No Pics Today

Sorry. Met my cousin David yesterday, who had parked his container ship in Singapore for a few hours with the express purpose of forcing Nikki and I to drink lots of 660ml bottles of Tiger Beer. As a result I forgot to download my new set of pictures to Nikki's laptop and create a blog entry before she went to work. David got back on board to drive his ship round the corner to Malaysia last night where he'll park it up again today (sorry for all the nautical terms, I hope I'm not confusing you all, I've been reading a lot of Patrick O'Brien recently) before showing his replacement what he's broken this trip and taking a taxi back to Singapore to fly home this evening. Hopefully he'll have time to meet up for a couple of glasses of mineral water and maybe a garden salad before he goes.

Nikki took me on the MRT yesterday, which is Singapore's underground system. It's great. Really clean. Very cheap. Very fast. Even the escalators down to the platforms travel about 6 times faster than normal. They have this great system where you buy your ticket and get a plastic card. The two fares I paid yesterday were SG$2.30 and SG$2.50, but the clever part is, if you keep hold of your card at the end of a journey and pop it back in a machine, you get SG$1 back. The cards look like they're reusable, possibly from the same machine shortly after they've been deposited. No-one chucks their tickets away like they do outside every other underground station I've ever seen and the cards are recycled over and over. Brilliant.