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December 2006 Singapore HolidayDecember 2006 Singapore HolidayAs I mentioned elsewhere, I bought a book on speed reading, and managed to read 10 books during this vacation . Many of them were smaller books that I completed while on the Singapore holiday from our vacation. Two of them were on Islamic issues, and I put my reviews online:
Maybe I can keep up the pace and finish a book every week during 2007…..
[Internet Snarled In Asia By Taiwan Earthquake Breaking Internet Cables] is my wiki entry for today about trying to survive the great Asian internet outage of 2007. (That’s a name I made up for it….) The internet here has been lousy since the earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. Actually, the internet still works, sort of, if you can survive 60% packet loss, and round trip ping times of a second or so…
We took a vacation from our vacation and went off to Singapore the same day the quake happened. I was going to try and download some stuff to do on the train, but I had no luck, the internet was crawling. I called the Malysian ISP and listened to their thing about some problem in Taiwan, and chewed them out for not putting some kind of easy to find “Network Status” thing on their home page, instead of forcing me to wait in a 20 minute phone queue to find out what was happening…. So we went down to Singapore for a day.
On to
It was a rainy day in Singapore, so there wasn’t much else really to do other than go to the mall after we rode for about 20 or 30 minutes on the commuter trains. Singapore makes it very expensive to have a car, they’ve decreed there can be no cars older than 10 years old in Singapore. The regular rode tax also doesn’t pay for you to actually drive everywhere, there are very high additional fees to enter certain areas of the city. So the trains are well used, and run on time.
On the way to Sim Lim, Sarah spotted a shoe seller in the park. She and my sister in law had fun looking for some new sandals for about US$4. I busied myself practicing being a hawker in front of the booth “Nice shoes? Nice shoes? You need shoes? Come see shoes? For Happy To You, ”, and various other phrases I saw printed on things around me, while gesturing like I was practically going to drag people into the booth. Some passby who looked Singaporean laughed and complimented me on my good job.
After that we went back to our hotel, and then up to a small city called Kluang where we stayed the night in a cheap but musty $15/night hotel, visited with the parents and relatives of another of my sister and laws, then took a bus back home to KL.
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