Shopping-tastic! A weekend on the malls

Tanglin Mall and Vivocity


Tanglin Mall at the end of Orchard Road is a little piece of the Caucasian kingdom, a relic from British colonial past, complete with faux-Tudor black and white frontage. I honestly feel out of place here, with so many westerners floating around buying over priced merchandise.


It makes me feel uneasy, like I’m segregating myself from the real world, because it isn’t the real world. It’s like the Epcot Centre in Singapore, where a little piece of every country is crammed into the purpose-built dome for the benefit of those who can’t bear being away from Mother Country.


Apparently the coffee is very good; Caffe Beviamo is the best of the best if you’re after a really good latte. But coffee does not a shopping experience make, and this place just feels wrong.

Vivocity, the newest and largest mall in Singapore, is the perfect example of how to build a mall, if you’re in the business of designing malls that is. Down by the new Harbour Front development, overlooking the causeway to Sentosa Island, Vivocity is an absolute playground for Singaporeans on the weekend.


There’s every department store you’d want, there’s every designer shop you’d ever need to be down with the kids (of ANY generation), there’s equipment stores, food stores, cinemas, a paddling pool on the roof, a gym and when you’re bored with that, walk into the older Harbour Front Centre, adjacent, and book a boat trip to Indonesia. What else do you need for entertainment?

Alternatively, Vivocity can be used as a viewing platform for Sentosa Island's Resort World!

Resort World's rides still aren't working...

 but the Casino is raking in the money.  Some CEO lost S$26M in a weekend's binge-gambling.  He's trying to claim the Casino was irresponsible. 
Answers on the back of a S$2 bill, addressed to "Big Loser"




If you’re not content with seeing the same stores over and over, I find it interesting to spin myself around three times and try to find my way out. The mall has been designed with disorientation in mind and zig-zag escalators, randomly placed elevators and confusing signposts make for a slow getaway! It’s a perfectly designed mall and I take my hat off to the engineers and architects. I take it off to them until I just want to find a toilet NOW and then I lose my rag and just WISH there were some signs!

 

The hilarious moment of the day came when we ate at JPOT Hotpot Steamboat restaurant in Vivocity and found the attached notice on our table. Highlighting the importance of good hygiene when sharing dishes, it is important to use the tongs for raw food. Tongs, or THONGS? Too funny!

Shovel

Help! I’m being held in a captive market!

We’ve been figuring out for the last few months how much things cost. The obvious price-hikes we’re now painfully aware of: anything Western comes with a double digit mark-up, anything Local is dollars and cents. My cup of coffee in the morning, a regular filter coffee, nothing fancy, is S$4. Malay Kopi in a bag? One dollar thirty (and that’s if you want milk, black it’s 80 cents). Six inch Subway sandwich, turkey, 6 grams of fat, very healthy, weighs in at a hefty S$5.50. My noodles and veggies at lunch are a dollar eighty. The expats are a captive market, one that, for convenience sake, continues to pay the bucks.


One market that is infinitely more ruthless in its pursuit of elastic pricing, a real slave to supply and demand, is the world of maternity paraphernalia. Good grief have the owners of Mothercare and the competition figured out that Westies will pay top dollar for the smallest little thing that ensures their overall pregnancy experience is just like their Mum’s or their Grandmother’s.


Maternity chairs, perfect for rocking your baby into a dreamful feed, seem to be only sold by Mothercare. Given that there are only three versions from one supplier, the price is about four times that of a US or AU supplier that you could buy on-line...if you could only ship it here! A colleague from work with many frequent-flyer bonuses managed to fly a cot and a chair from the US to the UK a while back in his bonus weight allowance. A very smart solution if your job takes you back ‘home’ every few weeks.


An even more extreme example that penalises all mums is the maternity bra. A two-pack is a staggering S$80 from family friendly (but profit hungry) Mothercare but in sunny Sydney we picked up the same for S$20.


It’s as uneven a pricing table as I think I’ve ever experienced. It’s like one of those old-time hawker centre guys with a pole across his shoulders; on one side high in the air is a box of noodles and on the other, scraping the ground, is a cast-iron stove complete with coal. I used to moan about the inflated commuter tickets on the British Railways, but this is painful.


Another place where pricing could do with a little help is around this whole specialist maternity hospital construct. We selected Mount Elizabeth, a shiny place with an exotic fish-tank in the lobby, just off Orchard Road, where no one seems able to give us a straight answer on the cost of anything to do with the birthing experience. We have a ‘quote’ for the birth, which I accept, given that no one knows what we’ll need from the point of “it’s coming” onwards. But no one can put a dollar figure on any part of it. We were referred to the special ambulance service for the hospital, but even they couldn’t tell us how much it was to get us to the maternity ward in case we needed the emergency ride.


Another friend of ours who gave birth recently at the same hospital experienced a 60% increase on her budgeted delivery but to this day cannot tell us what exactly the increase is for. As a result, we’re scurrying the cash away in these last few weeks to ensure we’re covered for the birth.


Having kids over here, without the safety net of good private medical, which mostly considers pregnancy to be a pre-existing condition (unless you’re insured before hand) is an expensive life-style choice.


Shovel

Spontaneity, Sir? Let me check whether I can do that.....

Taking the lead from another popular blogger and also my Lady’s experiences, I wanted to draft a short blog on the lack of spontaneity that seems to have been bred into a lot of people on this small yet highly successful island.

While the education system has, by all accounts, followed the UK system teaching children to answer the questions in front of them for the purposes of passing a test (and has excellent results for that) it seems to have been at the expense of creative, out of the box thinking. And it’s not just me, it’s the press that think this (and ergo the Powers That Be: PTB) and also many taxi drivers...who are never short of comment.
A couple of examples that would lead me to believe that the educational requirements have bled into the everyday way of life are these that I have spotted or actually been required to conform with in the last couple of weeks.

Eat with your family day, sponsored by the National Family Council (www.nfc.org.sg). Indeed a whole family month; have breakfast, learn a sport together, take a picnic...how to family 101....can’t people do this on their own? I have even seen Singapore Family Sports day. Crikey!
I have seen emergency vehicles on several occasions with their lights flashing and sirens blaring, waiting patiently at traffic lights while the other traffic passes. Gosh knows what would happen if something unexpected happened...gosh knows what would happen to the people that called the emergency services should that vehicle not arrive.

Having said all this, after the incredible rigour around the retail banking system, I was opening a new account last week where the minimum deposit was S$1,000. I asked how I could pay that into the new account and whether I needed to go and get cash out my other account at a rival bank to do so. Oddly the gentleman serving me thought for a moment and said “How much would you like to deposit?” to which my initial response was “Nothing” but after some negotiation we settled on an arbitrary S$500. A little flexibility actually brightened my day up and left me S$500 better off!

While I’m here, I wanted to drop down a note on a good food establishment called ‘Fries with Everything’ on Joo Chiat Road.

It’s a novel concept and the owners aren’t even Belgian. An exceptionally plain and ascetic building, painted stark white concrete walls and floors mirrors the menu in its simplicity. Side orders apart, it’s a menu heavy on meaty things; cheese burger, lamb burger, chicken fillet, pork chop, beef steak and as the name suggests, everything comes with a portion of fries; shoestring or straight cut. Following up the very western theme come caesar salads, coleslaw and thick milkshakes.

We decided to eat here because the greeters were welcoming enough to come out to the street and talk to us, explaining how their steak is cooked and without pushing us to take a table. Nice, I like that.

Lady selected a lamb burger that was juicy with a hint of mint and a ricotta and roasted tomato relish and I took the char-grilled beef kurabi, slow cooked and so tender that my knife slid into the meat right through to the plate without any pressure being applied. It was sumptuous serving of beef and an absolute travesty to have served it with chips and coleslaw.

To be honest with a name like ‘Fries with Everything’ you’d expect to have some pretty good chippies, but unfortunately the fries were the worst part of the whole affair! Still for $40 (and the steak was half of that) it was a pretty reasonable dinner.

In comparison, here's some amphibian related algebra from the other end of Joo Chiat Road. 
I kid you not, a Vietnamese restaurant does a good line in frog.  But, if one frog and rice = S$8
and 2 frogs and rice plus 1 extra frog = S$16
and 4 frogs plus 2 rice plus 3 extra frogs costs S$30,
how much does one frog cost?


Shovel

Youth Olympic Games – Closing Ceremony

So inspired was I by the opening ceremony of the inaugural Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in Singapore that together with my Lady, we picked up tickets to the closing ceremony. Games and events during the weekends were all sold out and the weekdays, well, that’s for working, right?


At S$15 each, with 27,000 other people, we got to watch the spectacle reach its natural conclusion, the montage of achievements relived, the flags lowered and the flame extinguished. Not only that, but we got a pretty well stocked goody bag each (reusable, suitable for shopping and picnics by the beach), a Singapore national flag (handy for next year’s NDP) flashing hats and heart-shaped wands, a bottle of water and, get this, a YOG muffin. Like I said, well stocked for all eventualities.

With a haul of two silver and five bronze, Singapore has achieved much in the sporting arena. The young Olympians have trained well, fought hard, and leave standing proud, dusty, bloodied but champions all. One of the great aims of the PTB is to ensure that the Singapore of tomorrow has a sporting infrastructure and an athletic culture that rivals any small nation around the world. They seem to be on their way.

As hosts, Singapore put on a world-class display, hosting this event with short notice and limited resources. What went in their favour was unlimited local endeavour, enthusiasm and government support that could not and would not allow these games to be seen as anything but a success. As local journalists have said, the natural perfectionism of Singaporeans probably pulled this event off, but you’ve got to be engaged emotionally to want to produce this.

 Admittedly I think the international media coverage was limited, but then again this was the first of its kind. Without doubt, the first Winter YOG in Innsbruck, Austria in 2012 and the second YOG in Nanjing, China in 2014 will be bigger, but you have to start somewhere. And Singapore certainly removed all the stop-signs to start the ball rolling. It’s been a heart-warming experience to watch this and see the nation come together over something that’s not politically or financially motivated (and I firmly believe that sport should never be political – hence my frustration at the withdrawal of a 17yr old male Iranian taekwondo practitioner from the final of the -48kg category because he was fighting an Israeli. Honestly, build a bridge and get over it).

Unlike the F1 Grand Prix, which had long been shunned by the Singapore Sporting Council because of ‘safety’ but when it was proved there was a lot of money to be made from hosting it, the race got the green light to proceed, the YOG has been supported because it is the right thing to do for the future of youth sport in the world. With the cultural exchanges and educational program running in tandem, it seems to have been even bigger than sport.

I’m always mightily impressed at what a motivated and big-picture attitude can do. There’s a lesson for us all I think on a big scale.


Shovel

Commuting Arts & Crafts – folding a newspaper

Current chat on the I-Stomp pages of the free paper in Singapore is about capacity on the MRT. Apparently the system is just too crowded. In my recent blogs I’ve aired my frustration with commuters here in Singapore about how there is little perspective on how good they have it here, about how easy commuting is here and how much space, comparatively, there is in the MRT carriages. Rush hour lasts about 30 minutes and if I wanted, I’d never actually have to miss a train, however I choose to let the odd one go so that I can have a little more space to myself.


One of the things that I think people like about the cosy system is that they are still able to read a full-size newspaper, completely open with their arms out in front of them. That requires the equivalent of two human spaces to do and this is the problem. There’s almost double the space on trains that people actually realise, but they are unwilling to give up their precious personal reading space.


So I thought I’d put down the five simple steps on how to fold a newspaper in order to be considerate and thoughtful to your neighbouring commuters.

Step 1 – Obtain your free paper, choice of title is yours, chief-editor is the same....

Step 2 – Open your free-paper prior to entering the MRT or Bus.

Step 3 - Fold the paper in half on itself.

Step 4 – Half that page again, lengthways, showing columns 1 & 2 on one side available for your confined-space reading pleasure.





 

Step 5 – Flip the skinny paper and continue reading columns 3 & 4.

Of course, this method is best employed on a proper daily whose content and comment is worth the paper it is written on. You’re probably reading a free-paper, so it’s probably not worth the effort and adverts on every page don’t count. Like I said, it’s your choice; read selected news that you’re spoon-fed or get a small A5 book that might have something intellectually challenging or thought-provoking between the covers.

Shovel

Maintaining your drains – essential DIY

Sitting a gnat’s girth from the equator, in the middle of the warm south china seas, drains are going to be a festering problem. It is hot and humid here. Hot and humid all the time. Our storm drains and home drains are full of tepid water that doesn’t run away and we humans tend to wash down the plughole an awful lot of protein, hair and waste food. Some of the storm drains that run around these older neighbourhoods have only ever been flushed through after dramatic floods. I hear that people have actually fallen in them, they have been so flooded, and gashed their legs badly in a fetid bath. Delightful.

At home, we’re not talking about our u-bends or sink plug-holes. We’re talking about industrial, vertical drains built from industrial piping that run several stories down. For some odd reason these are always filled with water, about 35cm below the level of our floor. Around these drains we have inherited a breeding ground of slime and a furry mattress of hair and fluff from the previous tenant. Once already we’ve had a greasy ball of matted hair and human fats disgorged from a deep, dark part of the shower’s drain that was blocking the progress of water. Today I tackled the remainder of the drains that hard started to smell somewhat ripe with the recent heat.


Everything was going well; rubber gloves, long handled brush, boiling water and powerful chemicals were all dispatched into the dark with moderate success. On flushing the sink and opening the kitchen’s drain cover (and this is right in our kitchen remember) I came face to face with a stinking fat cockroach, twitching its antennae as it watched the cleaning waters race past. Now that’s not pleasant at all. Cockroaches spread a lot of nastiness and have a habit of leaving their eggs lying around in a careless fashion. Quickly the Baygon was to hand and the poor guy didn’t stand a chance. It struggled a few inches before collapsing at which point it was wrapped in a paper body bag and dumped into the external rubbish-chute.


The general message to all out here, keep your drains clean and flushed regularly. Watch what is washed away down the sink in the way of food stuffs and make bleach your friend!


Shovel

Youth Olympic Games 2010 - Opening Ceremony

Two and a half years ago, Singapore was given the responsibility to host the inaugural Youth Olympic Games. Two and a half years in comparison to seven years to prepare for the games; it was a tall order but Singapore have pulled off an absolutely amazing start to this new addition to the Olympics. Only a week after the NDP, Singapore once again hosted an enormous event with some 27,000 spectators in the stands and many thousands, if not millions worldwide in the international audience.

The Youth Olympic Torch - Robinson Road

Once again using the back-drop of the city-scape and a floating platform on Marina Bay, the events unfolded, telling the story of the young athletes’ hopes, dreams, fears and struggles. This time there was no military hardware and only one suitably unifying song; including the lyrics “you are the one, Singapore. Now is the time, here we go, yeh!” It was quite a show. True to most Olympic opening ceremonies, there was the underlying story-line that was narrated by the TV presenter, but most of all it was about the spectacle, the grandeur, the big vision of it all.
And Singapore did not disappoint, despite the fact that the venue is a multi-purpose landing stage on the Bay, it doubles as the platform for the F1 Grand Prix and other international events, the scale of the show was immense. Not to mention the fireworks and the vortex Olympic flame that I hope to get a picture of at the closing ceremony.Three thousand, six hundred young athletes from 204 represented countries will experience something akin to a cultural exchange trip over the next 13 days. While they all take part in their respective sports, they will also be exposed to a structured cultural differences program, and an international education program. It’s a brave new plan from the International Olympic Committee from Switzerland, but one that fits exceptionally well with the young nation of Singapore.
I was exceptionally impressed with the ceremony and have just booked tickets to the closing ceremony. Let’s just hope the weather holds! I can’t imagine sitting in rain for a few hours would be fun. I’ll update you in a couple of weeks!


Shovel