Merry Christmas from The Passengers

Merry Christmas to all of you from warm (and still slightly sweaty) Singapore. The Passengers have enjoyed a wonderful Christmas day with new friends. Passenger J ate his own body weight in roast potatoes and Passenger H got very excited about Yorkshire Puddings.

We hope that you are all having an equally lovely day wherever you are and we wish that we could be there to share it with you. However we will not be sharing our big stack of presents...

Doors - Bali

This gate includes the Bahasa greeting "Selamat Datang" or "welcome."

People in Bali traditionally live in a family enclosure called a kampong (translated elsewhere in Bahasa-speaking regions as "village").  The compounds include numerous buildings for sleeping and cooking and farming, and though extended families often live together, they can spread out inside across multiple houses.  The Hindu heritage of Bali means that each kampong contains any number of shrines including a seat for a deity beside the principal entrance and usually a small sacred precinct inside.  Additionally, small offerings are placed daily in front of the doors of individual buildings. Here are some of the elaborate doorways that we saw around Ubud during our holiday.  Click the link at the bottom left to see all the pictures.

Many kampong entrances have been modified to accommodate Bali's ubiquitous motorbikes. A Chinese-inspired alternative to the more popular chair-style shrines can be seen at left.

A kampong portal wedged between shops along the road.

Hawkeye Style

Thank you, Deadspin, for posting this video to a wider audience.

College football, a sport of rivalry, pageantry, and not a little bit of id, concluded its regular season last weekend.  Now we await bowl season, a calendar of thirty-four arranged matches lousy with corporate sponsorship overlaying America's holiday calendar.  It all culminates on 7 January 2010 when Alabama and Texas play in the Citi BCS National Championship for the "Coaches' Trophy presented by Dr. Pepper."  The whole spectacle of college football with its marching bands, cheerleaders, and huge stadiums bedecked in partisan apparel only intensifies for these events.

All those trappings of competition might be symptomatic of unfortunate tribalistic fervor with disturbing resemblances to militant nationalism.  However, it should be remembered that many parts of America have embraced university teams because of a dearth of other amusements.  This would be especially true of many state schools.  Notice a pattern among many of these other top-ranked teams in addition to Alabama and Texas: Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, and Iowa.  Most of these places are long on rural heritage and without a local professional team.  Too little  urban entertainment should help explain why aspiring rapper Notti Boy took the time to record the largely wholesome video above in support of his team, University of Iowa Hawkeyes.  It sounds like hip-hop in the Midwest has not changed much since the start of the decade. Imagine the even greater limitations of supporters for high achieving football squads at religious institutions like BYU (Brigham Young University, a Mormon college in Provo, Utah) and TCU (Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX).

Iowa and Georgia Tech play in the FedEx Orange Bowl on 5 January 2010.

Champuan Ridge - Bali

The forested interior of Bali, Indonesia.

The Passengers are returned from a weekend on the island paradise of Bali.  This was our first trip south of the equator and the weekend had numerous other highlights, like surfing lessons and big cocktails at Naughty Nuri's. However, we especially enjoyed seeing the interior and countryside of the island around the artsy hangout of Ubud.  Here are some images from our hike along Champuan Ridge and around the villages nearby.  There's lots to see so this post has been broken into two pieces.  Click the link at the bottom left of this entry to look at the rest of the pictures.

Atop Champuan Ridge.

Bringing down the stalks from the ridge.

Unexpected Guest

Here's a picture of the uninvited guest who greeted us on Thanksgiving (26 November) evening after we returned from a pleasant French meal on Club St.  These geckos are everywhere in Singapore and do often make their way inside houses and businesses.  On Wednesday I spied one crawling across the cornice at the aforementioned French restaurant's sister establishment.  Fortunately, the creatures are harmless, seriously shy, and eat lots of pesky insects.  I put on kitchen gloves and bundled our visitor out of the apartment. I didn't put him in the elevator, assuming he could walk his way down the walls from the eleventh floor.

UOB Building - Bangkok

The so-called "Robot Building" on Sathorn Road was finished in 1986. Our hotel (Ascott) stands at left.

Slowly but surely the images from our trip to Bangkok are migrating onto the web. We must hurry up because the Passengers fly to Bali tomorrow for a long weekend. More photography will be conducted. This entry showcases the tower for United Overseas Bank in Bangkok.

The building stood next door to our hotel, the pleasant Ascott, on Sathorn Road in the city's main banking/commercial district. Several other banks have buildings just down the street, but our neighbor was the only office block that looked like a Gobot (video link: sound alert).

The so-called "Robot Building" was designed by Thai architect Sumet Jumsai and completed in 1986 for Bank of Asia, later acquired by UOB. Notice the tower has four distinct masses stacked atop each other with the top layer dramatically smaller than the lower registers. The building has the silhouette of a square snowman and rectangular projections along the sides that could be mistaken for arms. Two round windows facing the street suggest eyes, and several levels have octagonal attachments akin to monstrous lugnuts. I was most amused by the feature unfortunately on the backside of these images, but visible from the Ascott swimming pool. A flat blue contraption appended onto the "head" hosts two sturdy antennae, but the combination looks like a wireless router writ large.

Shophouse Living

The view from the entrance to the converted shophouse home featured in this week's "Great Homes & Destinations." The high ceilings, whirring fan, and indoor garden help moderate the tropical heat. Image from the New York Times.

The New York Times today shows off a domicile in Singapore in this week's "Great Homes" feature. The piece tells of two pretty young management consultants (jealous? me?) outfitting a classic shophouse with modern designs and local materials. The article taught me that Dahlia Gallery has great furniture offerings and that bespoke hardwood furniture is terribly cheap in Indonesia.

The shophouse facade; note the use of European-inspired plastered ornament. More images from the NYT article here.

Shophouses are an architectural distinctive of Southeast Asia. The houses are built as a series of narrow, contiguous properties. A shophouse is typically two or three stories tall with the ground level dedicated for commercial use and the upstairs given over to accommodation. The business level recedes from the street, creating a sheltered walkway along a row of adjacent shops. Most are ornamented with versions of classical pilasters, bold verticals against the horizontal structures, between the units or beside the shuttered windows. Often each house displays its own color scheme of contrasting colors, a convention that puts on display the riotous palette favored by the Peranakan merchants that prospered in this region.

Today as Singapore has urbanized, most shophouses have been converted to single-use buildings, either as high-end single-family homes or as locations dedicated to business. As houses they carry many of the romantic associations New Yorkers feel towards brownstones or San Franciscans do towards row houses. So shophouses can be hard to find at a reasonable price. The romance has also prompted commercial development of shophouses for upscale boutiques, like Club St/Ann Siang Hill. Unfortunately, ersatz shophouses - lined up, canopied over, and air-conditioned - form the main structures of the monstrous Clarke Quay development.

The shophouses along Club Street host arty shops, international fashion brands, swish offices, trendy restaurants, and even a few of the longstanding Chinese clan associations that gave the road its name. Leone Farbre has more photos on Flickr.

The strange canopies that allow visitors to Clarke Quay to experience air-conditioning whilst still outside. Image from the materials firm Macalloy's website.