We spent last weekend in Germany. It was my dad’s 75th birthday. My sister had arranged everything. She found the hotel, a castle above a city that we had chosen because it was located such that the drive was about the same for each of us. She had booked a package with an excursion to town, tea one afternoon and a big celebratory dinner the night before the birthday. The lot wasn’t cheap, but we had a lot of fun and we spent more time together as a big, though still incomplete, family than we had done in a long time. The kids – ours and my sister’s – had a blast. They romped through the castle and discovered new things all the time. On Sunday, we drove back to Switzerland and at night my plane took off for Singapore.
Singapore was a bit of a letdown. The conference was a dud. There were more than four hundred attendees, but traffic at our booth was very slow, and the scientific program didn’t excite me to venture into the freezing lecture theaters. The conference was held at the National University, which didn’t seem surrounded by anything worth seeing. Neither was our hotel, ten minutes away. Besides the hotel, the university and the view from the windows of the taxis shuttling us back and forth, I didn’t see much of Singapore.
View from my hotel room.
For being a densely populated city, Singapore exudes a surprising degree of calm. Traffic is easy. The number of cars is apparently – and very sensibly – regulated by high taxes on their purchase and the requirement of a license to operate. Together, they can easily push the price of a small car to three times of what you’d expect to pay. For sensible policies, it seems to help to have a government with a certain aversion to dissent.
Singapore enjoys a tropical climate. It is warm during the day and slightly less so at night. It is warm in summer and warm in winter. The concept of seasons has little meaning there. It is never oppressively hot. The sun is often hidden behind thick clouds that frequently empty themselves on the town, refreshing things a bit. The drawback is the humidity that hovers between 95 and what feels like 110 per cent.
Most mornings, I went for a run in the string of elongated parks near the southern edge of the main island. One of these parks was a secondary rain forest, full of lush greens with enormous leaves and colorful flowers. Signs warned of monkeys and exhorted appropriate behavior. Do not carry plastic bags when encountering a monkey, one prohibition read, though how one is expected to anticipate a monkey while deciding whether to set out for a walk in the park with or without a plastic bag was not revealed. Don’t feed the monkeys, read another. I didn’t see any monkeys.
These were my first runs after being diagnosed with cancer and having half of my colon removed and my hemoglobin values largely restored. I enjoyed the runs, but my speed wasn’t what it used to be before my red cell count had dropped. My usual five-minute (per kilometer) average was quite a bit out of reach.
This surprised me a bit. With my regular rides on the trainer, I’ve got my legs back to where they should be, at least visually. Right after the operation, they were pathetic sticks that scared the shit out of me. I looked a bit like a starving child in Africa. Now they are muscular and pleasingly sculpted and still free of fat, but not all is good yet.
Having never used a power meter or sat on a bike trainer before, I have no way of judging my physical shape with any accuracy, but I had the feeling I was doing all right. The runs in Singapore told me otherwise. At the very least, I need to keep up the work to get back into a halfway decent shape, never mind surviving cancer.
We went to dinner one night in an area of colonial remnants given over to the demands of youthful nightlife, with bars, restaurants and roof-top terraces, but even there we didn’t walk around much. It wasn’t the trip for it. I should have come a day earlier or left a day later, but there wasn’t the time for it. After the conference dinner, the night before the conference ended, I headed to the airport for the overnight flight back to Zurich.
During our night on the town, we ate in the Coconut Club, a restaurant so hip it couldn’t be bothered with a proper menu. There was just one main dish based around a big chunk of grilled chicken or a fried fish. Diners customize the experience by picking from a large variety of side dishes. In our case, these turned out unnecessary, not because we aren’t individuals but because the main dish was plenty.
Drinks, like cars, are extremely expensive in Singapore. We stayed briefly in a rooftop bar but headed back to the hotel quickly. This wasn’t the trip for sight-seeing or merriment. I should have come a day earlier or left a day later, but there wasn’t the time for it. After the conference dinner, the night before the conference ended, I headed to the airport for the overnight flight back to Zurich.
The plane touched down shortly before 8 am. I was home by 9:30. Less than eight hours later, I’ll be back at the airport to see off Flucha and the children. As every year, they are going to Argentina for Christmas. I’m staying in Baden for chemo, with my mom a much appreciated company. Not much is going to happen in the next two weeks.
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