Tuesday 30 September 2014

All good things...(reprise)

(meta comment: Blogger ended up eating my original blog entry that I wrote at Changi airport with the very blood of my heart. This text is obviously but a shadow of the sheer brilliance of the original entry. Luckily SwiftKey has saved some full sentences as long as I remember the beginnings.)

My Earthly goods are currently traveling somewhere in middle of the Indian Ocean and I'm sitting one final time at Changi airport terminal 1 waiting for the gate to open for boarding. During the past two weeks of packing, shipping, fixing, cleaning, farewelling and panicky tennis lessons I have kept asking myself the same question over and over again. Why on earth would I of my free will (or anybody else for that matter) want to go back to live in a country which is cold and gloomy 6 months a year? It comes as no surprise to the avid readers of this blog that I have utterly enjoyed living in this little red dot under the equator.

Every time I ponder upon this question I end up concluding two best reasons ever: One reason is 8 years old and the other one is 3 at the moment. I could have easily extended my Singapore adventure, but the family opted going back as per the original 2 year plan. I would never want to miss a single day of the life of my wonderful kids growing up and thus the decision making was painless in the end.

Even though the feeling of letting go weighs so very heavily on my shoulders right now, I was told that it's good to leave when you are still having fun. At least it makes me so much more anxious to be planning for another similar excursion in the future.
Ended up hurting my back pretty bad as I took a little tumble when playing for one more time in the outdoor courts under the sun. Also ended up hitting my own nose with that new Babolat racket sticking from my back bag. So perhaps it is time for me to go back.

Farewell to Farewells

I truly feel that I have been a valued member of the work community. Today marked the final set of  farewell parties. Thus the total breakdown of various farewell parties is as follows:
  • One more formal farewell event with cake and cards and everything
  • Two after work beer events
  • Two separate dinners arranged by different sets of colleagues
  • Three separate farewell lunches once again with separate colleagues both within and outside my own department
  • Two ad hoc farewell coffee sessions 
  • One farewell ice cream session

Now, if for whatever reason I was not allowed to leave the country tonight at the airport (bear in mind that I had to return my Employment Pass back to Ministry of Manpower earlier today and officially I'm no more a legal alien),  I would not dare to show my face in the office tomorrow. I would probably just hide somewhere, change my instant messenger location to Finland and work from 2 PM to 10 pm just to fool everybody.

UPDATE: I did actually also throw so called house-colding party for few selected colleagues to help me get rid of beer and souvenir vodka, which my company did not agree to ship in a container for some reason.

Thursday 25 September 2014

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:

Monday 15 September 2014

Nerd at 25 meters below sea level

Honestly I need to admit being in a bit of a panic mode to try to see every last thing there is to offer in this region. I just returned from a diving trip to Philippines with a group of friends this time investing a proper full week rather than a hasty weekend getaway.

Unfortunately not my picture,
but pretty much the same experience
(free pic from EzineMark.com)
There are absolutely stunning dive sites in the Philippines. I visited two diving locations in the Visayas region (access through Cebu city): Balicasag island off Bohol and four different sites around Apo island. There were heaps of coral, both soft and hard, and bustling marine life in both locations. I saw massive schools of Jack Fish swirling in true National-Geographic-photo manner. I had also the pleasure of spotting my first sea snakes (Banded Sea Snakes are apparently 3 times more poisonous than Cobras), first Scorpion Fish (both leaf and with out leaf varieties), first Mantis Shrimp among number of old acquaintances such as turtles, Parrot Fish, Snappers, Garden Eels, Groupers, Flounders, Nudibranches and so forth. Another scuba related first-time-evers were diving in stronger currents, diving deeper then ever before, diving away from the reefs into the blue to seek out the big schools of big fish and diving with a group of closest friends. Still no sharks though... 

Roof of our little room, which is directly above the dive shop
and literally 3 minutes away from the Chapel reef
Special mention goes out to Apo island, which is somewhat remote destination off the bigger island of Negros. You need to travel with a medium sized catamaran from miniscule Malatapay village to an island with limited electricity (true test on how can nerd survive without wifi!) and pretty basic accommodation options but with truly mindblowing reefs starting just directly off the shore. Absolutely very picturesque location. I felt truly reluctant to ascent from my final dive into the Visayan Sea. I would have wanted to stay underneath in the magical otherworldly depths until I would have been forced to surface. On Apo we were pretty much the only customers on the whole island due to the rainy season, which didn't bother us during our back to back dives at all. We had truly wonderful weather the whole time.

However when starting our homewards journey on Saturday morning, we were greeted by dark skies, howling winds and heavy rain. The sea next to our hotel was so ruff that there was no way of climbing into any boats from there. We started to wonder whether it is safe to venture out to the sea at all and if we are going to miss our flight back home. We were suggested to hike across the island over two hills to go and ask the boat captain himself on if there is any way off the island. Getting to the other side fully soaked we noticed that the sea was indeed calmer on the east shore due to coverage provided by the island itself. However the captain told us matter-of-factly that there is typhoon Luis ranked at Signal 1 (* running rampart on the island of Negroes and it might continue for several days. To our surprise the captain still continued loading the boat and shoving us one by one into a small paddle boat to get into the same catamaran we crossed the 45 min distance on few days before. The sea was pretty ruff indeed, but not overly scary. The only half scary thing was the captain wearing an old scuba mask and laughing maniacally while driving the group of tourists into the eye of the typhoon and potentially to their wet graves. But instead of a grave, we reached the opposite shore safely. Royally soaked, but safely.

*) Googled Typhoon signaling system afterwards and Signal 1 it is actually the lowest level of warning for tropical storms and typhoons. Sounds scary enough though especially after the sad events in 2013.