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.

Road to recovery

Finally there is light at the end of the tunnel. Waves of headache and fever have started to get less severe in terms of both ferocity and frequency. On Tuesday out of a sudden this feeling of having my brain clogged up was lifted and I was able to think straight for the first time in weeks. Feels pretty good.

Once again a time of doing a bit of a comparison between the two countries. Over here I had few colleagues visiting me at the hospital, more than a few colleagues came to check up on me at my home once I was discharged from the hospital, a few of them send me a bouquet of flowers and fresh fruit and the rest have been calling and texting me through out my recovery period offering to help in any which way they can. While still in hospital I also noticed that the other patients basically had visitors throughout the visiting period from 9 AM to 9 PM.

Flashback to few years back when I had to be hospitalized back in Finland. The only call from a colleague was that from an executive who asked for number of chores which I was supposedly able to fulfill while lying on the hospital bed. Furthermore, interestingly the word "Colleague" translates into "Work Friend" in Finnish. Honestly, I tend to prefer the friendlier approach over here more.

Finally, if do you see my new arch nemesis Aedes Aegypti (pictured below for easier recognition) give her (it is apparently only the females of this particular species who are after my succulent blood) a good smack on the back with greetings from me. Then again my grand tour of South East Asia would not have been complete without contracting a tropical disease.

I clearly had too much time on my hand while at the hospital. 

Welcome to tropics

Having enjoyed 10 consecutive days of unrelenting headache, I finally gave in and went to see a doctor. There were the typical root cause expectations related to bad ergonomics and so forth, but the doc did take me seriously as one shouldn't apparently suffer from headache for so long. The doctor herself took blood tests (way convenient) and send me to bed with muscle relaxants for 2 days on MC (medical certificate).

Still the headache wasn't unbearable, just continuous discomfort. So I was merrily working on my laptop at home when the doctor called in the results. My platelets (aka trombocytes) had plummeted, so I had to see another doctor immediately. Sooner than I realized I was being admitted into hospital with positive results for dengue fever.

I never learned to know the sucker who stung me (later learned that it was one Aedes Aegypti). In Finland mosquitoes make this infernal whine just before they start to feast on your blood. And they don't carry any diseases. Well I guess this is part of living in the tropics.

So good possibility (and way too much time to kill while resting on a hospital bed) to make some comparisons on the hospital care between these two countries.

I'm now in a private hospital through my insurance. It feels quite similar to Finnish public sector hospital. The facilities are considerably newer though. One thing I have noticed is the amount of paperwork I need to review and sign. All kinds of terms and conditions and getaway clauses I guess. Admittedly I didn't read every paper when worrying about dengue in the admissions.

I do feel like getting a quality care from a Burmese nurse (among others)  and Edinburgh schooled Sikh doctor. This particular doctor mentioned that some of my Finnish hospital procedures sound like they were done here 30 years ago. And there I was expecting Finnish level of health care being among the best in the world. I still do, but so seems Singaporean equivalent as well.

NP: Amerigo Gazaway's DJ-set from South by Southwest (SXSW) event couple of weeks ago.

PS. I'll proofread, add links, tags and geo location once back slouching over my laptop in as unergonomical position as before

Close encounters with local wild life

I started getting pressure on expediting my posting frequency, thus finally here's the blog post concerning the local fauna. Today we happen to have a day off from work in the middle of the week to celebrate Deepavali or festival of lights. This is one of the benefits of living in a society which embraces multiple religions (in October we had Hari Raya Haji and next month obviously Christmas -- no need for wiki link for that one). So I have had plenty of time to do important things like visiting local IMAX theater, earn additional FourSquare badges (lvl 2 mall rat & trainspotter) and also documenting the my four+ legged room mates.

The apartment I have rented is located on the 2nd floor of a 22 storey building. During the first nights I realized that in addition to having some privacy from the nearby palm trees there is another added benefit from living near to the ground which is having the chance of meeting local wild life right here in the convenient confinements of my own home.

The occasional chirping sound I bestowed originally on some small crickets. Though I wondered how come it really sounds as if the chirping is coming from within the apartment and not outside. This jungle noise I put up with first couple of nights. Probably on the third night when I was just about to go to sleep I found the actual culprit. It was not a cricket but a translucent lizard which had found its way under my pillow! We looked at each other into the eyes for second and then she wiggled off the way lizards tend to slither quickly.

I left my bedroom and started to wonder what are people supposed to do with lizards crawling on their bed. Gathering courage I got myself a set of paper towels and decided to capture the little feller and show her (I expect it to be a she) out through the way of balcony. Quite quickly I realized that it is not likely that I'll capture her easily. Chirpy (as I dubbed her) is rather quick and can access places where me & my paper towel armament cannot reach. Also I started to wonder whether I could really hold the thing in the paper towel even if I captured her. She ran into my bathroom and decided to close the door behind her and leave it be for that particular night.

Through out the night I could hear Chirpy singing away in the locked bathroom (since then I have come to realize that doors don't really hold lizards as they can fit through underneath the door). In the morning I hesitantly went into the bathroom to take a shower. I turned on the light and try to pinpoint my new room mate using mirrors on the walls. And there she was. Slithered merrily across the walls as I had to enter shower. 

Later in the office the localites taught me that house geckos are very much part of living on the equator. These guys have actually been here way before humans so it's really us on their turf. Also I learned that geckos eat ants and spiders and thus are rather helpful than actual pests. Which there are also in these parts of the world: with the first cockroach sighting I decided not to adhere to live and let live/you were here first -philosophy, but bought an effective pest trap. Also since then I have seen my share of rats in the vicinity of the house (not inside luckily), big fat snails and during the dusk there are number of fruit bats flying over any occasional swimming pool user. I prefer not to meet any of the 108 species of snakes living in Singapore, like this one captured at a close by metro station.

 As a matter of fact I just heard the familiar "tsirp, tsirp, tsirp" sound coming from behind the nearby curtains. It must be Chirpy joining me for evening snack!

 

Chirpy AKA Sirkku