridge Road at Cross Street. We used to live less than a block from here, on Mosque Street. You can just see a bit of the green entrance to the Mosque on the right.
Note the new tower going up in the background in Tanjong Pagar. That red circle tower (the PS 100 Green Tower) and the dark one next to it (Carlton City Hotel) weren’t there in 2011. In fact, I used to walk straight through the empty lot that is now the PS 100 to get to work.
It’s not for nothing that people joke about Singapore’s national bird being the construction crane.
