Cloud Forest

Episode 12 1:15:15 Mark

We finished watching Little Women, the insane Korean dramatic series, this evening. A while back the two younger girls, Oh In-hye, youngest of the three sisters, and Park Hyo-rin, daughter of the villain and his wife, have run away to Japan. Later on we get a passing comment from Choi Do-il, the inscrutable boy-friend / psychopath, that the girls are in the Netherlands. Shoot, Choi and Oh In-joo, the eldest sister, board a plane for Europe to try and locate them because they are sure the bad guys are after them. However, a crisis arises and they bail out of the plane. Well, not literally, it's still at the terminal and connected to the jetway. No big deal, just another bit of nutso behavior. 

So the girls are on their own and we don't hear any more about them till we get almost to the end of the last episode when we see them wandering around some fancy botanical garden (top). Where is this place? The show doesn't give you any clues, and since the last clue we had was the Netherlands, I go looking there, but I'm not finding much. So I feed the screen capture to Google and up pops this image:

Katie Lolas at Cloud Forest

Ah Ha! The girls aren't in Europe, they're in Singapore. 

Gardens by the Bay
Cloud Forest are the two snail like, glass structures along the water

Cloud Forest is part of Gardens by the Bay, a large botanical garden near the Marina Bay Sands Hotel.

P. S. Tech talk - Katie's image is on Instagram, which doesn't enable saving images, so I printed the page to a PDF file and then fed that file to an on online program to extract the images. Whole lot of monkey motions just to give Katie credit for giving me a clue.

Fullerton Hotel Singapore

Fullerton Hotel
Just after the 10 minute mark in episode 8

We've been watching Little Women, an insane Korean TV series. I have more to say about the show, but right now I just want to mention the Fullerton Hotel. The leading couple are attempting to collect 70 billion won (roughly 50 million US dollars) that has been siphoned off from a politician's web of illegal finances. When you are operating in this rarified atmosphere, what's a few zillion won for a nice place to stay? So the guy books the girl a room at the Fullerton. While the manager is giving her a tour of the place he mentions that it was built by the Duke of Devonshire. While there is such a Duke, and has been since the 14th Century, I could find no connection to Singapore, much less the hotel. I wonder if this is something that was taken from the original book by Louisa May Alcott.

Fullerton Hotel

The Fullerton was built in the 1920s and was originally an office building. The cupola was a lighthouse but is now a restaurant.

Fullerton Light atop the hotel

Central Singapore. The Fullerton is just to the right of the bridge in the center of the image. The three column structure on the left is the Marina Bay Sands Hotel.

View of downtown from the swimming pool atop the Marina Bay Sands

Singapore is 3,000 miles from Seoul, South Korea, where most of the show is set. So just a short six hour plane ride about the same distance as from coast to coast in the USA.

Future Perfect

Stamford Raffles

William Gibson, presumably the William Gibson, has a short piece about Singapore on Wired. At first, before I knew who wrote it, I didn't like the writer's attitude, he sounded like a whining, liberal twerp. But about half way through he mentions that he writes science fiction, I check out the byline, and all of a sudden my attitude shifted from 'stupid twerp' to 'maybe there's something here'.

The whole place sounds a little bit like Star Trek, all clean and spiffy and well behaved, but boring. Of course, if you are engaged in intellectual pursuits, a boring physical world is good.

The best part is that I learned who Raffles was. In stories I've read, the name Raffles is attached to some venerable old hotel, but there was never any explanation. Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore around 1818.

Singapore might be capitalist today because the USA fought the communists in Vietnam.

Via Detroit Steve

Singapore Jet Fighter Exercise

RSAF Exercise Torrent 2016 - Montage
The Repulbic of Singapore Air Force conducted an exercise that included operating jet fighters from a public road. The video shows how much trouble it is to prepare a roadway for use as a runway for supersonic aircraft. The best part though is the title of the soundtrack: Mobile Suit Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans