2012 The Year In Pictures

I was in Singapore in late February, working.  It was hot and humid but I was indoors, mostly, below decks.  We went out in the evenings for drinks and dinner in the Garden District, Orchard Road,  the westernized area.  The hotel was directly across the street from a prostitution hook-up spot, the Orchard Towers, a.k.a. “four floors of whores”.  We sat and watched the sometimes amusing action on the street when coming back from dinner.  (None of my team participated.)

Singapore is huge and amazingly calm.  Traffic is dense but no one uses their horn.  Workers ride in the back of small flatbed trucks, each of which is marked with how many people it can carry and its maximum speed.  We were grateful to have an air-conditioned minivan.

 

We took the subway a little.  The distances are great in this massive city-state.  You can easily spend an hour on the subway getting across part of the island.  It took us an hour or more each way to get from our hotel to the boat.

Towards the end of my visit I got a call that my dad had taken a tumble.  It was bad; a sharp blow to the head against a concrete step.  He was bloodied and cracked several vertebrae.  Not so good for an eighty-five year old man. 

My Mom cleaned him up, put him to bed.  They had breakfast the next morning and then drove to the local “doc in the box” clinic which immediately put him in an ambulance dispatched to the emergency room.  He ended up with surgery to repair the cracked neck, got some screws put in, eventually made it home.