1. After what seemed like a rather long back-and-forth exercise, I finally turned down two professional opportunities this week.
I had been in talks with two different firms, both based in Hong Kong, to consult with them, in bidding efforts for Aviation projects in Asia. Unfortunately, in this industry - of Airport Design/ Planning and even Architectural Design in general, there really are few chances of being able to work remotely. While my previous firm in NYC, had made fantastic arrangements for letting me do the same one day a week (I used to work from home on Fridays in NYC), this is not really an option, in most other Architecture/ Urban design firms in the world. Both opportunities did present themselves with exciting prospects, yet they would only be possible if I made Hong Kong my base.
With our current state of flux that entails shuttling between three cities with lots of intermittent travel sprinkled in between, adding another home-city to the mix did not seem feasible at this point. Besides, my counter-offer to them - to base myself out of Singapore or Mumbai (in the near future) and travel to HK for short periods of time (say 2-3 weeks at a stretch) did not work out either. Any other industry and this would have been a win-win for both parties - as I have seen with several friends around here, who base themselves in Singapore, but work for firms all over the world, with frequent travel. Yet, it is in Architecture that we still depend so much on 'team work', thus necessitating a physical presence in the office, every single day! I wonder, how long it will take for us to change that? Or will we ever be able, to change that?
Eventually, I declined both opportunities for lack of being able to move base to a city (Hong Kong), that I've fallen hopelessly in love with and wouldn't mind living in someday. Just a bit outside the radar for now, though!
The good news however is that both the job-offers are sort of open-ended, which means when we are done with our global mobility assignment on behalf of the Hubster's company in mid-2014, we could potentially re-consider the 'next' home-city and try out living in HK, for a bit. Or not. Who knows what the future holds?
2. As per the original travel plan, we were to fly to London this week, to bring in the daughter's 2nd birthday there. But as we learnt this week - this was not to be!
As I have mentioned in a few earlier weekly updates, the 'last-minute' planning nature of our trips off late, is thanks to the Hubster's sporadic project status, here in Singapore. Sure enough, the nicely planned vacation, that was to revolve around the baby's three consecutive weekend birthday celebrations, saw an unfortunate change in plan.
Hubster's client made a personal request, asking for his physical presence at the office in Singapore, all the way until the end of August. In a never-before happenstance at his end (as compared to this being an usual occurrence in some of my ex-offices), he had been asked to 'move out' his vacation plan, until after the project deadline (which had moved from July to August, thus causing the change of date in our trip as well).
While we were both largely disappointed at first, our solace came in the fact that the trip was not canned; merely postponed. Still, it meant moving around a lot of dates and more importantly affecting some major plans that were already in the making - the most important one being - the plan to move base from Singapore to Mumbai. This unfortunate turn of events did however lead to a fortunate realization - that the firm would now be picking the entire tab of our summer trip! Clearly the change in plans did not seem that painful anymore!!
New itineraries were determined almost immediately. Not to be downed by the change in dates of travel and in keeping with the time/ research that our friends in the two cities had vested in the respective party-planning, we've decided to still have the daughter's super-belated birthday celebrations in both cities, in late August - early September respectively. She honestly doesn't care and will most likely think it's another one of those 'monthly birthday' celebrations that her Mommy has gotten her used to all this time anyway. And we still get to take our trip, albeit almost towards the fag end of our stay here in Singapore, which is not that bad somehow! Win-Win!
Time to sing the Holiday Rap soon -
"We are going on a summer holiday.
If you want to go yo sven.
We are going to London and New York City
and we take a little piece of Amsterdam, Right!"
Well, just swap Amsterdam with Wales there, for us and we are good to go!
3. Mid-week, I met up with a friend who co-founded a company called Go! Places a few years ago, to present Asian history, heritage and culture in a fun and more accessible way. In order to veer the company in a newer direction, he has been conducting a research-study, using frequent travelers as his database, to gauge their travel-habits. We had a fun afternoon discussing various aspects of travel, alone and/ or with kids, travel-planning, the factors that tie into why we travel and where we travel to and finally if and how, we freeze our travel memories, once we return from our trips. Do check out his site at the link above and feel free to reach out to him, if you like what you see!
4. Zoe turned Two on Saturday this week (July 13th). Given that our London plans got shelved, we decided to spend the birthday locally, doing what she likes to do, all weekend long. In a nutshell, that meant swimming, eating, running around aimlessly, blowing candles (over and over again) off of cakes, going animal-fish-reptile-bird or human baby spotting (Yep, I know that last one sounds slightly freaky, but we have a big 'baby' lover in the house) and dancing - all weekend long. So that's exactly what we did, the entire weekend.
We also figured we'd put the 'forced-to-stay-local' weekend to good use and go explore Sentosa - an island off of Singapore's mainland, famously known to be Asia's playground, with it's theme parks, beaches and multiple resorts. The Aquarium was our point of interest for the weekend, since it is considered to be the World's largest aquarium, as per the Guinness Book of World Records. We thought it was beautifully designed, but overall the experience fell short of being 'Oh-so-awe-striking' or anything, for any of us. In fact, the three of us loved the ride to and from the island to the mainland more than the actual aquarium - since it involved a cable car. It was nice to see the little one associating this cable-car ride with her past cable-car experience, which was in Hong Kong to get to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island, to give him a 'Hi-five', as she thinks! It was amusing to hear her repeatedly say "We are going to HongKong" as we took the cable car to Sentosa and back. How awesome would it be to have HK just a short cable-car ride away!
5. The weirdest thing occurred this week - weird, considering it occurred here in Singapore - the country with one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Where stealing is a crime; a punishable offence. Where the punishment meted out to perpetrators is so drastic, that 'stealing' is hardly existent here.
Having said the above, to be robbed, in Singapore, is a novel and a unique experience! In fact, if someone loses something in a public place, more often than not, the object-in-question sits right there, untouched, un-stolen, where it was left last by it's rightful owner, waiting to be picked up on his/ her return. I have talked of this in some of my previous posts, but also had a chance to experience my very first case of a 'misplacement mishap' as I term it, over this weekend.
We were meeting friends for brunch at this lovely cafe within the Goodman Arts Centre, called Cafe Melba. Openly spread out over a big patch of green, this cafe is perhaps one of the best semi-outdoor spaces that I have been to, for brunch, here in the city-state. Abuzz with families and kids all over, it was an ordinary Sunday afternoon.
The couple and their son, whom we were meeting, brought Zoe a bag full of wrapped gifts, as a belated birthday gift. As is the norm in Singapore, one parks strollers outside the restaurant and usually leaves behind other bags/ diaper bags/ belongings there too, especially as this is a place where nothing goes amiss, usually. 'Usually' being the operative word there, please make note!
We had a lovely lazy brunch, spread over a couple of hours, perhaps even longer. We were catching up with these friends after a while and finally getting to meet their 5 year old son, who we had last seen as a newborn in NYC. Upon settling the check, when we came out to collect our stroller and the bag of gifts, we found the latter gone, from where we had left it last. (I had placed it next to the stroller, tucked away so efficiently that only someone who intended to take the bag, would be able to do so. A 'room for error' or having taken it 'by mistake' was thus hardly possible.)
With the bag gone missing, we looked around for it all over the place. The waitresses helped too in our futile attempts to recover the missing bag of gifts. It had vanished into thin air, perhaps - considering in Singapore, no one takes anything that does not belong to them!
Since there had been a small baby shower going on, on the table near where the stroller was parked, we presumed that perhaps someone in that party had taken the bag home mistakenly, considering it to be one of the 'baby shower' gifts. But the gifts in this bag were meant for Zoe - who is a 2 year old, so we presumed that they would soon stand out oddly enough, among the other 'newborn' gifts and be returned to the restaurant.
Left with nothing else to do, we took down the contact name of the person who paid the bill, from the baby-shower party and thought we'd try to track him down online. A quick 'google' search of this contact person's name revealed his identity on LinkedIn.
Since then - I have sent out a few emails to him, explaining the situation and hoping that he'll realize his party took home a gift which was not meant for them. No answer - to date!
It remains to be seen, if we'll receive a response at all. The 'case of the missing bag of gifts' remains unsolved. At this point, there is as much a chance, that the bag was stolen, as there is that it was mistakenly taken.
We left the place feeling terrible, since our friend had taken time out to specifically plan the bag of gifts for our daughter, which included a book for me as well as several lovely hand-me-down books from her son, among other wrapped presents.
This incident has served as an eye-opener for us - towards the complacency that people living in Singapore get used to (ourselves included) - of leaving their things around in public places, thinking they wont go amiss, because this place is as safe as it is made out to be. It might be time to take the public announcements more literally, that yell in your face - "Low crime does not mean No crime!"
On that rather helpless note, the week ended! Hoping the next week brings some word back from Mr. Mistakenly-taken-the-bag-and-disappeared! Or we'll just have to believe that even Singapore is not as invincible as it seems!
Until then, stay well!
Love,
Shweyta
I had been in talks with two different firms, both based in Hong Kong, to consult with them, in bidding efforts for Aviation projects in Asia. Unfortunately, in this industry - of Airport Design/ Planning and even Architectural Design in general, there really are few chances of being able to work remotely. While my previous firm in NYC, had made fantastic arrangements for letting me do the same one day a week (I used to work from home on Fridays in NYC), this is not really an option, in most other Architecture/ Urban design firms in the world. Both opportunities did present themselves with exciting prospects, yet they would only be possible if I made Hong Kong my base.
With our current state of flux that entails shuttling between three cities with lots of intermittent travel sprinkled in between, adding another home-city to the mix did not seem feasible at this point. Besides, my counter-offer to them - to base myself out of Singapore or Mumbai (in the near future) and travel to HK for short periods of time (say 2-3 weeks at a stretch) did not work out either. Any other industry and this would have been a win-win for both parties - as I have seen with several friends around here, who base themselves in Singapore, but work for firms all over the world, with frequent travel. Yet, it is in Architecture that we still depend so much on 'team work', thus necessitating a physical presence in the office, every single day! I wonder, how long it will take for us to change that? Or will we ever be able, to change that?
Eventually, I declined both opportunities for lack of being able to move base to a city (Hong Kong), that I've fallen hopelessly in love with and wouldn't mind living in someday. Just a bit outside the radar for now, though!
The good news however is that both the job-offers are sort of open-ended, which means when we are done with our global mobility assignment on behalf of the Hubster's company in mid-2014, we could potentially re-consider the 'next' home-city and try out living in HK, for a bit. Or not. Who knows what the future holds?
2. As per the original travel plan, we were to fly to London this week, to bring in the daughter's 2nd birthday there. But as we learnt this week - this was not to be!
As I have mentioned in a few earlier weekly updates, the 'last-minute' planning nature of our trips off late, is thanks to the Hubster's sporadic project status, here in Singapore. Sure enough, the nicely planned vacation, that was to revolve around the baby's three consecutive weekend birthday celebrations, saw an unfortunate change in plan.
Hubster's client made a personal request, asking for his physical presence at the office in Singapore, all the way until the end of August. In a never-before happenstance at his end (as compared to this being an usual occurrence in some of my ex-offices), he had been asked to 'move out' his vacation plan, until after the project deadline (which had moved from July to August, thus causing the change of date in our trip as well).
While we were both largely disappointed at first, our solace came in the fact that the trip was not canned; merely postponed. Still, it meant moving around a lot of dates and more importantly affecting some major plans that were already in the making - the most important one being - the plan to move base from Singapore to Mumbai. This unfortunate turn of events did however lead to a fortunate realization - that the firm would now be picking the entire tab of our summer trip! Clearly the change in plans did not seem that painful anymore!!
New itineraries were determined almost immediately. Not to be downed by the change in dates of travel and in keeping with the time/ research that our friends in the two cities had vested in the respective party-planning, we've decided to still have the daughter's super-belated birthday celebrations in both cities, in late August - early September respectively. She honestly doesn't care and will most likely think it's another one of those 'monthly birthday' celebrations that her Mommy has gotten her used to all this time anyway. And we still get to take our trip, albeit almost towards the fag end of our stay here in Singapore, which is not that bad somehow! Win-Win!
Time to sing the Holiday Rap soon -
"We are going on a summer holiday.
If you want to go yo sven.
We are going to London and New York City
and we take a little piece of Amsterdam, Right!"
Well, just swap Amsterdam with Wales there, for us and we are good to go!
3. Mid-week, I met up with a friend who co-founded a company called Go! Places a few years ago, to present Asian history, heritage and culture in a fun and more accessible way. In order to veer the company in a newer direction, he has been conducting a research-study, using frequent travelers as his database, to gauge their travel-habits. We had a fun afternoon discussing various aspects of travel, alone and/ or with kids, travel-planning, the factors that tie into why we travel and where we travel to and finally if and how, we freeze our travel memories, once we return from our trips. Do check out his site at the link above and feel free to reach out to him, if you like what you see!
4. Zoe turned Two on Saturday this week (July 13th). Given that our London plans got shelved, we decided to spend the birthday locally, doing what she likes to do, all weekend long. In a nutshell, that meant swimming, eating, running around aimlessly, blowing candles (over and over again) off of cakes, going animal-fish-reptile-bird or human baby spotting (Yep, I know that last one sounds slightly freaky, but we have a big 'baby' lover in the house) and dancing - all weekend long. So that's exactly what we did, the entire weekend.
We also figured we'd put the 'forced-to-stay-local' weekend to good use and go explore Sentosa - an island off of Singapore's mainland, famously known to be Asia's playground, with it's theme parks, beaches and multiple resorts. The Aquarium was our point of interest for the weekend, since it is considered to be the World's largest aquarium, as per the Guinness Book of World Records. We thought it was beautifully designed, but overall the experience fell short of being 'Oh-so-awe-striking' or anything, for any of us. In fact, the three of us loved the ride to and from the island to the mainland more than the actual aquarium - since it involved a cable car. It was nice to see the little one associating this cable-car ride with her past cable-car experience, which was in Hong Kong to get to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island, to give him a 'Hi-five', as she thinks! It was amusing to hear her repeatedly say "We are going to HongKong" as we took the cable car to Sentosa and back. How awesome would it be to have HK just a short cable-car ride away!
5. The weirdest thing occurred this week - weird, considering it occurred here in Singapore - the country with one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Where stealing is a crime; a punishable offence. Where the punishment meted out to perpetrators is so drastic, that 'stealing' is hardly existent here.
Having said the above, to be robbed, in Singapore, is a novel and a unique experience! In fact, if someone loses something in a public place, more often than not, the object-in-question sits right there, untouched, un-stolen, where it was left last by it's rightful owner, waiting to be picked up on his/ her return. I have talked of this in some of my previous posts, but also had a chance to experience my very first case of a 'misplacement mishap' as I term it, over this weekend.
We were meeting friends for brunch at this lovely cafe within the Goodman Arts Centre, called Cafe Melba. Openly spread out over a big patch of green, this cafe is perhaps one of the best semi-outdoor spaces that I have been to, for brunch, here in the city-state. Abuzz with families and kids all over, it was an ordinary Sunday afternoon.
The couple and their son, whom we were meeting, brought Zoe a bag full of wrapped gifts, as a belated birthday gift. As is the norm in Singapore, one parks strollers outside the restaurant and usually leaves behind other bags/ diaper bags/ belongings there too, especially as this is a place where nothing goes amiss, usually. 'Usually' being the operative word there, please make note!
We had a lovely lazy brunch, spread over a couple of hours, perhaps even longer. We were catching up with these friends after a while and finally getting to meet their 5 year old son, who we had last seen as a newborn in NYC. Upon settling the check, when we came out to collect our stroller and the bag of gifts, we found the latter gone, from where we had left it last. (I had placed it next to the stroller, tucked away so efficiently that only someone who intended to take the bag, would be able to do so. A 'room for error' or having taken it 'by mistake' was thus hardly possible.)
With the bag gone missing, we looked around for it all over the place. The waitresses helped too in our futile attempts to recover the missing bag of gifts. It had vanished into thin air, perhaps - considering in Singapore, no one takes anything that does not belong to them!
Since there had been a small baby shower going on, on the table near where the stroller was parked, we presumed that perhaps someone in that party had taken the bag home mistakenly, considering it to be one of the 'baby shower' gifts. But the gifts in this bag were meant for Zoe - who is a 2 year old, so we presumed that they would soon stand out oddly enough, among the other 'newborn' gifts and be returned to the restaurant.
Left with nothing else to do, we took down the contact name of the person who paid the bill, from the baby-shower party and thought we'd try to track him down online. A quick 'google' search of this contact person's name revealed his identity on LinkedIn.
Since then - I have sent out a few emails to him, explaining the situation and hoping that he'll realize his party took home a gift which was not meant for them. No answer - to date!
It remains to be seen, if we'll receive a response at all. The 'case of the missing bag of gifts' remains unsolved. At this point, there is as much a chance, that the bag was stolen, as there is that it was mistakenly taken.
We left the place feeling terrible, since our friend had taken time out to specifically plan the bag of gifts for our daughter, which included a book for me as well as several lovely hand-me-down books from her son, among other wrapped presents.
This incident has served as an eye-opener for us - towards the complacency that people living in Singapore get used to (ourselves included) - of leaving their things around in public places, thinking they wont go amiss, because this place is as safe as it is made out to be. It might be time to take the public announcements more literally, that yell in your face - "Low crime does not mean No crime!"
On that rather helpless note, the week ended! Hoping the next week brings some word back from Mr. Mistakenly-taken-the-bag-and-disappeared! Or we'll just have to believe that even Singapore is not as invincible as it seems!
Until then, stay well!
Love,
Shweyta
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