Sunday, May 13, 2007

Granny on Tour - Day 1

Well it ain’t no cooler. How the hell did I manage to put in an honest day’s toil in the fields in this climate? Air conditioned tractor cab, yes that was it.

Whilst waiting for my mate to pick me up at the airport one’s perennial initial impression of the place hasn’t changed. This country is awash in cash. It positively smells of affluence. Standing at the cab rank I reckon about 10% of the hansoms were Mercs. We are not talking cheapskate C180s here but wall to wall E series. They all have the big numbers too – an E280 as a cab? Good stuff. But whilst that is all very showy, beneath it for the main part things get a little shaky.

I’m staying in a friend’s apartment – he has a couple of hundred of them – and it is housed in an enormous (25 storeys I think) flash building clad in what looks like a ploughed field. On closer inspection it is some sort of brick compound but from a distance it looks very impressive, which is the whole idea of course. I am shown to my particular billet by a liveried gent and I am almost gob smacked by the opulence of my temporary surroundings. Marble this, parquet that, hot and cold running the other. Very nice. But on closer inspection it is not. I mean it is all very nice and I couldn’t be more grateful but the standard of workmanship of the finishing is dreadful. Room Four at Milford Primary could have done better on a craft afternoon having spent $50 in Bunnings. I could do a better tiling job standing on my head, eyes closed, one harm tied behind my back, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar and singing Rule Brittania. Although I’m sure that the finer points of tiling take years to perfect, I’m equally sure that tiling 101 isn’t too tricky. They even make tiles square so that lining them up is somewhat simplified. The bloke who did my bathroom (and kitchen and hallway) must have had Salvador Dali as his tiling tutor. I’ve just been for another look and I can’t find a 90˚ angle between two tiles in the whole place. I won’t even start on the plastering or the joinery. But here is the point, if you don’t look too hard it looks fantastic. For the most part Singapore remains like that – a place that has had so much fertilizer put on it that it has outgrown the basic amount of nutrients in the soil. But that is not really a problem because if you run out of soil you just go and get some of Indonesia, put it on a barge and make the country bigger.

I thought the building boom here couldn’t last at its then current pace when I left (twelve years ago) and I was right – it has sped up. Was taken out to lunch by the apartment bloke. As an aside eating is to the Singaporean what rugby is to the Kiwi. No ‘G’day, how the bloody hell are you?’ for these jokers It’s ‘Hello, have you eaten?’ and that can be at any time from 0700 to 0600 the next day. So lunch was not going to be a pie from the lunch bar. All very nice and lasted three hours. Got to talking about (amongst many other things) building. And the economy. Everything always comes back to that common bottom line – money. If you tell someone where you live they are not interested in the view, the proximity to the pub or anything other than its current value per square foot. And the numbers are getting scary. As I type I am looking at a couple of Singapore’s national birds, the tower crane, beavering away (its late on Saturday night) putting up an apartment block that will be marketed at $4,000 psf. A 200sq. m. pad is going to set you back $8 mil. My friend told me that he had just sold a floor of offices in one of his buildings at a current S’pore record (until next Thursday presumably) price. ‘That must be very pleasing’ I offered. ‘Yes, but it also makes me sad’. ‘Why so?’. ‘Because I sold some of the other floors for less’.

These people think differently. Way, way differently. I’m not saying better or worse, but it is certainly different. I had forgotten this. Next we have the en bloc sale and it’s creation of the homeless millionaires. I have been here less than a day and a new phrase has to enter my lexicon - the en bloc sale. I had heard it several times and eventually had sheepishly ask what it was. It goes like this. A developer wants a block of land. Small snag, there is a twenty storey apartment block on it. Mr Developer thinks it would look a whole lot better (and his bank balance certainly would) if there were a thirty five storey apartment block in its place. What to do? Buy the current building (just so you can get the land, the building is surplus to requirements). He offers everyone living in the block a telephone number for his flat. As long as 80% of the tenants agree it’s a done deal. What of the 20% who don’t want to sell? They have a right to an appeal that will be turned down and its then take the money and shut the f*** up. So we have a fair number of people (and I know two) who have a wheelbarrow full of money and nowhere to live. This short sighted approach to wealth (greed) fails to take into consideration that the housing market that these people have been thrust into is now a bit more expensive than the one they left a few years ago. I don’t understand how it works but then I am not in practice in the art of thinking Singaporean. There will be an answer and it will involve impressive looking buildings with interiors crafted by primary school kids.

Off to play golf tomorrow. That will be different.

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