You have to have a Certificate of Entitlement to own a car, the COE is sometime the same price as a car! The government is concerned that too many cars will gridlock and wear the road system - are you listening Hong Kong? New COE open up as cars are scrapped every year.
The transit system is fully accessible to the point where it was decided that the Asean Para athletes would use it instead of coach buses. What a Luxury!
Caning is still meted out for crimes - not sure which crimes exactly but I saw a couple of stories regarding sex assault. Hmmmm...
There is an air quality crisis here from raging forest fires in Sumatra. Rainforest has been logged to death then fires set to clear land for palm oil plantations. Local retailers are starting to boycott paper products made with Indonesian sourced paper in an effort to make the land clearing less profitable...now if only every could just boycott palm oil.
Voting is mandatory here. If you do not vote (and don't have a good reason) you lose your right to vote and the right to run but you can reapply to get back on the voter list. It costs $50 even if "gave birth" was your reason for not voting.
It's the sale of gum here that is illegal, not the chewing of it. This is what our town car driver informed us this morning enroute to the airport. He also said that his COE cost $75,000.00 SGD. Woah!
I'm hanging out in the Kris Flyer Silver lounge at Changi airport with Jen, my medical escort. We have a flight to Tokyo at 5:50 am then a long haul to Toronto. Not quite the route I planned originally but given the bombs in Turkey (Ankara) perhaps this redirect is not so bad after all.
For the second time in my life insurance has worked for me and worked well. Sherree and I have an annual package that we get with our credit card for about $120/year. It pays for itself after three car rentals but it also includes out of country medical for up to 28 days. This is sufficient for our typical US trips and when we do something longer we just get an extension. For this foray into the world I had to pay around $350.00 extra. I balked a little bit but decided it was worth it...and it was. I paid nothing out of pocket for my ambulance, one week in hospital, bag of drugs, medical escort, business class flight home, and town car home from airport. I can't stress enough the importance of this type of insurance. OHIP will cover a small portion but you, or in my case the insurance company, have to pay up front and recoup it later. Good luck with *that*!
One more flight left NRT-YYZ. Sigh, another fabulous travel experience comes to an end. And just in case you are wondering, my fractured pelvis hasn't deterred me one bit from thinking about doing this again but, definitely, no more upper beds, bunk, capsule or otherwise!
Happy Thanksgiving!
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