Singapore: City Sights, Tourist Type

Singapore is a city of superlatives, it says: the biggest observation wheel, the tallest water fountain, the best shopping, the highest oen-air swimming pool, etc. My first afternoon, I did the most touristy thing you can do: I took the Duck Tour and rode the Singapore Flyer, the Ferris wheel thing that is 15 meters taller than the London one. What's a Duck Tour? you ask.


It's a Vietnam war era amphibious transport, nearly as old as I am, brought to Sing, and refitted as a tourist cruiser. You spend thirty minutes in the water, and thirty minutes on land. The Duck tour was about as expected, cool in idea more than in execution, but it was fine and I got some good, if fairly standard, tourist shots. The guide really seemed to enjoy his job. The Duck, ours was Darlene, returns to the starting point and you take the City Sightseeing bus to the Flyer on your own. We hit the water first:


where you can get some great views of two of the skyline's icons, the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and the Flyer:


You may also catch one of the other Ducks along the way:


Fountain of Wealth:
You meet up with your Duck in a place called Suntec, a massive shopping and convention center. I was plenty early to arrive, and so I visited the Fountain of Wealth, apparently the world's largest fountain. There is a small fountain as part of it, which you are supposed to go around in circles with your hands in its waters to become wealthy--or more precisely to help the folks who developed the scheme to become wealthy. There's no fee, but to get there, you wind through a maze of shops and restaurants within SunTec:


Marina Bay Sands:
You have to say it is quite impressive, even from the outside. But does it really need an entry in the Lonely Planet guide?


Obviously, the third pic was taken from the Flyer, but the last shot was taken in the Duck, as it passed through the Colonial District, where chaps still play rugger on a Saturday afternoon.

The Singapore Flyer:
At 165 meters, the world's highest blah-blah-blah, it was part of my Duck Tour price. It takes 28 minutes to do the complete circle, there are 28 cars, it opened on the 28th day of the month, etc--all good portents in Chinese numerology. Frankly, I am just glad that it was designed and built by global engineering firm Arup.


The Stadium:
As I was driven in from the airport, the cabbie pointed out to me the new Singapore stadium, not yet completed, seen here in a Flyer-height view:


The reason this was of interest is because of what the Duck guide pointed out as we puttered around the bay: he directed our attention to a stand of colorful bleachers right on the waterfront:


While the stadium is under construction, this is the site of al the stuff that would ordinarily take place in it. Even football (soccer) matches. On the water. Literally. On a floating, full-size field!


Helix Bridge:
Another of my favorite "discoveries" while being the typical tourist was this bridge which uses the shape of the DNA molecule for its support. Dunno why, just thought it was cool:


Merlion:
This is Singapore's strange "mascot", recognising its history as a fishing village, and its original name, meaning "lion". The design was created in the sixties as a tool for the tourism board, and aside from the one in Merlion Park seen below, there are four other "official" ones (since the tourist board holds the copyright), yet a devotee can find a few others. If you are interested in the disappearing sights of Singapore, two good sites are Remember Singapore and Untourist Singapore.


The Duck tour and the Flyer take place basically in the marina, which is a freshwater reservoir, with its own seawall to keep the ocean at bay. You can see far out to sea from the peak of the Flyer:


Looking the other direction, here are two views of the cityscape:


So that's pretty much the tourist deal for a Saturday afternoon in Singapore; next up: what I did on Sunday, followed by posts on stuff like the Botanical Gardens, Asian Civilizations Museum, and of course, food.

Yangmyung Graduation

I am back from my vacation, and you can expect to see several posts about it in the next week or two. But first, here is the last activity of the school year, which immediately preceded the vacation. And I do mean immediately: the graduation ceremony for sixth graders ended about 12:15, I locked up my classroom, went home and changed, then caught a taxi to the subway. My flight left on time at 4:35.

The ceremony tales place in the auditorium, which is a kind of addition located on the roof of the school building. There are about 95 sixth grade students, in four classes, each wearing their own colored shirts. It begins with a few dance or musical performances by the graduates, while their classmates look on:


The classes go in order, receiving their diplomas and a handshake from the principal while a slide show behind them displays a pic and some other information, like what they want to be when they grow up.


Then, special achievements are recognised, there is some group singing, and the new graduates are serenaded by the fifth grade chorus:


They then exit to applause, and go to a reception downstairs. I stand by the door to congratulate them, and receive lots of thanks, handshakes and hugs.


It was about 4 C when I left school, and about 28 C when I arrived in Singapore at 10:15 local time. I had sixteen full days of sunshine in Singapore and Koh Samui, returning Monday night at about 10 o'clock. My walk to work the next morning--the first day of the new school year--was in good time, but an air temp. of 1 C. Sigh.

YM School Lunch

Cleaning up before I go on vacation ...

The food at my school is generally pretty good--I'd say 9 days out of 10; but occasionally they'll pollute some perfectly good pork with octopus tentacles or ruin a mushroom soup with odeng. Every day about lunchtime, they send out via the school's messaging system a PPT slide with a labelled photo of the day's meal.

I had the idea to collect a week's worth of these and make a post about school lunch. Then for some reason, they have stopped sending them, leaving me with only three days' worth. But here they are anyway:


They also publish a monthly calendar which lists the menu as well as possible allergy information and the average Calorie, protien and fat data for each week.

PSP Video

At each graduation ceremony of the extra HS program at Nambu district, there was speechifying, diploma-getting, and also video-watching.

Each term, someone in the office compiles photos and video from all phases of the program and puts them together in a pretty slick presentation. Whenever my picture comes up, the kids from my class always cheer and yell--God knows why, I try to be just as gruff and curmudgeonly as I can!

They haven't released this semester's video (and may not, since the program is ending), so here is the video from last semester:

Farewell, Saturday Class

Tonight was a sad "Farewell" to the Public Speaking class I've been teaching at Nambu District since 2010. The pay was very handsome, for a start; but more than that, it was an opportunity to work in my specific area, and to work with really bright students. Without having to go around regularly beating them about the head and shoulders, yelling, "Speak English! Speak English!" all the time. And also very high quality co-teachers!

Tonight we had the final graduation ceremony. One unexpected plus is that all the teachers received a 500 GB Toshiba external hard drive. I think once or twice before we've received a 8 GB USB drive, so this was nice. Still, since the program is ending at least partly due to SMOE's ongoing downsizing of the NSET program, I'd rather they spend the monwy on our employment. Oh, well.
As I said, we had the final graduation ceremony, followed by a very nice dinner--Korean sashimi. It's not my favorite, as there's not much tuna, but it was quite good. Quite expensive, with beer and soju, and all free, of course. I took pictures on my iPhone, and I'm trying to see how well I can create a blog post with pictures on my new iPad (uh, new to me) before carting the thing around on my upcoming vacation.

First is the place setting, with some samjang, sweet chili and some soy sauce. The second picture is the first main, with smoked salmon in the center; the ones with red to purple bits are quite fishy, and the almost pure white ones rather tasty. They were all impeccably fresh and buttery soft.


There was also some sushi, including shrimp and tuna roll, plus that grilled skinny fish you always seem to have in izikayas. Next came a plate of some non-fish sea life, including sea cucumbers in the middle (good, but salty), marine snails (top left), conch, and oysters on the half-shell with a bit of peppery greens and some hot sauce.


I neglected to take pictures of the assembled teachers, but I was already kind of tired of pictures because they make such a big deal out of group pics at the ceremony itself. So I have to end with a shot of one of the last items on our menu, 왕세우튀김, or king-sized batter-fried shrimp, golden, crispy and delicious.


This post should have taken about an hour and ten or fifteen minutes, but I'm now about two hours in because it is almost impossible to move the cursor around! It's easy enough in the word processor I bought, but the Blogger thing is infuriating. Anybody?

I have had to give up because you simply can't edit anything. Ridiculous! I'm not sure whether to blame the iPad or Blogger ...

Winter Camp--Done!

Well, as I feared, MS Movie maker failed to export our second film, Ghost Story, so it languishes in msmm format on my classroom computer.

So instead, I'll post some photos from the previous two weeks, during which I did Detective Camp (5th and 6th graders) and Toys & Games Camp (3rd graders). First, being detectives:


In Toys and Games, we had a Scottish Highland games lesson, wherein we made up our own contests of strength and also played Maide Leisg, or the "lazy stick" game:


We had our own Olympics; we learned how to play flick football and three-penny hockey; we played Scrabble Jr, Boggle, and Go Fish; we made our own mancala sets out of egg cartons and learned how to play:


We also made three kinds of paper airplane, constructed our own duck calls and had a contest to see who could build the tallest tower out of straws:


A good time, but quite a lot of work!

Vacation Event

No, no problems with my upcoming vacation, although the same can't be said for the young family in this video.

Actually, this is the first of two films that will be created by my Winter English Film-making Camp at Yangmyung Elementary School. I was cameraman (I'm not letting a 10-year-old monkey around with my camera!), director and editor. However, the idea and the script were 95% done by the students. I cut about three lines and changed a couple of words, but what you see was really them--they are all fifth and sixth graders. I think it's cute.


Day 1 of camp is film terminology and story elements; Day 2 is creating their story and writing the script (I then type them up for ease of reading); Days 3 and 4 are principal photography; Day 5 is post-production. We got things a little out of order because some students had to be absent today. We edited film one and will finish film 2 tomorrow.

Now, I've wanted to do film-making camp for years, but everytime I suggested it at my high school, I got turned down--they wanted only "conversation camp". Even though not enough students signed up for it to make, most of the time!

Well, last summer at the elementary, I had to do an extra week of camp, and I did movie-making. The students wrote and acted, I directed and edited. I know you don't remember seeing them uploaded here, and that's because MS Movie Maker failed to convert them to any format beyond the msmm format, after a dozen attempts on three or four different computers. Now that this one worked, I may try again.

In any case, hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to upload the camp's second movie, Ghost School. Stay tuned to this channel.

Farewell, 2013!

A long-standing tradition here in The Seoul Patch, stretching back all of six years, is to provide some kind of assessment of the previous year in the first post of the new one. So here goes:

• Another contract signed with SMOE, and two semesters at Yangmyung Elementary School successfully completed
• A fair amount of vacation travel, to new places including a week in Vietnam, ten days in Palawan, Philippines, and five days in Malaysia, plus a nice return trip to good old Koh Samui
• Read and reviewed forty books this year, most of them good. You can click on book report in the label cloud to see all of them
• Made two awesome new friends, said farewell to two friends moving back home, and welcomed two old friends from Yong-in training days back into Korea--hurrah!
• Moved to a new neighborhood in central Mokdong with the largest flat I've had so far; three convenience stores, two bakeries, a greengrocer, a butcher and dozens of restaurants quite nearby

Here is the BBC's annual pub quiz show on the events of 2013, albeit with a distinctly British perspective. Enjoy!

Last Book Report of 2013

• The Return of Sherlock Holmes and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - While some stories and their denouments, like the Empty House or the Norwood Builder, are indelible (at least to me), many others can surprise me over again upon each re-reading, as long as I have allowed sufficient time to pass. For my brain, softened by decades of bad living, ten years is ideal--The Blue Carbuncle and The Beryl Coronet don't ring a bell and so are as fresh as when last I read them. And besides, even if you do remember what happens halfway through, the storytelling is so strong, the language so lovely and the characters so comfortable that you don't even mind. Since the tales are now in public domain, the price is right, too--iBooks, the Apple version of Kindle, has them all downloadable for free, along with hundreds of literary classics that have stood the test of time. Oh, joy!
• The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes - Launched in the 1970s, Pioneer 10 and 11 were space probes set on a course that would take them past the planets then off into interstellar space. But by the late 1980s, trackers began to notice the spacecraft were inexplicably slowing down--the Pioneer Anomaly. What was causing the deceleration? The answer could be the long hoped for gravity wave, or even more tantalizing, so-called "dark matter" upon which a whole new type of physics depended. Or a software glitch. Or even more mundane, the failure to account for a small quantity of heat loss from, say, an oddly-shaped bulwark. I'm not going to give away the answer, but I will note that scientists are still looking for definitive proof of dark matter.
• The Frozen Sky by Jeff Carlson - Humans make their first contact with aliens, blobby denizens of Jupiter's moon Europa which live in the icy shell, the "frozen sky" that covers it. This book is a fast-paced action adventure, a political intrigue and a good quality hard sci-fi read. This is good stuff, and the ending hints at a sequel. I hope so, and that is an indication of high esteem.
• People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry - Disturbing true story of the disapperance and murder of a 21-year-old ex-British Airways flight attendant named Lucie Blackman who moved to Tokyo to make some money as a club hostess in the ex-pat friendly Roppongi district. She was not a stripper or prostitute, not a drug maniac, she was just looking for some adventure and quick yen to clear up her debts back home. A hostess sits and talks (or mainly listens) to frustrated milquetoast Japanese salarymen while encouraging them to buy more liquor. But they were also obliged to escort certain men to dinner outside the safe confines of the club--and Lucie disappeared while on an unscheduled jaunt to the seaside. The book details the grotesque inertia and incompetence of the Japanese police forces (while they cound not have saved her in this case, they could have locked up the perpetrator years before), the mind-numbing slowness of the judicial system, and the harrowing price paid by Lucie's family and friends because of the above. Lucie's killer was a Japanese of korean descent going under the name of Joji Obara, who had probably committed his first sexual crimes at age seventeen. He is incredibly wealthy and still uses his minions to harrass the book's author, a longtime journalist in Japan, from his jail cell.
• Brilliance by Marcus Sakey - Starting in 1980, there was a substantial uptick in the number of children born with abnormal (abnormally high) intellectual or sensory abilities. Because of their great skills, the "brilliants" as they were initially called began to take over many aspects of public life--for example, playing Wall Street so well they shut it out down--and the tide of public opinion turned against them. Abnorms, or "twists" are identified at an early age and packed off into "academies" at age eight; the government has a powerful agency to hunt down activist or terrorist twists. Meet Nick Cooper, a twist himself and key agent of the Department of Analysis and Response, who goes under deep cover to assassinate the most dangerous and devisive abnorm of them all, John Smith, only to discover that all is not as it appears. The plotting is good, the characterizations are fair, but the dialogue is always leaden. Still, an exiting and occasionally thought-provoking read.
• Operation Mincement by Ben Macintyre - Yes, the British spy agency did indeed dress up a dead guy as a Marine Captain, attach some brilliantly faked documents to him, and dump him from a submarine so that he would wash up on the Spanish coast. They knew that there was a good chance that Axis-leaning Spanish general staff would help the documents make their way to Berlin, where they may convince the Nazis that the Allies had no real plans to attack Sicily, that Sicily was just a cover for the real attack being developed for Greece and Sardinia. The story has been told in the book and the movie, The Man Who Never Was authored by Ewen Montagu, the MI6 officer who was one of the deception plan's key instigators. That book was intentionally and necessarily incomplete and mendacious in certain ways. Ben Macintyre's new work names names, fills in the blanks and shows us how successful the plot really was.

This is the first time I read every book on the list via an electronic medium. I still love paper books, and have a stack of them ready to go. Meanwhile, here is an interesting documentary of the printing press from Stephen Fry, in which he actually builds one:

Christmas Cake 2013

View previous cakes, all different: 2012 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.

A sure sign that it's Christmas Eve in Seoul? There are stacks and stacks of boxes inside and outside every bakery you come across. Inside each box, is a Christmas cake. A delightful tradition, and one which is welcomed here at the Seoul Patch, as you can see above.

This year's cake has a typically festive scene atop it (though you cannot eat the snowman!) and is made of moist and airy chockolate sheet cake with cookies and creme icing. Really tasty.


Merry Christmas and Best Wishes of the Holiday Season to sll my friends out there in the Patch and beyond!

Korean Food on QI

This season, the great Stephen Fry's "QI" TV show is devoted to the letter K. I posted about the section on Korean idioms a few months ago. This week's episode has a segment on a certain Korean food that begins with K--any guesses?

The segment begins at 27:00.

Ta-da-da-tah!

I am now officially a Super Waygook!


That's my avatar at an ESL teachers' resource/forum called Waygook.org. I never once ever even heard of this website in my four years as a high school English conversation teacher in Korea. During my initial months after being transfered to an elementary school, I really foundered for materials that would be accepted by my three co-teachers.

The materials left behind by the previous NETs left a lot to be desired, as far as I was concerned, but conversation/task-based/cultural education activities didn't seem to thrill my cos. And I have to say the prevalence of "bomb games" on the waygook.org website doesn't thrill me, either.

Nonetheless, waygook.org came to the rescue! There are lots of great materials available here--you have to become a member to access them, but it's free, so that's alright. I would urge anyone for whom it is appropriate to sign up. And start downloading!

Eric, a dear old director friend of mine from the theatre department at USC once said, "I've never seen a play so bad I couldn't steal something from it!" I have always thought of the classroom as a bit of "theatre", and I attended every teacher's conference with an eye to what I could steal from even the most boring presentation. What is an internet site like Waygook.org but a continuous online teacher's conference?

If a desription or idea looks remotely useful, DL it, then worry about putting it to use later on. I'm sure I've DLed hundreds of files I never saved, much less used or adapted for use. It's all about your individual style. The same goes with the materials I've added to waygook.org--the Christmas Quiz Game PPT I put up recently has over 500 downloads so far, but I bet it won't actually be used in 500 classrooms across Korea.

When Pigs Fly

Had a night on the town last weekend with good old Andy and even older Jerry. Andy now lives out near incheon and was talking up his new neighborhood, which I have to agree is pretty nice. His place is about two minutes from the subway, and another two minutes from our spot for victuals, "The Flying Pig Cafe".


It isn't really a cafe, but a pork restaurant, and quite a good one. I did a lousy job on camera, or otherwise I would be able to show you the lovely half-inch thick slabs of samgyupsal before sizzling. As it is, I can only show this:


... and the aftermath, with pals awaiting their porcine platefuls:


It was quite delicious.

Also in the neighborhood is one of those self-serve international beer places, and an Izakaya called "Sumo" that was reasonably nice, with the door-hangings surrounding each table to make a private niche, and comfortable chairs. The food was so-so but the conversation was excellent.

We didb't make it to saw-cha (fourth round), but we'll hopefully start with it next time I get out that way: a chicken place called "Oh! Ba Ma" or similar.