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...

Mindfulness meditation with a True Brit

Well done Carro for convincing me to get a smart phone. It is unbelievable how many brilliant Apps there are out there. My new favourite is one called "Headspace - Get Some" with a real Brit called Andy guiding you through meditation techniques. But instead of trying to create a Budhist Munk style mystique he prefers the checked shirt Jamie Oliver approach with the same kind of voice. It's really MegaBrill!

This is also my first Blog using the Google Blogger App - also thanks to to Carro's gentle prodding

A day in town with a museum visit

Finally! A day on my own, no stress, still pretty happy about the week's accomplishments, no need to compromise about what to do, had a good sleep.... Went into town, bought the Straints Times at the entrance to the MRT, and headed stright for the Asian Civilisation Museum in a beautful colonial building at the mouth of the Singapore river. I wondered around for 1,5 hours, some pretty good exhibits. What struck me most was a small exhibition about the Singapore River, how it is so little (only 4 km long) yet so significant for the country's history. And more to the point, how it was totally abused for about 150 years, to the point that the smell was totally unbearable. But 10 years of effort in the 1970s managed to restore it. Sad in a way that the hussle and bustle of small ships bringing in cargo from the larger ships anchored further offshore is a thing of the past, but it is still a pleasant spot.

Check out the Rolls parked outside the Fullerton Hotel (old central post-office, just accross from the museum).

Lunch on a shady terrace overlooking the river, then a walk accross Fort Canning Hill and along Orchard Rd before coming home to indulge in a monster clean-up before Marina, Donatella and the children show up tonight.

Last lecture at NUS yesterday

Yesterday I held my last lecture and tutorial session at NUS. It went well and I feel pretty satisfied at all that I have accomplshed here in Singapore. 25 new lectures, 10 sets of homework assignments. The students seem satisfied (and they are demanding students so I don't think that they are happy because I let them off lightly). ALl that is left is to put together a small exam for Tuesday and then read and orally examine 8 project reports. Today the director of the agency that funded my Fellowship was here to meet with the three Swedes on Teaching Sabbatical here in Singapore. Pretty positive, and we also discussed ideas for making it possible to come back in two or three years to refine the concept. As we all agreed today, when doing what we have done for the first time there is not really time for innovative teaching methods, but if we were to come back we would be able to experiment in a totally different way. We will see if that idea comes to anything.
Great day, I feel pretty proud of myself!

Thank God for massage joints round every corner

Wow, there are massage joints all over the place here. Timo and I went for a minor foot massage the other day (totally killing just in case anyone thinks that it is only about having someone tickle your foot....). But since I came back from 4 days in Malaysia with a really bad back blockage which sent pain shooting down my leg all the way to the knee I gave the local Chinese massage people a chance to show their skills. Pretty impressive and pretty cheap. No problem getting an appointment same day. Pretty painful when they poke at sore and strained muscles, but I survived and feel a lot better.

T-shirt and Poster for Dell
It's always cool when something actually works in the global village, so I feel that I should share this occurrence of functioning global logistics.... The battery on my Chalmers (Dell) laptop suddenly collapsed (albeit after several months of somewhat strange behavior). I didn't feel over-excited at the prospect of tracking down a new one here, especially after my first scan of the Dell web-site seemed to indicate that my particular model was never sold in Singapore. However, Chalmers has a 3-year service agreement for all Dell computers. Wow: you punch in your service tag, and up comes the full list of all components of the computer with part numbers. AND a list of all items covered by the service agreement & the expiration date. Usually this type of agreement expires a few months before component failure, but in my case I had just 9 days left. What luck! Email to Dell Service Centre explaining the situation. A couple of hours later I received an email back saying that they would deliver a new battery free of charge at the address of my choice. An hour later Dell Logistics called to make an appointment, and next morning the doorbell rung at there was a beaming Singaporean with a DHL shirt and a new battery in his hand. Signed the delivery receipt and checked that the new battery worked. End of story. Pretty impressive to see the whole chain work so smoothly.

And here is a picture of the beautiful umbrella tree outside my office.

Dad's right, it would be cool to keep each other posted across multiple time zones by writing blogs. SO here is mine, will do my best to keep it updated and throw in some pictures every now and then. Even though an iPhone is not exactly the best camera in the world....

I suspected that Google would have the solution, and they do of course. So this first blog is no more than copy/paste of the email I sent a few minutes ago.

Cheers!

It has been a special week, my students have had their mid-term recess, so I have not had to prepare any lectures or tutorials. I thought that I would have loads of time to "get ahead of the game" but that was of course wishful thinking. My students are currently busy working on a mini-project, so I have had a continuous stream of students asking questions. This is of course the best part of being a teacher, so I am not complaining.

I took advantage of my free time to cross the Johor Straits into Malaysia to visit a research group there. It was a great day. Their research is much closer to my own than that of my colleagues here in Singapore. The atmosphere there was a lot more low key. The campus is set in a huge park a long way out of town. Lots of space, and all research groups are located in small pavilion like buildings which were so positively peaceful. A very pleasant change from the high-strung high-stress "keeping up with MIT" atmosphere at NUS. I hope to manage to promote some long term exchange with my Malaysian colleagues. However, I am well aware that promoting exchange with people so far away is easier said than done.

Timo and Ceci are doing really well. They have both got major pieces of work back from their teachers, with pretty good grades, so they are rather proud of themselves (and rightly so). I am impressed by what they manage to deliver, they have had to come up to speed with domain-specific vocabulary in a large number of topics in a very short period of time. By and large, they seem to be at about the right level, although they both state that they find the science here a little easy. Also, due to different rules about dividing lines for age groups here compared to Sweden, Timo is in the right age group, whereas Ceci is more or less the oldest student in class. You win some, you lose some.

We have had a busy weekend. Friday night Marina and I went out with Stefan and Malin, a friendly Swedish couple from Göteborg also here for a 5 month stay with the same Fellowship as me. So that was our first time to enjoy a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar in the Raffles Hotel.

Saturday we did some volunteer work with a group of students. Marina has done a variety of volunteer actions over the past few weeks, including working for a tree-planting enthusiast who spends his life planting trees in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. We helped plant 200 trees and shrubs at the entrance to a park. Digging holes, loading wheel-barrows with soil, carting old soil away and so on is totally killing in this climate. After 2 hours I was completely wiped out and didn't really recover all afternoon.

Just got back from church at the Norwegian Seaman's Missionary Church, which also doubles as the Swedish Lutheran Church in Sweden. It is conveniently located on the top of a hill looking out onto one of the many container terminals (gazing at oil refineries, naphtha crackers and contain terminals is maybe an acquired taste, but I love it), and it near home. More to the point, the wife of the Swedish priest in residence was one of Caroline's confirmation leaders in Vallda, proof yet again that it is a small world. The ambiance there is very special, and 5 pm mass is always followed by a pleasant barbeque dinner out on the terrace. Lots of friendly Scandinavians there. The Swedish priest Gudmund is a great sort. He has his racing bike with him, and played Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" as Postludium music because he felt that it underlined the main theme of his homily. Cool!

Another highlight of the day: Timo and I went for Reflexology Massage of our feet this morning. Typically Chinese, different areas of the foot are supposedly linked to energy flows to different internal organs. So 40 minutes of intensive massage of you feet it supposed to have positive effects well beyond just relaxing your feet. Timo just found it relaxing, I found it very painful just on the outer edge of the arch of my foot. I asked the gut afterwards and he said that it probably has to do with back problems, which is spot on. I learned to type way too late in life, so I spend far too much time hunched in front of a screen and keyboard (4 finger typing, slightly better than 2 finger typing, but I have never really learned to not look at my fingers on the keyboard).

Nicholas: thanks for the confirmation pictures. We looked at them together this afternoon, great memories!