A friend (yo DC!) was telling me the other day about a possible world record for a Chinese public convenience. See details here of the 1,000 toilet 3,000 square metre facilities. Indeed, China is well served with Public loos, while they don’t cut the mustard in terms of English requirements for modesty, they are usually pretty well looked after for a public loo and they’re everywhere.
This rather begs the question why it is so common place to see so many people relieving themselves in public. As a particularly cringe-worthy example… We were sat in a restaurant downstairs from muppet HQ the other day with a visiting client when a young lad of about 8 edged his way between the parked cars so that he could piddle in the flowerbed directly outside the window next to where we were sat eating lunch, his mother waiting on the pavement a few yards away. If the client noticed, he never showed it for a second.

Blog-lag-tastic, we actually got back from Thailand about three weeks ago but here it finally is…

It rained a lot the day of the marathon which meant that for the runners it was cooler than it would otherwise have been, very welcome but wet like I’ve never experienced before, not so good. Monsoon season.

The next couple of days where intermittently rainy and sunny but always a pleasant temperature so you didn’t really mind. We managed to explore a bit and fit in Para-sailing, elephant trekking and white-water rafting. The second half of our week was perfect weather for lounging around the beach and the resort which is exactly what we did. Splitting our time between massages, the beach, the pool, eating and drinking.

We also had a couple of nights down in Patong with ‘A’ (top dude from our day with the elephants) Taking in the PhantaSea show and some Thai-boxing.

I guess patong (or what I heard about it) was why I’d avoided Phuket the last time we went to Thailand. In the end we had a couple of good trips down there but I think that what really made the holiday was being in a nice quiet-ish location where other places were accessible but not in your face.

Photos finally posted in the gallery.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-07/pl_music

As anyone who has every turned on a T.V. set in China is aware, there is a story called ‘Journey to the West’ about a monkey king getting enlightened, there is also a pig in it. Brits of a certain age remember the Japanese one that was dubbed into English in the late 70s.

Well apparently they’ve made an opera and Damon Albarn is involved which is all well and good but not why I’m writing this. The bit that made me laugh is that apparently there is an instrument called a Klaxophone used in the production which Damon Albarn designed himself. After spending some time in a Chinese city he bought one of each type car horn manufactured in China and turned them into a musical instrument.

Quality.

I’ve just spent 3 and a bit days in Singapore. Singapore is cool, in a very non-literal sense. This was only my second time in Singapore and to be honest I didn’t get to see very much of the place.

I arrived late on Tuesday for a course that ran from Wednesday to Friday (ITIL Foundation). Aside from popping out to buy a MacBook Pro (yippee) I didn’t do much apart from attend the course and study, yes I know that’s not how courses are supposed to work .

I did manage to get Friday night out on the town, which gave me a chance to catch up with several people I was glad to see again and grab a few Singapore Slings. Bizarrely, and quite by chance, ending up in the bar where I all too briefly spent my 26th birthday.

I’m not really sure what this means but it occurred to me as I went to leave on Saturday morning that I had, sub-consciously spent most of the week trying to evaluate Singapore, I guess primarily against the question of whether I would like to live there and would D?

I don’t think I’m any closer to the answer other than that I’m more sure that spending a week in a posh hotel and only visiting Clarke Quay and Orchard Road is probably not the best way to decide. Fortunately I don’t have to decide as I have no better reason for considering it than that I thought it might be a nice place to live on the basis of a) the weather and b) the whole east-meets-west thing.

Singapore seems to be near perfect on the surface: multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, perfect weather. Clean and courteous with impressive architecture and good green spaces. A successful economy and geographically located such that it would be a great launch pad for exploring the rest of Asia. The truth undoubtedly must be more complex but that may very well just add to the richness of the place.

As an aside, this post is brought to you by the magic of Free Wi-Fi throughout Hong Kong Airport. Like so many things in Hong Kong – I’m left thinking, why doesn’t the rest of the world do it like that?