PS: Surely, this title could also be won by a male immigration official. With gender equality at the workplace actually seeming to work in Singapore, though, it might just be won by a woman. Who even knows?

After that it is back to Germany for almost a month. But we are going to be leaving again before October — more on that later. You can tell, I am not spending much time in Germany at the moment. Honestly, I like it that way — the rest of the world is just too interesting.

Hah, but wait for 2010! Give Klinsmann another four years and you are going to see us win our next World Cup in South Africa!

For this very reason, the Singapore government is scared of Singlish — they fear that Singapore as an investment destination will suffer because nobody understands the locals. This is quite funny — the government even runs a public “Speak good English!” advertising campaign. They also make sure that all official communication is spoken in perfect British English, for example the announcements on subways (including the mandatory please mind the gap) or the newscasters on tv. All this cannot, however, belie the fact that it is really hard to understand people around here — after three weeks in the country, I am still hardly used to it.

While you can certainly make fun of Indians for trying to evangelize vegetrianism, you cannot argue about their food which is excellent and all over Singapore.

We also had the pleasure (?) of trying out “Hainanese Steam Boat” (that’s from China, btw) — it’s basically a wok heated at your table filled with broth (it resembles fondue). Now, fondue is great so when some Chinese woman tried to lure us into this slightly seedy restaurant we let ourselves be dragged in. After all, lots of enthusiastic locals were sitting on plastic chairs devouring what seemed to be excellent food. Well, they just seem to have a different taste. We ordered a beef and a fish plate (sounds ok, doesn’t it?) and got some undefinable beef innards along with incredibly gross mussels, fishcake (it’s some kind of condensed fish that feels like foam when you chew it) and some very yummy liver. Oh, I forgot the stuff that felt like a sponge in your mouth and tasted like nothing (it was on the fish plate but God only knows what it was…).

It was such a great cultural experience. Whatever. As you might have guessed we left half the stuff untouched. All along people were looking at us as if we were from Mars — they didn’t seem to be very used to Westeners there. I was starting to feel bad about being such an intolerant Westener when some of the employees noticed the fact that we were not even touching their best stuff and started giggling unscrupulously (while standing right next to us!). In the end, we all had our laughs, the food wasn’t too expensive and it was quite the experience. Honestly, though, I am not going back.

I just want to highlight this little feature of our appartment: it has a pool attached right to the house. As hot as it is around here, this is awesome. I love the place.

Stay tuned for more stories from Singapore…