Thursday, October 2, 2025

This Photo? Or this Photo? How About This Photo?

 One thing that has been particularly vexing for me during this trip to a whole lot of iconic places is the number of young people who spend vast amounts of time getting exactly the right shot for their own personal agenda and ignore the beauty that is not themselves.  We were very surprised to see young people and not just girls standing in front of what is the eight wonder of the world and spending no time looking or absorbing, but all the time posing and flicking hair whilst Angkor Wat looks on and goes, ‘seriously, WTF?”  ….or whatever that would sound like in Hindi or Buddhist.  If an ancient building actually spoke.

Outside the Unification Palace in Vietnam, two young girls, perhaps in their 20’s stood and pretended to pose walk, or pose get called, or pose a fast spin.  In Hanoi, this woman took about 20 minutes to pose at the side of the pool casually ‘glancing’ over her left shoulder.  Some young guys at Cambodia, did what I can only describe as K-Pop’s version of grunge, who didn’t seem to be interested in 1000 years of history, just their own look.

Tonight took the cake!  There was a bar and a restaurant full of people and a young lady spent several chunks of time which added up to around 30 minutes just posing and taking photos and posing and taking photos.

She has probably now posted them to Tik Tok, or Insta or whatever is the lastest, but little does she know, she is now posing for all of us.  

You can’t see the garter around her leg, but who am I to judge?

Incidentally she also travelled up in the lift in that outfit, but again, I am the wrong generation to even understand.

I am going to say ‘hey National, do something that is actually going to make a difference for eyes all over the world, please ban social media!”

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Palms of Debate

 The hotel that we are staying in is lovely and most everything seems to happen on the 7th floor.  The gym, the bar, breakfast and of course the swimming pool.  No such suspended infinity pool or my nightmares, but still very nice.

One thing that we have debated is whether the enormous palm trees around the pool are real, or fake.  It is quite the great debate.  I suggest they are real, whilst Sepa is pretty sure they are fake.


I don’t know much about palms, but I would suspect that they need a reasonable root mass to hold them up, so where is that?  How is that?

Before I leave, I am planning to go up to the palm and stab it with a fork to see once and for all, if we get sap or we get some sort of building material.

I have heard that Singapore is really tough on crime, so willful damage is probably up there, but don’t worry, I will be in stealth mode, 

however, if I don’t see you for a couple of years, please send me care packages.

Amazing Architecture!

 The buildings in Singapore are pretty amazing!  There must be some sort of covenant that means not all the buildings are just boring boxes.  Maybe they have something like Melbourne where 1% of the cost of a building has to be spent in making it creative or arty from the outside.  

This building is the ArtScience Museum and it has 4 storeys inside.  It is designed to use no power and it is cool inside from the design.  Apparently they seldom use the lights either.




I actually don’t think this photo does it justice for how huge this building is and on the top is apparently an enormous infinity pool.  Haven’t they seen that movie where Jason Statham kills the villain by sucking him out of the infinity pool and he plunges to his death?  In his togs.  Somethings are just not worth picturing in your head.


One very cool item was the water that gets collected off the roof when it rains and it goes down a concave shaped roof and into the hole and into the pool below.   It was very cool!