Look at those TEUs man!

Went for my favourite evening stroll the other evening. Down through our local park, along the connector path besids the stream and in to West Coast Park, ending up on the water front just as the sun was beginning to set. Beautiful, as always. The container terminal was busy with a Maersk container ship busy unloading (pictures below - I am prepared to admit that an Iphone is not the ideal camera for twilight shots, maybe one day I will try my hand at photography again). Can you believe that they can cram 15,000 TEUs on the biggest container ships (TEU = Twenty ft Equivalent Unit). I can't. Admittedly the container ship in the picture is not Emma Maersk or one of her 400m whopper sister ships. According to the Maersk timetable it must be Maersk Jorong, a puny rubber dinghy a mere 220 m long with a TEU capacity of 2824 (LOL everyone). Amazing what doubling the length does for capacity.
Anyway, it is fantastic to be able to walk down to the harbour area. On this particular occasion there was a large RoRo vessel setting sail, another one steaming away in the distance, Maersk Jorong busy load/unloading, lots of oil rigs under construction lit up and looking like Christmas decorations, and Jurong Island lit up in the background, with flares flaming up every now and then. All this is available every evening every day of the year for those prepared to go for a 20 min stroll. Not bad!

Back from Borneo

Back from Borneo, it seems like ages ago already. As usual, my intentions to keep my blog up-to-date have not materialized. In Sarawak I had the excuse of not having access to Internet. Since then, it has been the old, old story of too much else to do...
Anyway, Borneo was fantastic, and very different from Peninsular (or West) Malaysia. The Malay population is much less dominant, so Sarawak feels less Muslim than W Malaysia. There is a lot of offshore oil and gas here, so it is supposedly a pretty rich place, although one of our taxi drivers said that rather a lot of money disappears into the usual corrupt pockets.
After spending a day in Kuching, we headed off to Bako National Park. You get there by bum-boat, which is an adventure in itself. But more to the point, it means that many people don't get there. It is a pretty tough undertaking to go there just for the day, and overnighting has the reputation of being rather basic (which is true), so I got the impression that many don't bother. Anywhere, it is an amazing place, with stunning scenery. Hills and cliffs covered with rainforest jungle, and a little higher up (just a few 100 meters above s.l.) the vegetation gets very sparse. Lots of macaque monkeys (we saw some of them being pretty mischievious with guests outside the visitor lodge cafeteria). Wild boar as well, and it took some getting used to feeling that it was OK with these animals nosing around just in front of our hut. W were also fortunate to see the Proboscis (long-nosed) monkeys, but I didn't manage to get a shot with my phone. Hopefully Ceci will post something worth seeing on Facebook soon. Also lots of fly-eating flowers. Below are some of the pix I did manage to take. I must confess to not being much of a photographer.
We also made it to the Orang-Utang rehabilitation centre. They have feeding times twice a day, and there were lots of people. There were also signs stating that the likelihood of seeing an orang-utang were "approximately zero" since the fruiting season had started in the forest and the orang-utangs prefer natural fruits to what the rangers supply. After a long wait we were suddenly instructed to walk quickly to a different place and there we were lucky to see just one orang-utang feeding high up in the tree canopy. Lucky us!
Then on to visit a long-house, the traditional houses of the "river people", also traditionally head-hunters.
Here come a few pix

A day in Kuching, Sarawak

Here we are on Borneo. It took me a while to figure out Borneo. A huge island, but not a country. Most of it is part of Indonesia, and then a strip along the north coast belongs to Malaysia (Sarawak and Sabah provinces) and then Brunei which has the weirdest borderline I have ever come accross. And here we are, we flew here yesterday, Timo and Ceci have a 5 day break. Kuching is a cool little town on the banks of a large meandering river, now rather muddy because the rain season has just started. We are staying in a "backpacker travel lodge" with a great bar/breakfast room in a loft where you can sit on tall benches and eat breakfast gazing out at the skyline and river.
We spent today wandering around, visited some museums and so on. This is the island of headhunters, we were in the ethnographical museum and saw a replica of a tradtional longhouse, including a number of skulls hanging from the ceiling.
We had dinner last night at a great place overlooking the river, the atmo was definitely colonial.
School break doesn't mean respite from homework. Timo and Ceci both have work to do. Timo has to prepare a speech about the benegits of reading (!!). Here is a picture of him at work on his hotel bad, taken from my "meditation alcove".

Gents evening at the Tiger Brewery

One has principles but one must be flexible. I don't like Heineken and was sad when they clinched the deal to purchase the Asia Pacific Brewery, makers of Tiger beer, shortly after we got here in July. But the Brewery Tour is a must so I went on the "tour" with a couple of Swedish friends yesterday afternoon. It is not a glamorpus old brick building with coppar brewing stills. Instead it is a nondescript building along a motorway in a huge industrial zone. The tour was a joke, but it ended with a 45 minute sampling time so we got to drink a sample if all 6 of their own brews plus stuff they brew under licence (incl Heineken) and Bulmers cider (which tasted ghastly). My favourite: Archipelago Pale Ale. A great evening. Here is the inevitable snapshot

Beautiful monitor lizards

Check out this picture of a monitor lizard taken today in a mangrove swamp nature reserve on the North coast of S'pore. They can be up to 2,5 m long and this one was definitely big. They are big but somehow sympathetic looking. They hang out, wondering about or lying in the water flickering their 20 cm Y-tipped tongue. They can get going though, we saw one chase another. And when they se they really move fast.
A guide/photographer told us that they sometimes sight crocodiled their. He showed us a beautiful pocture of a crocodile that had just caught a fish. Sighting chances are best at low tide and we were of course there exactly at high tide.
Domatella and Nathanael have had a great time here. They are flying back home tonight. There is a öittle panic because Nathanael just bumåed his head rather nastily while playing in the pool with Timo - a k a tomfoolery in the Plunge.

Economists - Don't we all love the way they speak?

Wonderful quote in the paper this morning. Consider the following from a spokesman for MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore): "While the global economy should be relatively less volatile next year, its growth momentum is unlikely to pick up significantly as the deleveraging process in the advanced economies will be protracted".
I think that they like that kind of crap language here. The other day I received a utility invoice from the university housing office. The cover letter ended with the fantastic statement that the invoice was attached for my "easy and convenient perusal". I thought that perusal was mostly for flashy charter travel brochures...
Oh well I am on Jurong Island right now, a *HUGE* petrochemical complex on reclaimed land just off S'pore. Mind-blowing. When they need more land here they send bulk carriers to Indonesia to fill up with gravel and sand and get on with land reclamation.

E4-04-03 for the last time

E4-04-03 is the classroom where I have my lectures and tutorial classes. Today the students wrote their exam there on the second part of my class. As I walked out of there with a bundle of exam papers under my arm I realized that today was the last day for me to set foot in that room. That is in a way my general feeling: I have worked very hard since Aug 1st and feel that it is time to have time to fo other things as well. One of my plans is to go on a short trip to Cambodia (Kim Wilde lyrics: "He's got a job to do: Fly to Cambodia") to visit the vast temple complex at Angkor Wat. Cool!
But before doing so I have a lot of wrapping up to do...