Singapore - the first leg
We go to Singapore three times on this trip reinforcing the importance of it as a hub for the region. After getting up at sparrow's we took the obligatory selfie at the airport with our Cabbie, and took to the skies via Singapore Airlines.
It's 20 years since we travelled with them and we were rather impressed that their high standards had changed little in the interevening time - little things like toothbrush kits even in cattle class. And that they serve Singapore Slings! But now it's in an impressive A380 - we were happy passengers.
Our hotel was the Four Seasons owned Regent - a rather anonymous edifice reeking of the 80s atrium style and largely catering for the 20 something aspirational locals. Though Paul did find his new car in the driveway. Yep it's a Bentley GT3-R - yep more than $600ks' worth. Arabic number plates, naturally...
The city has changed greatly which we hope to explore later in our trip and that the in house TV has a Russian channel also indicates so has their tourism base.
The Russian TV networks being available nowadays in hotels etc is something we've also noticed in our recent travels. Also Russian being offered as one of the ten or so languages for the commentary on hop-on/hop-off buses. I doubt this would have been the case 20 or 30 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe order in which languages appear on hop-on/hop-off buses and similar contexts gives a rough guide to which ones are on the rise in terms of tourist volumes. Last time in Europe we were surprised how close to the top Spanish often was, also Portuguese. I guess this was partly due to the fact that Brazil was booming at the time, as was much of Spanish-speaking Latin America...
When we were in Brazil, they were busy importing skilled workers from both Spain and Portugal displaced by the PIGS issues. The Portuguese could understand Spanish but not vice versa!
ReplyDeleteI think I told you my observation in Miami that Portuguese seemed almost to have become a required language for customer service roles such as with the rental car agencies or hotels. Of course, this had nothing to do with the Portuguese!
DeleteI can remember waiting in a rental car agency and the couple in front of me were Brazilian. They wanted to get a GPS unit with the rental, and were keen to be assured that it had been configured for 'Brazilian Portuguese'. So many Brazilians were coming to the US at the time that there was pressure (from tourist-related industries) to include Brazil among the list of countries eligible for the visa waiver program.
Re the comment re the PIGS, I also heard of some adventurous Portuguese workers chancing their arm in the oil industry of formerly Portuguese Angola around this same time...
When we were in the US IN 1990, the US electrical retailers were already catering for the Brazilian tourists picking up electrical gear, much in the way our parents had invaded Japan and Hong Kong. They'd started stocking dual voltage stuff - which was to our advantage when buying our first decent CD player... Brazil is a big country:).
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