Sometimes I miss...

... good bread with butter and good honey.
... giving body combat classes and ride my bike.
... drink beer with friends.
... Eva's cakes and bread.

From Singapore

Singapore - a breath of fresh air. Is it?
Compared to all southeastasian cities, it's definitely cleaner. The public transport system works. There's enough space on the sidewalks to actually walk. Car drivers stop to let pedestrians pass. Few people spit, almost nobody litters. The small boat that took us to a small island the other day can only take 12 passengers, otherwise people are advised to complain. The buses are clean and in good working condition. People are polite. The city is full of huge shopping centres with expensive shops. Everybody goes shopping after work or on public holidays. And to think that Singapore was "thrown out of" Malaysia in the 50ies, and managed all this by itself...

The downside?
No freedom of speech. Press heavily influenced by the government. The same prime minister ruled for decades, the current prime minister is his son. Homosexuality is illegal. No social security. No real opposition (although they do turn up in elections but never win). High rate of self-censorship in the press and the arts. Spitting is forbidden and punished with a high fine, as is eating or drinking on the subway (costs 250 Euros), littering and many other things.

The question:
Is all this necessary to build a working state which is clean and where people are nice to each other? Is it necessary to have such strict laws and punishments about what I would call minor issues? If there weren't any laws like these, would people spit and litter and smoke everywhere? Maybe yes... (look at China). Or maybe not?

I don't know.

Christmas in Singapore

As initially planned (or tought) we spent our Christmas in Singapore with Ray, a Singaporean traveller who had spent his 2008 Christmas at my place in Geneva. Last year Ray had given us a Trans-Siberian book which we carried back to him by land.

Singapore is a mix of people, there are four official languages - English, Malay, Tamul and Chinese -, corresponded to as many groups of people you find in the street. The organization and cleanness of the streets allow us to breath again after the pedestrian unfriendly Kuala-Lumpur. Unfortunately in Singapore this comes at the expense of lack of freedom of speech and tighly controlled citizens, with cctv cameras everywhere and heavy fines (from 250euros for eating in the metro and up) when you get out of the line (crossing the road less than 50m from pedestrian cross, spitting or litering, cycle the bike where it says you should push, connect the laptop to a plug you find in the metro station, etc). And this fines are enforced as it reports in the newspaper today.

Christmas in Singapore, even if a good part of the population is Christian, is very laic. There is decoration everywhere but much less than in europe; the people do shop but at same time is the sales period and end of the long "summer" holidays, preparing to be back to school. The dozens of shopping centres (even more dense than in Porto, Portugal) are not full of people (or there are not enough people to fill them all).