Ang Mo signing off, soon

Seemingly many Asian cultures have their own special term coined for foreigners often specifically targeting Westerners. Japanese have a racial epithet for outsiders called gaijin while in China it is laowai (or gweilo in Cantonese) whereas in Thailand it is farang. The Singaporean equivalent would be Ang Mo (红毛). While these terms may not have originated from derogatory nature, there is a pretty strong connotation of exclusiveness (ie. us vs. the outsiders) and depending on the context the term can also be used with intentionally offensive undertone.

Ang Mo literally means "red haired" and the etymology can be pretty easily guessed. The first usages of the term date back to 16th and 17th century in the Fujian province in China with Hokkien speakers (which is still the prevalent dialect in Singapore) and it was referring to the Portuguese and Dutch people most probably for apparent reasons.

This particular Ang Mo is about to let go his honorable title very soon. For the past 2 years I have been clearly in minority. According to the most recently published demographics I would belong to the ethnic group called Others, which represent only 3,3 percentage of the total population. For the record, I have not really had any issues whatsoever about belonging to the minority over here. Perhaps I do have a gnawing suspicion that my landlord did squeeze every last penny from the Ang Mo expat when reviewing what fixing needs to be done in the apartment before the hand over. But then again Chinese businessmen tend to have the penny squeezing reputation no matter the customer ethnicity.

Within a week I will be disappearing back into the majority. In the wake of World War II European countries shy away from tracking the ethnicity of their population like they do very transparently in Singapore. However I will be back in the 89,33 percentage of the people who speak Finnish as their mother tongue. The 3 other biggest language groups after Finnish are Swedish, Russian and Estonian (in that order), thus I am probably not far off when estimating that as a Caucasian I belong to the 97% of the population.

After all this time living in Singapore I would still proudly consider myself a proper Ang Mo rather than a true Singaporean. See what I mean by looking at this Wah Banana clip below:

Manjulah Singapura

Today marks the 49th birth day of Singapore. Many of the buildings - private and public alike - have been covered with red and white for the past few weeks to celebrate the occasion. Also many cars sport a little Singapore flag on the windows or colored pouches over rear view mirrors. In addition shops are heavily promoting Singapore t-shirts and related paraphernalia at this time. 

I actually find it rather charming this hype about a nation. The pleasant observation is that there is only a positive spin on the national pride from what I'm able to see.  Sadly nationalism has been somewhat smudged and owned by the right wing extremists in Finland and several other European countries. I wouldn't think of wearing a shirt with Finnish flag unless I intentionally wanted to risk being labeled as red neck neo-nazi. 

Big surprise for this year's birthday festivities was that it rained a little during the National Day Parade. From what I have heard they  actually seed the clouds to prevent rain on special days like NDP and formula one race day (!). Probably not something that you would see in Europe...

Finally cannot do much but to have a wry smile when reading the neverending bright eyed touting for the prime minister by the National news paper:

"The crowd's enthusiasm reached an all-time high with the arrival of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who received the loudest cheers from the audience. He arrived before Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long [current PM's father] . As the former prime minister took his seat, the audience gave him a standing ovation. - See more here"

But then again I have no doubt that that really took place earlier today. Singaporeans seem to be truly happy and proud of their nation and genuinely appreciate the work Lee family has done for this place over the past 49 years.

Fiddler on the MRT

I imagine I am stating the obvious here, but easily 80 % of my fellow commuters (me among them obviously) have their necks tilted while tapping away on their smart(ish) devices. I guess that is now the new norm everywhere, but it did strike my eye when having just relocated over here. Of course you had people fiddling with their equipment in buses and metros in Helsinki, but not even close to this amount of people across all age groups. This might have changed in the past 21+ months though. Remains to be seen.

The constant fiddling is not limited to killing boredom while commuting. I have seen couples spending a romantic evening in a posh restaurant with stunning views from the 70th floor and both of them are deeply buried in their own devices. I took the liberty of noticing with certain sad happiness, that at least one of them was busy bringing more money to the Finnish mobile app phenomenon, Supercell.

While on the topic of commuting: I am not typically fond of allowing my social media existence to be used to promote any commercial products, but this time I need to give praise to Bose QC20 headphones. I just bought a new set over the last weekend to get me prepared for my next upcoming travels. I have grown so dependant on active noise cancellation headphones in planes that I was forced to replace my previous headphones (AKG NC 495) which broke during my business trip to China a month ago. I gave the Bose an acid test of ambient noises of Singapore in the morning and honestly was blown away. This is by far the most effective noise cancellation I have ever heard of. Or not heard of!? I was walking in true bubble of silence getting immersed in Portishead potpourri through Spotify and pretty much hearing nothing else. It was magically surreal to see people, buses, cars, trains, but not hearing anything but Beth Gibbons voice over trip hop beats drilling into my head. I didn't even feel the urge to fiddle my phone to pass the time.

PS. So that marketers don't have a field day on how social media affects buying behaviours, I need to state that the sound quality of these in-ear headphones is not as great as big over the ear model that I used to have. Especially the low bass sound I find is lacking. However it's the noise cancellation that is FTW.

PS2. The selection of Portishead was inspired by the fact that they had just performed live the other day in a Finnish music festival in Ilosaari. Wish I had been there.

PS3. With absolutely no relation to fiddling mobile devices, killing ambient sounds or really anything at all, I need to share the weirdest dream in a while which I just remembered by all of a sudden. My old client had drawn a donkey's head (!) as a failed rating on my exam for religion class (?!). I had refused to answer correctly because of the appallingly denominational way the questions were posed.

AC acclimatization

I have made an observation that the fancier a venue (be it a hotel, shopping mall or taxi) the colder they have set their air conditioning. I have to wonder if that is some kind of intentional demonstration of level of luxury. I am writing this blog entry from a conference venue in a hotel on Orchard road and my fingertips are turning white because it is horribly cold inside.

People with glasses have to deal with the situation here where glasses get foggy when going from indoors to outdoors. This is exactly the other way around back in Finland during winter. In Finland it can be always warm and cozy inside the buildings throughout the year. It is actually pretty strange how some of the coldest conditions I have ever had to survive have been indoors in countries like Singapore, Japan and Italy.

One would imagine that as a Finn I would have centuries of adapting to cold weather built into my very DNA. That may be the case, but Finns have also centuries of practical experience on building efficient central heating systems and proper insulation for their homes, offices and venues. Every winter there will be cold weather hitting Tokyo and cool air creeping through their paper thin (sometimes literally) doors and windows. Then again Singaporeans just want to create the winter conditions on their own.

Art of Queuing

Long time no post. I guess that's the novelty value wearing off and complacency settling in. I am glad I did capture the early findings in the beginning as it starts to be harder and harder to spot any interesting peculiarities. However, this topic I just need to cover. 

Local newspaper ran an article mentioning that one of the most popular tourist attractions in Korea is opening up a venue in Singapore. I had actually heard about the Trick Eye Museum already before and I was thoroughly interested. I remember being blown away by an exhibition portraying paintings by Escher and playing other tricks on audience's perception. Ever since I have wanted to experience more of similar kind of art.

I expected that perhaps a few more might have seen the same story on the paper, but if we were to venture forth early enough on Saturday morning we should be OK, right? While it is still something very new, I expected the hordes would not have found the place yet.

So there I was with my 2 kids standing on a not too long of a queue to the ticket counter. I was wondering why there was two queues, but I decided obviously to choose the shorter one. Once it was my turn to purchase the tickets, the chap at the ticket counter told me matter-of-factly that the waiting time today is 5 to 6 hours. Please proceed to the end of the other queue. Which was outside. With a measly fan moving the hot and humid air around the queue.

I had to make sure I had heard properly. "Yes, 5 to 6 hours today. You may want to try some other day. It might be only 2 hours then". I stared at the guy in disbelief. Then I stared at my 3 year old who was already pretty anxious about the 20 minute wait so far and the heat. Without much hesitation I made a graceful exit from the queue number 1, bought my kids a soda and went back to the taxi stand we just had came from.

Queuing truly seems to be a national past time in Singapore (along with eating, talking about food and spending time in the malls). If there are two similar stalls in a hawker center, the localites seemingly tend to patronize the one with longer queues. I assume the queuers expect they are serving better food since so many other people are already patiently waiting. Something that I still have hard time grasping are the queues of adults waiting for some little cheap plastic toys as part of the kids meal in some fast food chains ("This week only, you can have a purple Hello Kitty which has a tiara! Yay"). It is a common sight that the restaurants list outside which toys are already gone and what can be still purchased. Back in the 5 to 6 hour queue in front of the Museum there were number of families with little ones in prams probably there to get some good exposure and training in proper queuing behaviour.


PS. Finland's about to enter official Summer season and pretty much a period of closure of the full nation for the next ~2 months starting from Mid-Summer festivities this weekend. I just got pinged that it's right now snowing (!) at least in Central Finland. As you can expect, not too many queues in Finland. At least outside. Except always when waiting for a taxi after one of the pre-Christmas parties in the middle of coldest Winter.

One among many

I raised an observation regarding the lack of people on the streets when I visited US briefly last year. That really would not be the case in the most densely populated country in the world. Here you are never alone.

Take a look at a short video clip I put together from various places like Clarke Quay, Vivo City and Expo MRT station:

The music on the video is by Amerigo Gazaway and his excellent Otis Redding flavoured remix of Big Boi's Shutterbug (aptly titled for a purpose of amateur video clips). Song is available from bandcamp.

Happy 48th Birthday Singapore!

August 9th marks the National Day of Singapore. Contrary to what I had previously thought, Singapore gained independence through separating from Malaysia in 1965 and not from under British Crown. To a great extend autonomous Singapore had intentionally merged with Malaysia already few years prior to that and thus ending being a part of the British Commonwealth.

A big thing on the National Day is apparently the National Day Parade which is running a particular theme for each year. This year's theme is Many stories... One Singapore. This particular story shown on the video took me by surprise.

 

Hectic big city life

It is same in all big cities, I presume. City life just tends to be more hectic and fast paced than in more rural areas. According to my observations people actually seem to walk faster and check the time more often in cities than in smaller towns. People are rushing for public transportation even though it is running on few minute intervals as opposed to running once every half an hour or so. I wonder what is actually the cause and what is the effect. I bet that there is plenty of studies done on the topic.

You have 5 seconds to comply.

At least one thing that is increasing the feeling of hecticity (that's not really a word, is it, but interestingly word "city" is embedded in there) is displaying the seconds left for pedestrians to cross a street. In Singapore there are ridiculously few seconds offered to cross a street -- even one with multiple lanes. Just seeing the seconds diminish in front of your eyes forces you to fasten your stride. The clock starts ticking probably at 12 seconds meaning that unless you are there already waiting to cross the street, the chance is that you will not make it safely across in time. And this is coming from somewhat fit and somewhat still young (!?) individual. The kiasu mentality of people behind the wheel doesn't really respect pedestrians. I have no clue on how senior citizens or those disabled can cross the street in sub 10 seconds time...

But actually now I do! I just spotted this little curiosity (see picture below) close to a pedestrian crossing near a medical facility. You just need to flash your senior citizen smartcard to the street light in order to add few more extra personal seconds for safe crossing. How innovative is that?

 

ps. Jaywalking is naturally yet another crime in Singapore and offender could at least theoretically face punishment of up to 3 months in jail! Yes, you read correctly. For crossing a street.

Gift redemption process

Obnoxiously loud. That's how I would characterize my new vacuum cleaner. I got the little beast as a gift for subscribing to local newspaper (appropriately titled The Straits Times in a country which still considers homosexuality illegal). It seems to be very common over here to bundle all kinds of unrelated gifts or add-ons to a product or a service. And it seems to be working as an advertisement tactics as it is attracting the crowds. It took me more than 2 months to receive my vacuum cleaner due to "unforeseen interest in this particular gift".

So far I have also received a camera for signing up for a mobile subscription and won years worth of ice cream from a Hobbit movie contest (Yei!). The similarity between all of these gifts has been that there is more or less same redemption scheme behind them. With the received redemption letter I need to find my way to typically some far away (as much of a far away places as there can be on this small island) redemption center between 9-5 on Monday through Friday. In one case it was 2 tiered redemption sending me from one industrial area to another. The vacuum cleaner was luckily available from the city but from a 3rd party company that seems to be providing only these gift redemptions for other companies. They had a stack of the vacuum cleaners and various other weird stuff behind the counters.

I wonder if they have intentionally made it hard to redeem these gifts -- I mean, why couldn't they just send them over through regular mail -- to decrease the number of people actually receiving the gifts. For corporations it would be a minimal save, but save none the less. Then again there are stingy individuals like me running half the city after El Cheapo vacuum cleaner. Furthermore, I just recently invested in not exactly a cheapo pair of noise cancelling headphones, so I can have them cancelling out all the infernal racket the machine is making while cleaning the floors from all gecko droppings.