Arne Bevaart’s Culture Shock

I was practically crying with suppressed laughter reading this list (although as it went on it was looking suspiciously like a laundry list of complaints about how ludicrous Singapore can be), and here are my favourites (my comments in italics):

11. Your idea of a good night out consists of having dinner at a hawker centre, drinking beer, and then going to another hawker centre and eating again. Yeah, baby! Nothing’s better than the post-meal meal. I’m planning on having one of these in a couple of days myself!

25. You think that $100,000 is a reasonable price for a Toyota Corolla and $1,000,000 is a bloody cheap for a bungalow, but $5 for a plate of fried noodles is a barbarous outrage. This almost killed me, it’s so funny. Neil just found out that an apartment in a complex where I used to live is for sale — over S$2m! The loss his pal suffered on selling his WRX was about ten times more than what we paid for our little Peugeot. And $8 for a small piece of sambal stingray is extortionate.

26. You believe that not being able to get decent roti prata outside Singapore is enough to keep the best and the brightest people from leaving. Neil is almost in this camp — it’s the only thing he really and truly misses. He’s too good for the frozen stuff, so no prata for him.

32. You see nothing unusual about an organization of trade unions spending more time owning and operating supermarkets, drugstores,amusement parks, nightclubs, and financial services outlets than planning the next strike. I don’t even think of the NTUC as a trade union any more, they do everything! Heeheheheheheeee.

It’s a massively long list. If you make it all the way through, you’re more patient than I am.

• 14 Feb 2007