Classmate Tai Yan and his girlfriend were kind enough to take my sister and me out around Singapore Saturday. After he provided a list of fifteen possible destinations, we whittled it down to breakfast at a tasty and newly popular toast shop, a morning visit to Changi Beach, lunch at the Changi Beach food court, and an adventure to find Mount Pleasant Cemetery, which is essentially some nearly abandoned tombstones in the jungle. Then we all took a nap and then went out for dinner. Photos start here.

On the strength of Mr Brown's recommendation and the Youtube video, I saw Ling perform a free concert at the Esplanade, in a nice outdoor venue across a small inlet from a lovely little container port. The music was fun but quite amateur, mixing covers with originals. I have no musical talent, but I had the impression that the guitar player was sometimes straining to make it through tricky passages in the alloted number of beats, and that the drummer, who was fantastic, spent most of the set chasing after the other musicians as they wandered naively through the multiverse of possible speeds and timings and rhythms. More damaging was Ling's inexperience reading an audience: We sat down in a crowd that was at least 80% Tamil, on a day that was a major Muslim holiday (Eid al-Adha, called "Hari Raya Haji" in Singapore and commemorating "Ibrahim's (Abraham's) willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, under the order of Allah"), and the stage patter was about Christmas. I personally enjoyed the music selection, which was mostly Canadian woman singer-songwriters, but I'm not sure how much it spoke to the audience. There was certainly some talent and potential on display, and most of the problems should go away with practice and experience. Of special note was the amusing dissonance between the Singlish patter, available here, and the music.

The second act was "Two Guys, a Girl, and Amanda", which seemed like a quite capable bar band, which covered a number of catchy, terrible songs, followed by a selection of much better songs. All in all, a perfectly pleasant evening which, for better and worse, was more or less completely within my cultural reference area.