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My camera has returned from the shop.  It seems to be working fine, but I’m still a terrible photographer.

That beautiful garden (well lit, though I am not) is outside the apartment house that my former housemate Scott just moved into.  The building is called ‘Futura’, written on a big plaque outside in 80’s-style computerese.  And, as you can see, the place looks on the outside quite a bit like someplace Billy Dee Williams would hang out.

The inside of the apartment is deluxe in many peculiar ways.  Giant rooms with low ceilings, private elevator (cylindrical, of course), 270-degree picture window, full-time staff of 2, etc.

(That vase of flowers is meant to visually represent ‘full-time household staff’.)

I was briefly jealous of Scott for moving into such a swanky and ridiculous place until I heard his landlady bark at the help for not having served us drinks, at which point I was immensely relieved that I would be leaving shortly.  (And, for the record, the cook had offered us drinks, and we’d refused, and she’d set out a pitcher for us anyway just in case.  As if being rude to the servants wasn’t bad enough.)

Scott’s new roommates are a headhunter who moonlights as a life coach and motivational speaker (she’s the one who hassled the cook), her teenage TV-actress daughter, and a 20-something guy who works as a management consultant.  This show is totally going to write itself.

(That building is not Futura, but a different brand-new tower under construction up the street.  This photo is meant to visually represent “Sci-fi architecture is still in fashion in Singapore.”)

This video played on the train constantly when I was here last year.  Alas, the YouTube clip cuts off before the bit where the woman starts describing the culprit over the intercom.  Something about her accent still sticks in my head.  “The bag is heavy and bulky.  The man is wearing a checked shirt, black pants, and a black cap.”

Well, today I wore my hat on the MRT and was immediately pulled aside by security for a bag check.  I guess I fit the profile.

The above video still plays in the train stations now and then, but it’s been replaced at the top of the rotation by a video about my duty to spend 10 minutes each day fighting dengue.  Mercifully, the companion piece to the terror-themed video no longer runs.  It’s the one where the lady on the train isn’t vigilant, and everybody dies.

My camera is in the shop, after only two weeks of proper functioning.  On the plus side, the service center here is happy to honor my Japanese warranty — but, on the minus side they require a ‘Warranty Card’ which I either never got or immediately threw away.

My GPS led me on a big wild-goose chase in search of the camera shop.  I was looking for 3791 Jalan Bukit Merah, so I took a train to the general area but immediately discovered that I was in the ‘120’ block of Bukit Merah.  So, I switched on the GPS and it directed me far, far down the road.  After a couple of miles of walking and bussing I wound up at the intersection that the GPS was pointing at, which turned out to be the ‘110’ block of Bukit Merah.

So, in defeat, I flagged a cab, and tried to tell him where I was going — I kept saying ‘E Center’ and the cab driver said ‘B Center?’ and we went back and forth and finally I held up my PDA with the address on it and he said, “I can’t see, so you’ll have to shout it out,” and pulled into traffic.

He drove pretty well, for a blind guy.  Dropped me off at ECenter, 3791 Jalan Bukit Merah, which was next door to 121 Jalan Bukit Merah, where I’d started out.  Hi-larious.

But, anyway, on my wild goose chase I was compelled to ride a double-decker bus, and that reminded me of how great they are.  So just now (an hour or so ago) I hopped on another one at random, figuring that it would eventually terminate at a train station.  The above photo is me enjoying the panoramic view from the front, top row of the bus — very nice for sight-seeing and, as a bonus, the onboard TVs are turned off tonight.

This is turning into quite a long tour — so far I’ve seen a whole lot of the Central Seafood Processing Center, and a nearly endless supply of tower cranes, and for a moment there we were heading towards the causeway to Jurong Island which is this sort of man-made industrial super-villain lair which does not permit entry by normal humans, so that gave me a bit of a scare.  Oh!  And now I’m back in a public housing district, so that seems good.

The plaque at the art gallery explains that this is a statue of Chairman Mao directing morning calisthenics — apparently an important part of growing up in China for the artist.  Did the chairman really direct them himself?  Surely it’s metaphor.

Anyway, a few hours later I came across an after-work, open-air aerobics class going on downtown.

And in between I ate lunch in the most sanitary, efficiently-run restaurant I’ve ever seen.  A branch of a Taiwanese chain, apparently.  There must’ve been about 20 dumpling and noodle makers all going at once, and even some of the servers wore those weird surgical masks.

The other guy renting a room in my apartment moved here from Japan on a whim because he heard that the economy was doing well in Singapore.  He had a full-time job three days after arriving.

The population of singapore is a bit less that 5,000,000 people.  So, that headline gives us an annual job-growth rate of 4.6% per year.  During the US boom known as ‘The Clinton Years’, job growth was about 2.4% per year.

The beach here is not very crowded.  But the water — very crowded!

After wandering around Yishun a bit I rode back towards home and then jumped off the train when it rolled past a park and reservoir that looked nice.

The train was going very fast, though, so I wound up being quite far from the park by the time I got off.  In an attempt to make a short-cut I walked through a gate and down a road that was fenced on both sides, with kind of an orchard/park on one side and jungle on the other.

What was behind the fence?  Barracks?  Private ruling-class estates?  It was mysterious.  The road was pretty much empty.

Turns out that on the left side, at least, the fences were protecting a prawn farm.  Or, possibly, protecting me from the prawns.

I spent a while this week thinking that I would change apartments on the 1st.  I’ve pretty much given up on that idea — I seem to’ve missed the narrow window for short-term rentals.  But, in the meantime, I’ve been checking out various neighborhoods here, inspired by listings in the want-ads.

A very high percentage of the roommate ads I see are for places in ‘Yishun’ (I’m not sure if that counts as a town or a neighborhood) so I rode the train out there.  It turns out to be where more-or-less everyone must live — giant public housing  buildings going on for many blocks in every direction.

Public Housing is funny here.  It’s almost all ownership-based (what we’d call ‘condos’ at home) and seems to be entirely safe and well maintained.  Plenty of the buildings have retail, daycare, and schools on the first floor.

In a typically proactive move, the government here seems to’ve decided to provide decent housing to all of its citizens back in the 60’s and them instantly done so.  (To someone raised during the Reagan years, this sounds like hubris.  But in Singapore it’s just business-as-usual.)  So architecturally everything looks like the worst of the US ghetto towers, even down to the crack-epidemic-invoking names:

The buildings in Yishun were largely open on the first floor.  This is great for walkability — but as I strolled around, my American-city-trained instincts screamed that I should turn back, that I was walking straight into either a drug market or a mugger’s ambush.  Of course, the fact that everything smelled strongly of baking bread helped to ease that a bit.

And then there’s the landscaping.  All and all, it’s pretty much like the first reel of the Wizard of Oz, except that instead of picking up a Kansas farmhouse the tornado has picked up Cedar Towers.  And instead of dropping them in Oz, it dropped them in the middle of the Waikiki Hilton Village.

There’s a really good roti prata shop between the place where I’m staying and the subway station — I’ve had breakfast there several times.  There’s a giant apartment tower going up between me and it, so it gets harder and harder to get there — had to duck around a lot of equipment and risk walking under a tower crane on my last visit.

This morning as I was eating a bunch of guys sat down at the table next to me and clustered around a cell phone.  After a minute or two I heard distinctive music playing — they noticed my interest and waved me over.  While waiting for their food they were all watching a Wile E. Coyote cartoon on the 2-inch screen.

After a few minutes, the shop manager stopped working, lit a cigarette, and crouched down by the phone so that he could watch too.  Business ground to a halt for three or four minutes.

As you can see, the built-in keyboard on my laptop has some problems.  It intermittently loses the ability to type spaces, the arrow and ‘tab’ keys occasionally shut off, and (most important for an inaccurate typer like me) the ‘delete’ key seldom works.

Rather than turn my laptop over to a repair crew for a week, I bought a tiny external bluetooth keyboard.  It has the additional advantage of not leaving burnmarks on my knees when I work for an extended time on a couch — but, the jury’s still out about how it will affect my tendonitis.

I’ll probably replace the built-in keyboard myself just as soon as I can convince someone to sell me one.  Having opened the case on my laptop several times in the last few weeks (and viewed the horrors inside) I feel like an expert.

Meanwhile, my daybag gets heavier and heavier with all the gadgets I’m accumulating.  I’m worried that the shopping culture here has infected me.