5. Our first Cocktail in Singapore

Singapore Zoo is definitely worth visiting. It’s one of those places that spends a great deal of it’s time trying to get across the message that deforestation is ruining the planet and animals are becoming extinct at the rate of one species a day. We went for the “night safari” which starts at 7pm but beware, if you decide to go to this it take about an hour to get there via the MRT and the number 138 bus and when you arrive the queues are massive.

As I’m sure you already realise I hate queues so after standing in the queue for the tickets and then standing in the queue for the tram ride round the enclosures and then standing in the queue for the “creatures of the night” show I was ready to punch someone. Not PC I know but during one of our queue sessions the heavens opened I we were saturated which made everyone angry.

There were several animals here I’d only ever seen on one of David Attenborough’s shows including lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos, clouded leopards and porcupines to name a few so it was great to see them in the flesh. However, after spending all that time in the dark and the wet, we decided to head back to the city after the creatures of the night performance (which involved far too many people being crammed into an amphitheatre where idiots kept using flash photography and scaring the performing nocturnal animals – other than that, definitely not one to be missed).

It was getting late when we eventually reached the MRT stop nearest to our hotel but we decided we should probably have our first drink. Obviously a Singapore Sling springs to mind but we thought we should save that for another day and have it in the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel were it was invented. After a quick look at the guide book we decided to head for a bar called City Space which is on the 70th floor of the Swissotel Hotel.

It was amazing. The view from there over the neon spectacular that is downtown Singapore is breath-taking, so is the cocktail menu – from a price point of view I mean. I felt totally out of place as I was still wearing my sweaty, drenched zoo clothes and everyone else was sharply dressed and ordering S$800 bottles of champagne. We had one cocktail each which were both delicious but the bill was S$63 which is the most I’ve ever paid for two drinks. Call me a tight fisted Scotsman if you will but that’s enough to by 4 bottles of Buckfast Tonic Wine which is enough to keep a family in the east end of Glasgow going for at least 2 days.

It got me to thinking on the walk home that so far I’ve not seen any drunks. Also I’ve not seen any litter, any grafitti or any beggars. When we flew into Changhi Airport the hostess made the usual pleasantries over the tannoy which were followed with “…and please remember that trafficking drug into Singapore carries the death sentence!” No wonder the crime is so low in this city. People are too afraid to get an outrageous punishment for whatever they’ve done wrong. I’m sure that if you get caught stealing you get your hands cut off, if you get caught jay-walking you get your feet cut off and if you get caught having anal sex then the giver has his bits cut off and the receiver has his anus stitched up! Bizarrely enough in the middle of Orchard Rd which is the main shopping street, there is a shop call House of Condoms and it’s full of vibrators, pornography and other smut. Not that I went in of course!

4. Eating my first authentic Indian Meal

My Dad is Indian. I spent a year living with my Indian relatives in America. The favourite dish in the UK is curry. Despite this it may surprise you to know that I’ve never eaten a proper Indian curry. The stuff that you get back home is a kind of bastardised version developed for European appetites and the stuff my Dad and my relatives make always seems a bit… Well I guess the word is “muted”.

So we decided to go in search of an authentic Indian restaurant and check out the chow. After searching around Little India for a while we stumbled across a quaint looking place called Ghandi Restaurant. It was full of locals so we thought that was as good as any Mitchellin awarded place.

We were told just to sit anywhere and a sheet of banana leaf was placed in front of both of us. I was going to ask for a menu but before I could a nice gentleman carrying a big bowl of boiled rice came up to us and said simply “Rice?” We nodded and a couple of big scoops were slapped onto each of the banana leaves. He walked off despite our confused looks and returned shortly with three moderately sized silver containers and planted a spoonful of lime pickle, aloo (spiced potato) and a sort of coconut cabbage onto the leafy plate and walked off again.

The bloke who had originally told us to sit down then arrived at the table carrying two popadums, two silver cups and a silver jug full of water. We had still yet to say anything! His next line was a classic.

“Do you want lamb, chicken or mutton?” That was the extent of the entire menu but we were not put off. His accent was so think and difficult to understand that Isla said, “Yes, I’ll have the lime chicken please”. After sorting out the translations we decided to each have the chicken (without lime) which arrived on a little plastic plate and was cooked in a masala type sauce. It tasted great and as there were no spoons or forks to hand we tucked in with our fingers which seemed to be the done thing.

When we had eaten everything on our leaves, the rice-man left a little note on our table which said “S$10 for 2 persons”. We washed our hands in one of the many sinks and took the note to the till. I handed over S$20 which I though was a steal for the food we had just eaten not to mention the fact that we were stuffed since the portions were very healthy. As we turned to leave (no pun intended) the man at the till called me back, “Boss, you left too much,” and handed me back S$10. I couldn’t believe it. Not only had we just had a tasty and filling meal but it had been in a restaurant and it was costing less that £1.75 a head. OK, so the menu was a bit lacking in choice but when you compare that to the fact that our breakfast in the hotel had cost us S$9 for a bowl of cereal… Well let’s just say I think I’ll do without my coco-pops tomorrow morning.

3. Law-Breaking in Singapore

For those of you who have been to Singapore you’ll know that there is very little crime and the punishment for breaking the laws can be severe. Isla and I spent a great deal of today on the MRT train system exploring the city. Although there are tons of air conditioned malls you often have to spend time outside in the oppressive heat and almost visible humidity to get from one mall to another. If you want to see other parts of the city then it’s a good idea to use the MRT. However, once you are out of the centre then air conditioning is something you don’t see much of.

We had spent time wondering around Little India and by the time we got back to the MRT I was ridiculously thirsty. As we heading down an MRT escalator Isla said, “I’ve got a bottle of water in my bag if you want some,” and handed is over. I took a huge glup and as I wiped my lips I realised that everyone was staring at me. Over the tannoy came the voice of a pre-recorded message, “Drinking and eating on the MRT or in any of the MRT stations is illegal and punishable by a S$500 fine.”

Whoops! As I shoved the bottle bag in Isla’s bag I realised that there were no less that 5, yes 5 CCTV cameras pointed in my direction but luckily nobody came to arrest me. Staying in Singapore is a bit like living in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. The city has the distinct feel of a community that has given up some of it’s freedom in exchange for an ordered and relatively crime free society. To each their own I guess and I suppose a government like the one here would soon sort out all the Neds and benefit cheats back home.

2. Singapore bus tour

Depending upon which airline you fly with there are certain perks in Singapore. Our boarding passes granted us a S$3 bus trip round the whole city. There was about 13 stops and you could get on and off when ever you wanted as there was buses every 15 minutes or so. Sounds great doesn’t it. Well it would have been, if we had managed to stay away for it.

Firstly it took us over an hour to find the bus stop. You could see the buses from our bedroom window as they were parked outside the mall opposite our hotel and it seemed like a simple task of walking over the bridge from the hotel to the mall and then getting outside to the bus stop. Of course it wasn’t. The malls here are everywhere and they are designed like Theseus’ labyrinth; easy to get into and impossible to get out. Inside the mall was so disorientating that whenever we found an exit it was nowhere near the bus stop. Our final solution was to get outside and walk around the exterior of the whole mall until we found the bus.

We paid our S$3 and got on and the driver told us it would take 2 hours to do the whole loop. We got comfortable with our map of the bus route and tried to follow where the bus was going but soon Isla was asleep on my shoulder and it was all I could do to not fall asleep and slip off my chair into the isle. Before I knew it a voice over the tannoy said, “Everyone must alight here for Botanical Gardens. The next bus will be along in 15 minutes.”

I didn’t quite understand why we had to get off but we did and it was a good opportunity to stretch our legs and get something to drink. Sure enough the bus turned up 15 minutes later and we got back on. The strange thing was that it was the same bus and the same driver. I think that he must have nipped off for a cigarette break or something.

Anyway, we made back to the mall a further hour later having almost no memory of what we had seen. Singapore is a very strange place as you are never really quite sure which country you are in. One minute it looks like Tokyo then it becomes Colonial Britain then looks like part of New England in the States. Also there is Little India and Chinatown so it’s all very confusing especially if you’ve just arrived and been awake for 26 hours.

On the way back to the hotel we decided to get some food and found the mall’s food court. However one look as a shop called “Pig guts and organs” changed our mind and we just decided to head to bed. Luckily though we walked past a Pizza Hut of all things and grabbed some food in there. Once back at the hotel I think it took about 8 seconds to fall asleep and the bed was the most comfortable one that I’ve even slept in. Then again I was so tired that the mattress could have been made out of crushed glass and fire and I would have fallen asleep just as quickly. Well maybe 9 seconds.

1. Flying to Singapore

20kg weight allowance is a joke! Especially if you are semi-emigrating to another country. I’d spent my remaining days in Scotland at my parent’s house packing and unpacking my suitcase. I’d even had it on the bathroom scales a bunch of times to test it’s weight. None the less it was always floating (excuse the reverse-pun) around the 29kg mark. How the hell are you supposed to fit your entire life into 20kg? I’ve no idea. If you also take into account that I had to take a couple of text books and my kilt then you’ll realise that I had no chance.

I was departing early on the 28th Dec and my parents were coming to the airport with me. Not to see me off, you understand, but because they just happened to be flying off to Spain about 1 hour after we left for Heathrow. As I packed my case for the last time I asked my Dad if there was going to be room in his car for all three of us and our trappings. He said that it shouldn’t be a problem but a while later tried to confirm his reservation at the long stay car park, they had no record of it. So instead he booked a taxi.

It suddenly occurred to me that there was going to be 4 of us in the car now with the bags instead of 3.

“They have estate cars,” was his reply to my concern. So I finished my packing and went to bed.

My alarm went off at 4am and got showered and dressed and helped the folks with their cases down the stairs to wait on the 4:30am taxi. Low and behold, when it arrived it was not an estate but a regular sized car (even though it was a Mercedes) and needless to say there wasn’t enough room. So after lots of footering with the bags things ended up with me in the front and Mum and Dad in the back (I’m bigger than either of them) with my massive suitcase rammed into their sides and there cases in the boot. Mum was not happy but I found the trip to be most comfortable.

At the airport we met up with Isla, my girlfriend, and her family who arrived just before us. We had been seeing each other for 2 years and living together for the last 18 months so she had agreed to come with me on this little adventure. Actually she had been quite instrumental in making it happen, but that’s another story.

Unusually, we had to wait in a huge queue in the foyer. Apparently the airline we were travelling to London with had just installed a new check-in system and none of them knew how to work it. Mind you, the woman at the desk seemed more concerned with her computer than the weight of our bags and seemed to ignore the fact that they were over the limit. It took ages to get through it all but my Dad has about a million frequent flyer miles with that company and pulled some strings to get us into the VIP lounge area. That would have been excellent except we were so delayed by the new check-in software that we merely walked through it as a short cut to the plane. Rubbish. We said our goodbyes to the families and the first leg of our journey had begun.

The flight down was excellent. By excellent, I mean it was very, very fast and therefore over rapidly. It’s not that I dislike flying but I wanted this behemoth of journey to be over as soon as possible and the faster the pilots flew their planes the better. Besides we were now already running late thanks to the crappy new check-in nonsense which had ultimately caused us to miss our take off slot and leave 40 minutes late.

Now although there were some queues and delays at Glasgow, these were nothing when compared to Heathrow. What a disaster that airport is. It’s total chaos. Nobody seems to know what the hell is going on and we spent ages being herded from one “zone” to another.

It began once we had collected our bags from the Glasgow flight and then headed from Terminal 1 over to Terminal 3. As we arrived, I scanned the departure board and I couldn’t see our 12noon flight to Singapore. I got the e-ticket out my packpack and sure enough it said 12noon. Isla was rechecking the board and noticed a Singapore flight at 11am and wouldn’t you believe it, but it had the same flight number as ours. So for some reason they had changed the departure time without informing us and that was effectively making us an additional hour late for this flight.

Meanwhile another airline’s line was merging with ours creating mayhem. Some bloke in a day-glow yellow jacket pretending to look important stood next to us with his hands on his hips staring at the complaints and arguments breaking out in the crowd. “Everyone getting mixed up,” he muttered to himself and Isla (who was beginning to pull her hair out with the stress so far) couldn’t resist and said, “Well sort it out then!”

“How am I supposed to do that?” said the security guard. That really instils confidence in the Heathrow’s upgraded security level.

As he walked off in the opposite direction I grabbed a hold of another official looking person and told him about the change in the departure time. He seemed unphased and said that we still had plenty of time to catch the flight. He seemed decent enough so I took his word but how close we came to not getting the flight.

We ended up waiting for almost an hour to check in. And the first thing the lady said did when we put the bags on the scales was make that inhaling hissing noise that people do when there is a problem. “Your bags are too heavy,” she says. No shit. Between us we were 16kg over and she was about to hit us up for £160 excess baggage charge. However, we laid down the “emigrating” card and she forgot about the bags and started going on about how nice the weather would be in Oz and how she was so jealous etc. So a narrow escape there.

Once that was done we were directed to the departure lounge and this is where things became even more mental. There was the longest queue for passport control that I’ve ever seen as they had a make shift station that everyone had to go through to have their hand luggage searched for liquids. I kid you not when I say that the end of that queue was almost in a different part of the airport and approximately 500metres from the search station. When we joined the queue it was 10am and we only had an hour left till the flight took off.

After a few minutes of worry some women walked past shouting, “Anyone flying at 11am or earlier?” We stuck our hands up and she looked at our boarding passes and told us to follow her. This should have been easy but she had about 30 other people following her and if that wasn’t bad enough she was only about 4 and a half feet tall so it was impossible to see where she was going. Eventually we managed to bypass the liquid station and get straight to passport control.
Once there we had our passports and tickets checked and then we had to put everything through the x-ray machine including belts and jackets. Once through there I thought we were home free and was about ready to start enjoying our trip. But no. There was a separate x-ray machine that everyone had to put their shoes through. By now we are sure we are going to miss the plane as it’s 10:50am and we are in the middle of a shoe free-for-all with about 50 other folk all kneeling down to put their shoes back on and consequently blocking the path out of passport control.

We grabbed our shoes and flung them on as quick as possible as the sign in from of us told me that the walking time to hour gate was 20 minutes! Running time more like. We bolted along people-mover after people-mover and finally we got to the gate where there was… another queue. It seems that everyone else was shafted by the queues and checks and there was no way that the plane was going to be able to take of in time. So finally, at 11:45 we took off.

At last we were on our way to Singapore for a 5 day stop over before heading to Sydney. The flight itself was pretty uneventful but very long so we were glad when we landed. There were no queues here and we were out exceedingly rapidly and within 20 minutes had checked in to the hotel.

The hotel was amazing and our room was on the 31st floor so we had amazing views over the city. We had arrived at about 8am and we were totally knackered but decided to push on through and try and stay awake until at least 5pm. So with that in mind we went on a tour of the city.

Frustration

Last night I started writing my novel about our year away and the 365 challenge. However I'm mega frustrated as I've written a crappy prologue that took my about 5 hours and it's only 2 pages long. Worse than that is that I've got nothing else to write about since our trip hasn't started yet and I feel in limbo just now waiting for things to happen.

Hopefully the next 9 days will fly by and I'll have so much to write about that I'll run out of room on cyber-space. That will be sweet. I'm hoping that this book will write itself but if it doesn't then maybe you lot out there can write it for me...

...Here is the prologue. Please leave your comments and critisisms so that I can improve on this rubbish.........

Prologue

I’ve left the National Health Service. For a year at least.

The United Kingdom’s NHS was founded on the 5th of July 1948. It was a vision designed to provide health care based on the needs of patients and not on their ability to pay for it; a shining testament to the ethos of Medicine that everyone has the right to health. Your financial situation no longer determined what treatments you had available to you and over the following decades it would become the envy of the international medical community.

Now I want you to think of your favourite material thing in the world. That might be shoes, cars, books, electronics, handbags, whatever. Then I want you to imagine that you are in a shop that sells those items. However, instead of buying the normal one or two, the shop owner tells you that for the rest of your life you can have anything in the shop for free and you can have as many as you want – forever! What would you do? Would you just pick up the latest Ozzy Osbourne CD and leave or would you do a supermarket sweet effort and grab everything you could?

You see that’s the problem when things are free. People don’t just take what they need. We are inherently greedy and will take as much stuff as we can.

The NHS is a bit like that now. It didn’t take me long after graduating from Medical School to realise that the system is abused because it’s free. I had been working for the NHS for 5 years and I got to see first-hand the strain that it was under. People no longer treated the NHS as a privilege.

This upset me. I could see the NHS being pulled in all direction by patients, managers and medical staff. Everyone had their own agenda and the working environment for junior doctors was steadily becoming worse. The pay had increased since the introduction of the Junior Doctors New Deal policies but the European Working Time Directive meant that the number of hours we were allowed to work dropped dramatically to the detriment of our training. Who would you rather have taking out your gall-bladder? Someone who has done it 100 times in the last year or someone who has only done it 10 times because his time is mostly spend picking up the slack on the ward due to the fact that the number of hours he’s allowed to spend in the hospital is greatly reduced? I should also point out that the there is no autonomy in this as there are people employed to check the hours that you are working and make sure you don’t go over your allotted time.

Then there is the business of MMC. Modernising Medical Careers is a crackpot scheme that has been dreamt up to provide with NHS with more consultants. It starts running in 2007. Essentially newly graduated doctors will be fast-tracked towards being a consultant by having to choose their speciality in their second year of doctor-hood then being put on a streamlined course to consultancy. Again, would you like your gallbladder taken out by consultant that is 29 years old and only graduated 7 years ago or a 40 year old consultant that has been applying his trade for almost 20 years?

The reason that I bring MMC up is that doctors who graduated around the same time as me are not catered for by this scheme. We have to be slotted around the new graduates as they get preferential selection and the bottle necks that are appearing are forcing countless numbers of relatively senior doctors to re-think their specialities, their career plans, even their line of work.

Imagine that you work for a bank. You’ve spent 5 years training for your position and worked for them for a further 5 years. Then they tell you that there a new scheme on the cards that will fast track all new starts to managerial positions. They may even become the manager before you. Then they tell you that if you want to hold on to your position you will have to re-apply for it and go through the interview process all over again. Also you have to select a second position in case you don’t get re-hired for the one you are presently doing. Then you get told that you might not be able to work in that particular branch again and that you can only apply for a “region”.

Now, you’ve worked in, say, the George St branch in Edinburgh for years. Your wife also works in Edinburgh and you’ve got kids in school there. However, when you are applying for your region you realise that the form doesn’t have an “Edinburgh” region. It doesn’t have a Lothian region. It doesn’t have an East Coast region. In fact that only region that’s available to you is “Scotland”. You have absolutely no control of where you end up. You could be in Thurso or Oban, away from your friends and family (although that might be a good thing!). What would you do? Would you stay with the bank or go to a different company?

This is the situation that faces all the doctors at my stage. So what did I do? Did I leave the bank or just go with the flow? Well I decided to do something in between in that I was going to take a break. Not from medicine, but from the NHS and the UK.

My girlfriend and I decided to up sticks for year and give MMC a chance to settle in. Our destination was Sydney, Australia. We set the wheels in motion in early January 2006 and within a few weeks I had a job organised in a Sydney hospital starting in January 2007 for 12 months as and Accident and Emergency Registrar.

Over the next few months I became increasingly happy with our decision and in order to share our growing excitement I decided to start a Blog. For those of you who don’t know what a Blog is, well it’s a kind of online diary which is becoming an increasingly popular medium for people to covey their thoughts. One day while writing my Blog I had a random thought that went along the lines of “since we are away for a year, why don’t we try and do 365 new things and stick them on the Blog?” That thought then turned into this book.

I wrote this prologue before I left for Australia and my hope for this book was that it would not only provide the reader with some interesting ideas for what to do when they are abroad, but also to give my colleagues a bit of an insight to how the medical system works in a different country. Anyway I hope that the following pages inspire a couple of you to try some new things and get a bit of a laugh out of doing them.