Back to MN for a few weeks

Sitting in Changi Airport, about to head back to the US to finish getting packed up, get the house ready for our renters, finish recording my tracks for the new Bad September album, and trying to be as social as possible in all the cracks of time inbetween.  I'll leave you for the time being with this photo of the cactus garden at Changi Terminal 1, because in Singapore even the airport has an exotic rooftop bar.

Let's Talk About The Climate

Singapore is located at about 1 degree north latitude.  It is 142km from the equator, making it about as tropical as it gets.  It is hot and sticky pretty much all the time, with the temperature ranging between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius (upper 70's to the upper 80's) throughout the night and day.  Here's the historical temperature over the course of 2016:










It gets a little cooler after one of the big, brief rains (which appear to happen suddenly and without warning every day or two) it gets a little cooler, but overall it is just hot.  I had an experience after a rain, in the shade, with a breeze in which it felt legitimately pleasant outside, but most of life is spent in air-conditioned spaces, well-situated high-floor condo breeze-ways, or waterfront parks.

Singapore doesn't really have a "wet" or "dry" season... reading the climatological distinctions between their two monsoon seasons (each of which have dry and wet periods) and talking to locals makes it sound a lot like splitting hairs.  Yes there are patterns, but it's mostly just a shift in which direction the storms come from, and whether it tends to rain in the morning or the evening.  Not quite the same as seasons as I'm used to them. I am assured that where the sun sets can vary by about 20 degrees depending on the season by both property agents and coworkers, but I haven't yet investigated sufficiently to figure that much seasonality could be possible this close to the equator.

I'm told that right now it's the "hot season", and the graph above seems to suggest that the average might be a few degrees hotter than it is in November, but the long-time Singaporeans seem to be cued into much smaller fluctuations in temperature than I can even detect.  We'll see I develop the same sensitivity over time.

Right now it just feels hot like a summer day in Minneapolis at the end of July.  It's humid, even at night, and I sweat like crazy if I'm outside for more than about 5 minutes.  I don't equate "sweat" with "discomfort" so it's not that bad, but it is one more thing to take into account when planning outings for dinner, drinks, or customer meetings.

Musical Exploration!

I went out last night to start exploring the local music scene of Singapore.  First stop was the Theatres On The Bay complex at the Esplanade, which is a set of performance spaces on the bay that include a couple of indoor venues of different sizes and also an outdoor amphitheater that has free concerts on weekends.  Basically Singapore's version of the Lake Harriet bandshell.

The show tonight was a cover band doing American hits by decade in each of their three sets.  I stuck around for the 70's set and was treated to some actually pretty amazing guitar work, but mostly just true-to-the-original covers.  Still fun.

Afterwards I headed over to The Hood bar and grill, which touts itself as a music venue, but mostly seems to have a stable of house bands that rotate through each night playing, you guessed it, true-to-the-original covers of American classics.  Saturday, though, they have "open mic night" for bands to play original songs.  It was sparsely attended (no pictures of _how_ sparsely unfortunately, as my phone had run out of juice), and the band wasn't exactly amazing, but it was proof that there are musicians writing and performing in Singapore.  After the open mic section the "late evening" cover band took the stage and I got more covers.  

From the online research I've done, it sounds like most of the _actual_ music scene occurs across the causeway in Malaysia.  The border town of Johor Bahru (the locals just call it "JB") seems to be where average Singaporeans go to avoid sin taxes and musicians go to avoid arduous venue/performance licensing processes.  I haven't been yet since apparently the border crossing can be a huge pain and I want to get my actual immigration paperwork sorted, but I figure that's going to be a necessary stop on my music scene exploration.

"Street" Food

Check out the guest post about Singaporean hawker centres that I wrote for my friend Yiling's Food+Adventure blog: http://foodthewongway.com/2017/05/17/singapore-hawker-centre/

Green Spaces

Today I went looking for monkeys and durians.  Both were ill-advised, one because of bodily harm, and the other because it's out of season.  I struck out on both fronts, but I did get to take a nice hike through one of the two larger park systems in Singapore.  The Southern Ridges trail is actually two trails, one along a catwalk just below the canopy and one along the ground, that link together a set of parks along, as you might expect, the southern-most ridge on the island which includes some nice look-outs and some legitimate jungle, complete with "do not feed the monkeys" signs.  Alas, the wildlife I saw was limited to butterflies, spotted doves, and some sort of larger bird of prey that did not have conveniently placed interpretive signage.  I did find a fence of lucky bells at a popular wedding venue at the top of Mount Faber and got into a long conversation about the geopolitics of North Korea with a nice older Singaporean gentleman.

Merlions

Elizabeth visited all 5 "official" Merlion statues while she was here last week.  Here are a few pictures of the ones we found together, with some more context after the photos:

The Merlion was a national symbol invented by the Tourism Board in the 1960's, more or less concomitantly with the expulsion of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation and it's establishment as a modern independent state.  Making a new country means, among other things, making new metaphors and symbols and the Merlion was a prominent one.  A turning point for the adoption of the Merlion as a personification of Singapore came with the 1979 poem "Ulysses by the Merlion" by Edwin Thumboo, a native-born academic and one of the founding fathers of English Singaporean literature.  The poem speaks to the far-flung, disparate origins of the people of Singapore and the value of unifying symbols to construct a national identity beyond the consumerism and economic forces that drove people together here, and also strikes chords that are becoming familiar to me around ethnic and racial coexistence.  Full text of the poem can be found online here: https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellthumb/site/poems/ulysses.html at Edwin Thumboo's university website, in all it's early-aughts web design glory!

Here we go!

For those who don't know, a work opportunity came up to move in my current role, along with our family, to Singapore for a few years.  It started off as a joke between Elizabeth and I, but we quickly fell in love with the idea for a variety of reasons.  

• We've been putting off a big Asia vacation for a long time, since we wanted a few weeks to get over jet lag and see a few different places to justify the long ocean crossing, and this was a great way to establish a home base and see lots of things in the region.
• Singapore has one of the best food cultures on the planet, serving as a culinary cross-roads between China, India, Thailand, and Polynesia.  The food is both amazing, and if you get it from street vendors quite cheap.  The first street vendor to be awarded a Michelin star is a chicken rice stall near the Chinatown MRT stop.
• It will be an awesome multi-cultural experience for the kids, and for us.  I've lived in Minnesota my whole life, and although Minneapolis is an amazing and diverse city, this will definitely broaden our perspective and expand the envelope.  It should do wonders for Amelia's Mandarin.
• There's very low risk, relatively speaking.  Singapore is a safe, stable city-state (so long as you toe the line) and I am transferring over doing the same job for the same company.  Even with the absurdly high costs of housing and school we've got a budget that works and allows us to live comfortably enough and also be able to travel and enjoy ourselves here.

Which is not to say that there aren't drawbacks.  Of course we will deeply miss our friends and family and community that we have been building in Minneapolis.  Although time won't stop in our absence, we're hopeful that the vast majority of the people and places we love will be there when we return.  Also, Elizabeth is taking a relatively large risk with her career, coming here with no job lined up and no firm plan for whether or not she'll find a job (remote or otherwise) or be our tour and travel coordinator for two years while managing the household.  Both options have pros and cons, and we'll be playing that one by ear.

Right now I'm in Singapore until the end of May to start to work out of the new office and get settled.  Elizabeth just returned to the US after a week here touring the school Maxwell and Amelia are going to and also getting the lay of the land.  I'll be back in the states frantically working to get our house ready to rent and our stuff ready to move from Memorial Day weekend until roughly June 25th, and then we pack all our belongings into a shipping container and our family into an airplane.

We are planning on getting an apartment with some extra space so that we can always have room for visitors.  In fact we've already got our first houseguests lined up for February 2018... plane tickets from the UK were apparently too cheap to pass up to Tom & his family will be coming out for a few weeks.  Singapore makes a great "home base" if you want to have an extended trip in south-east Asia, and we're more than happy to provide free lodging and show folks around!

East Coast Lagoon hawker center

Elizabeth is off exploring looking for a second course while I hold down our table that's close enough to the water to get the sea breeze.  It's either finally not hot, or I'm starting to acclimate.