You see, we all originate from Singapore, a wee island at the southern tip of Malaysia. We have a LOT of relatives from there. So when someone flies over from Canada (a tiring 18 hour flight in total), we MUST bring gifts. It’s just the custom when returning back to the motherland, especially for relatives you will be staying with during your vacation. Not only is it the custom, but its just good manners — believe me, we would hear it from our parents if we neglected this duty!

So either the morning of, or the night before, there is a packing ritual with a box of box/duct tape, scissors, marker pen, and plastic rope at the ready. And a cardboard box. Before the packing ritual of course there is the shopping ritual. After phoning Singapore to ask relatives for any special requests, there is a shopping trip or two to acquire the appropriate supplies. 99% of items bought are food! I don’t remember what exactly usually, but it’s usually chocolates that they cannot get back there or they are cheaper here. And no, they are sick of maple syrup already.

It’s a regular game of Tetris, where you try to optimally pack in the different sized boxes and occassionally have to rip open a box to use the food to “fill in the gaps”. Firstly, your luggage bag is re-arranged. And by re-arranged, I mean “your clothes will be used to cushion the food or fill in the gaps”. Then another box is filled with more goodies and taped up (oh no — no wimpy one tape across the bottom and top here, we are talking multiple layers, and every side is taped).

The funniest part is the weighing. Or the “attempted weighing” as I call it. This is usually by “intuition”, as we have traveled there enough to know approximately how heavy the box/bag can be. Everybody takes turns carrying the bag to have a feel of how “heavy” it is, according to our experience packing from before and weighing it at the airport scale. My standard is: “if I can barely carry it with one hand, the weight is ok”. Each item has to be 32 kilograms or less. The Vancouver Airport/Airline check-in people are sticklers for this rule, and I don’t blame them because if they don’t, it will be potentially abused. If you don’t believe me, watch the baggage of any lineup of Asians going back to Asia at YVR

Well, our “intuition” is frequently incorrect, thus we have to weigh it at the airport scale BEFORE we check-in just to confirm, to spare us some embarrassment of having to take things out at the counter hurriedly. Of course we bring our trusty box of packing paraphernalia, and an extra bag just in case for the overflow to bring it back home. After confirming the box is within the weight limit, I re-tape it and wrap a plastic rope all around it like a parcel. I don’t see the point really, if the box is busted this rope won’t really hold things in. According to my mom, it’s for “identification”. Gee, I wonder if anyone can mistake this huge box as being ours, since it has OUR NAME WRITTEN IN BLOCK LETTERS ALL OVER IT.

I would think because we frequently travel there, we should get a scale. We used to use the bathroom scale, but it was not very accurate obviously — we might as well use our intuition (which we did!). Sigh, next time I’m getting a hand scale.

Technorati Tags: singapore, packing

I got there around 7-am, and lo and behold there were about two hundred attendees in front of me! Everybody was lined up in a snake-like fashion, neatly compressed, but when they let everyone go up the escalator to the second floor (to line up some more) the line deteriorated into one huge glob in front of the escalator. They definitely needed better crowd control there during the start. The keynote was to start at 10-am, and here we were, a little over two hours before the event, all stuck on the second floor. Everybody would sit down on the floor, still in line. Little did I know that I did not REALLY need to get up early at all, silly me!

Here are some tips for when you are lining up for the WWDC keynote:

1. Don’t bother eating breakfast beforehand. There are breakfast stations everywhere when you line up on the second floor. Coffee, tea, croissants, donuts, etc.
2. Line up with a friend to save your place in line if you have to go to the washroom – or else, just fast beforehand and during lining up. Besides, your line-mates are probably good chaps and they will allow you back to your spot. But then tip number 5 makes this tip obsolete!
3. Don’t bother starting up your laptop to take advantage of the Wi-Fi. Internet connectivity will not have been enabled until after the keynote.
4. Bring something to entertain yourself (PSP, iPod video, book). It will be a long wait. Either that, or bring good conversation. Criticize the OS X Finder, or something.
5. You can come late. Come at 9-am. From the back of the line, just slowly walk towards the front, while everyone is sitting down! Everyone does it (except for the ones already in line of course). Now you know.
6. Once in the auditorium, it usually pays NOT to be the first ones in. They cordon off the middle seats for VIPs, but guess what — a lot of VIPs don’t show, and they eventually open that area up to general seating eventually. So if you do get seated first on the edges of the auditorium, at least get a seat on the aisle right next to the VIP area, you might get lucky.
7. After the keynote, there are drinks and food right outside. If you want to hang around with the VIPs or mill about (maybe you can catch a glimpse of you know who?) don’t leave the third floor. Once you leave, they won’t let you back up.

Here is ONE absolute MUST tip if you are bringing your laptop: You HAVE to bring the extension cord for your power brick. Don’t rely on that tiny plug adapter that fits snugly with your power brick. The power points on the power extensions available on the desks usually don’t have space to accommodate the whole power brick being plugged in. Hopefully you won’t be one of those obnoxious people taking up two or more power points!

One last tip: Don’t be alarmed if an Apple employee asks to borrow your Leopard beta CD/DVD when you are at WWDC. I found that even Apple employees don’t have access to (all) their company’s products until their release to WWDC attendees.

I will be staying at the Westin again (not the St. Francis, but the Market Street one) — St. Francis is a really nice hotel, close to Moscone Center (10 mins walk). The Market Street one is even closer. Unfortunately, it does not have included Internet access. If you are staying in a room shared with a colleague, make sure you bring a (wireless) router where you can clone a MAC address, I usually bring a Linksys one. Initially, to initiate Internet connection, it redirects you to a web-page where you accept the connection charges. After that, it “authenticates” you through your MAC address for outgoing connections. After signing up, copy your MAC address into the router’s MAC address clone setup page, and apply the changes. Then your colleague can share the Internet access with you through the wired router connection, or wireless. Several colleagues have had trouble sharing the connection through their Airport Express however, so I don’t recommend using that particular router.

(Update: Mike Morton of Google has more on WWDC 2007, in the Official Google Mac Blog).

Technorati Tags: Apple, WWDC, tips, keynote

I was born here, but left 17 years ago with my family to British Columbia. This is my first Eid back in the old country (but the 10th time I have come back to visit), and on every visit Singapore has changed. It seems that every available space has been taken up by commerce. Even the walkways between buildings have been taken over by shops, there are shops everywhere. On one visit there is an empty field allowing a cool breeze to hit you, on the next visit it has been taken over by a shopping mall. It seems like everything is very dense here, also people’s sense of personal space. I am figuratively swimming in my own sweat whenever I walk outside, thank God for air-conditioning everywhere, even on the buses. My favourite hangout is of course Tampines Mall and Century Square, which is just a stone’s throw away from my wife’s house. This shopping area, on any given day, on its slowest period will rival downtown Vancouver in its peak period. Suffice to say, there are a lot of people in Singapore, everywhere

But the food, oh the food — it is a paradise for all types of food, at all times of the day. There are a lot of 24 hour establishments out here. Very, very cheap hawker centre food – the usual Malay, Chinese and Indian fare, if you want it, you got it. It is especially good for me because almost everything here is halal, thus I can eat to my heart’s content. And the prices are so cheap — a hearty dish can be had for the low price of $2.50 usually. Eating out is frequently cheaper than cooking at home! Oh – and also all the visiting of relatives during Eid will not make me any slimmer – they serve you scrumptious dishes of every kind, and there are usually several visits everyday. It is also the last year of the old Geylang Serai, the heartland of the Malay community, which is abuzz every year during Ramadan. They are demolishing the old buildings, starting afresh. I’m glad to catch the old market one last time.

This trip has been very profitable also (exchange rate wise) – one Canadian dollar will net me about $1.40 in Singapore dollars (1 US dollar is about $1.70 Singapore dollars). And I found that software here is dirt cheap – for example, a computer game will cost about Singapore $60 after minimal taxes (they have the GST here too, I think it’s 3%). The same computer game in Canada will cost $60 Canadian, plus 7% GST (Goods and Services Tax) and 7% PST (Provincial Sales Tax) – which will come out to about $69 Canadian. Factoring in the exchange rate of 1.4, that amount will be about Singapore $96. Thus I save (96-60) about 36 dollars – which is a discount of about 40%. I’m sure the game publishers would just love to tie the local prices to the US prices – but this will price the games out of everyone’s budget here — especially if they have the alternative of going across the border to Malaysia and picking up a pirated copy. You won’t find copyright infringing software in Singapore anymore — the government has started enforcing their new copyright law on Jan 1st, 2005.

If you are a Japanese food fan (apparently Singapore ranks #1 in Asia, in Japanese food consumption outside Japan) you must try the Kuishinbo Japanese buffet, located downtown at the Suntec City Mall (Tower 1). Prices range from Singapore $25 to $40 per person, depending on the day or whether it is during lunch or dinner time. I think I had about 30-40 pieces of salmon sashimi that one time I was there – I definitely got my money’s worth. Excellent desserts, beverages, etc — service was very good, and the food was delicious. Every 30 mins or so, they will announce (by ringing a bell, and through the speaker system) that they have a special dish, but it is only available to N number of people at X counter. Sometimes there is a mad rush — like the one time they had lobster. I would definitely go there again, I had a good time.

I didn’t have time to go to any of the neighbouring countries Malaysia or Thailand, but if you get a chance to, you should. Airfares are insanely cheap from Singapore to regional destinations – the pricing is really cut-throat, sometimes air-fares are $1 to go to Thailand! If you love blue waters and white sands — Phi Phi Island and Phuket are superb (me and my wife love those two places). Tioman Island off the east coast of Malaysia is awesome also, I have been scuba diving there.

All good things must come to an end — I have already spent four weeks here, and I have to get back to frigid Canada (brr, its almost winter there). You can bet I will be coming to Singapore again in the near future.

So 12 hours later after departing Vancouver, I land in Chiang Kai Shek Airport in Taiwan. I have about two hours to kill before my next flight, it is about four hours to Singapore. So I’m walking in a fairly deserted wing of the airport to my gate – and I was glancing at the flight arrival monitors (big 40 inch LCD screens, I believe), and lo and behold, there was a Microsoft Scandisk window overlaid on top of the arrival screen! It was churning away, I couldn’t read the window text because it was all in Chinese.I wish I had a digicam at that moment. No surprise that most of these systems would be run by Microsoft software.

I get to the gate – and saw a sign saying ‘WiFi’ near the public payphones. Hmm – why not try it out? So I whipped out my laptop and proceeded to just go to “www.google.com”, and it redirected me to the page for HiNet, a Taiwanese WiFi/broadband provider. The page is all in Chinese. Then I saw the “English” hyperlink and thought – I’m in luck! But not so fast. That brought me to a FAQ page that proceeded to tell me that for non-HiNet subscribers, I needed to buy a HiNet prepaid card, bla bla bla, and that card can be bought online using my credit card. But unfortunately when I went to the link it provided to buy the card, it was in Chinese yet again. Since most of the link location text was in English, I thought by hovering my mouse over a link I might gain some clues to where the link might go to from the status bar. Quite frustrating. The contact page was indecipherable also, so I couldn’t e-mail the webmaster or public relations or something.

On my return trip back, I have a 6 hour layover in Taiwan again. I really wish I could get some wi-fi love then, but I’m not hoping too hard.

Two days — that’s the number of days we missed the tsunami by. Zuzan and I were in Phuket from Dec 21st 2004 to Dec 24th 2004. Zuzan wanted to extend our vacation by at least a day, but I nixed that idea because not only was she coughing (and vomiting occassionally) badly, I myself was coming down with a fever and cough. We found out later that she had bronchitis (and I caught it too). I never thought I would ever think, how lucky for us to get bronchitis! If we had extended our stay for an extra day, maybe we would have extended it for another day also… who knows. The bronchitis cutting short our vacation was our *second* lucky break actually.

Two times lucky — our first lucky break was cancelling our initial plans to go to Phuket during the Christmas weekend! I suggested to Zuzan, to invite her cousin Manja and hubby Zep along for our getaway weekend also. We wanted to take advantage of the Christmas long weekend, but Manja had only one day off left for the year, and could not get anymore time off. We then shifted our plans so that we went earlier during the week (although we wanted to take the Christmas weekend also, so we can spend more time together since I am in town only 12 days, instead of having to go through the inevitable invites to family functions during the holiday weekend).

The gravity of the tsunami didn”t hit us — friends had started to text message and call about our well-being, and I initially jokingly put off their concerns about our well-being (most didn”t know we came back on Christmas eve). That was until I saw the destruction and havoc on TV. Zuzan was crying for all the people that were dead, and also because of the realization about how lucky we were not to have experienced the horror of the tsunami.

We would have beared the brunt of it. Our hotel, Burasari Resort, was adjacent to the Holiday Inn at Patong Beach, the hardest hit beach on Phuket island. As you can see from the image to the right, the resort is not far from the beach (maybe 1 min walk). Our room was on the ground floor (it was a room with pool access straight from the balcony). I shudder to think what would have happened if we were in the room! More likely though, we would have been at sea on an excursion.

We went on several excursions during our stay, one was at Raya Island (Koh Racha Yai), an absolutely beautiful island, where most of the time we spent on Batok Bay, and also snorkeling around the other bays of the island. I fear for the tourists out on boats going to Raya Island on that fateful day. When the tsunami struck, most of them would be out snorkeling. Below is where Raya Island is:

We also went on the “James Bond Island 3-in-1 adventure”. We visited the location where they filmed parts of the James Bond movie “The Man With The Golden Gun”, which is on Koh Ping Gan (now famously known as, of course, James Bond Island). It was a fun longtail boat ride — but of course neither Zuzan or I have seen the movie, so the island wasn”t that much of an attraction for us. We also went on a sea canoe ride through the limestone caves, which was very underwhelming (for me at least). The apparent highlight (at least for the Europeans) was seeing mudskippers in the mud! Sigh. What was more interesting was, our visit to Koh Pannyi for lunch.

Koh Pannyi is a floating sea village near James Bond Island. It is a “sea gypsy” village that was erected about 200 years ago by three Muslim families from Indonesia whom emigrated to Thailand but were not allowed to settle in the mainland because the Buddhist population there didn”t want any Muslims to settle there, thus they settled on the sea itself. Currently, the population of Koh Pannyi is 1200 people, and they have a mosque, health centre and primary school in the floating village. The men of the village earn their living mostly as sea canoe peddlers, and the women run the gift shops and restaurants of the village. The location of Koh Pannyi and Koh Ping Gan is northeast of Phuket, in Phang Nga Bay (see yellow circle):

Here”s what the sea village looks like (above). Here”s a closer look of the right side of the sea village: sea village

I hope the villagers did not experience the tsunami at all, I couldn”t find much news about whether the tsunami affected them. However, I found some news that gave me some hope, it appears they escaped unscathed: news story

After Koh Pannyi, we were brought back to Phang Nga province to go to the Elephant preserve, where Zuzan and I got to ride elephants and see a baby elephant show. I really enjoyed the elephant ride! The highlight of the whole day I thought. We dubbed our elephant “Juan Montoya” (of F1 Racing fame) because he liked to cut off all the other elephants. The baby elephant show was fun, although at some points I didn”t feel so good because I felt they were being exploited, and it was quite demeaning. But then without tourist money they can not survive — I felt conflicted about that. All I thought about was — imagine if a “superior” alien race made humans captive and made us do tricks to earn our keep.

That was the end of our excursions — right after that I got sick, and Zuzan wasn”t getting better — and you know the rest of the story.

Phi Phi Island got hit quite bad by the tsunami also. Zuzan and I spent our honeymoon on Phi Phi Don Island (the northern phi phi island), at the Holiday Inn resort there, and we thought for sure it would have been wiped out by the tsunami. But reports on the Internet say that the resort escaped relatively unscathed, no doubt because of its northeasterly location (left image).

Thailand is a special place for us. Not only is it the place we spent our honeymoon in, we also celebrated our first wedding anniversary there (this trip was supposed to be our belated first wedding anniversary holiday). More so, its the Thai people that we have met and interacted with that we are concerned about. Tourism is their livelihood, and I can”t imagine how they are feeling right now — houses lost, relatives lost, livelihoods ruined. We will pray that they are safe. Our two Thai tour guides, “C” (easy to remember… A..B..”C”) and “King”, we hope you are safe, wherever you are!

Click on the thumbnail to enlarge:

I took the panoramic image that is the title image of this site, but I didn’t lock the exposure on some parts of the image, and some parts don’t blend well (I didn’t have a tripod handy). The panoramic image was created using the PhotoMerge feature in Adobe�s Photoshop Elements 2.0.

View the panoramic image as a Quicktime VR file (3.5 Megabytes).