Beach Clean-up

This weekend I participated in the beach cleanup effort by Seven Clean Seas. It's a young organisation, just a year old, with the aim of reducing the waste in our seas. Now it's turtle hatching season here in Singapore, and the poor turtles have trouble climbing up to the beaches with all the plastic garbage.

The turnout was great, I don't know how many people but must've been in the hundreds.

We split to four groups and went to different beaches. It's quite shocking really how much garbage there end up at the shores of the clean Singapore. Here's a before picture of the beach where I ended up:

With so many people, the cleanup was quick, took a bit over two hours. Here's the after photo:

Overall, a lorry-load of garbage was collected, estimated to be up to 3000 kg! 😲

Singapore

So let's start by what's so great about this small island nation I'm calling home nowadays.

1. 691 all vegetarian eateries, and counting! Haven't seen that amount in any other city, despite what any most-veg-friendly rankings say. I haven't done a research on the database though, if you know of places with more, feel free to comment below. It's a lot though, whether more exists or not. My favourite places, you ask? Loving Hut at Joo Chiat, and Herbivore in Fortune Centre. Speaking of Fortune Centre, more vegetarian eateries there in one shopping centre than in the whole country of Finland...

   

   My favourite dish, the almond crumb filet, at Loving Hut

2. It's green. Really, surprisingly green for a city state. Trees shading almost every road, gardens all over the place, and some tropical rainforest with wild monkeys and wild boars!

   

   Lower Peirce Reservoir

   
   

3. Good infrastructure, like fast internet and good public transport. The MRT is highly reliable and the coverage keeps improving with new lines coming up. It can get crowded during the peak hours but not to the level of having to push people in unless there's some exceptional circumstances.
4. It's safe, everywhere in the city and any time of the day. Obviously you can't get zero crime in a city of 6 million people, but the crime rate is extremely low so one doesn't have to worry about it.
5. It's well-connected. Changi has been chosen the best airport in the world too many times to count, and overland or over the sea you can visit Malaysia or Indonesia pretty easily (although the borders can also get crowded for the weekends). So one doesn't have to feel limited by the small land area of the country itself.

Of course there's also down-sides to everything, like they aren't good at recycling, could use more press freedoms, and the political system could use more options, but on the balance of things I find this the best I've ran into thus far. :-)

10 years

It appears this long forgotten blog still exists, and so do I, so let us resume... Not going to revamp on everything from the past 10 years, just starting fresh. But the "few months in each country" thing seems forgotten, I'm rather settled in Singapore and liking it. There's still travels though, not to worry. :-)