Smart Global Life

 I've lived in Singapore for six years and I eat Korean food for lunch and dinner most weekdays. Not because I'm avoiding anything. My company runs a canteen, and the woman who cooks there is Korean with a long career behind her. Proper cooking, the kind you'd get at a gisikdang back home, the roadside places truck drivers eat at where nobody's trying to be clever with the food. It tastes like Korea. Genuinely. So the honest version of my Singapore food story is that I've had far less exposure to local food than someone six years in probably should. The Months I Actually Ate Local Every Day There was a stretch where the company canteen shut down temporarily, and I had to go out for lunch like everyone else. I ate economy rice. Every single day. If you haven't come across it, it's the stall with twenty or thirty trays of cooked dishes laid out behind glass. You point at what you want, they scoop it onto rice in a takeaway container, and you pay based ro...

 The bank turned down my credit card application because one month's payslip didn't match one month's bank statement. The reason it didn't match is that I'd been paid a bonus. I explained it. Twice. Here's the payslip, here's the statement, here's why the figures differ, it's a bonus, this is not complicated. They rejected it anyway. That's the only real friction I've had with financial admin here in six years, and it still slightly annoys me, mostly because I only wanted the card for the sign-up gift and the miles. The Order I Actually Did Things In I landed in 2020 with my Employment Pass IPA already approved, and started work almost immediately. So the sequence was compressed. First thing off the plane was a SIM card. Before accommodation, before anything. You can't arrange a viewing, confirm a start date, or receive a verification code without a local number, and everything downstream depends on it. Then hotel accommodation whil...

 My four-year-old asked to sleep over at her cousins' house. Without us. In a country she visits once a year and otherwise only knows through video calls. I asked her twice. Really? You'll be okay? No mum and dad? She said yes both times, completely unbothered, already halfway down the hallway after her cousins. Her sister, three at the time, started crying because she wanted to stay too, and that one we had to talk out of it and bring home. We drove to my in-laws' place that night with one daughter instead of two, and I spent most of the ride quietly stunned. She adores those boys, her cousins, both in early primary school. But this is a child who used to bury her face in my shoulder for the first three days of every Korea trip. We Always Go Around Chuseok Once a year, roughly, and almost always timed to Chuseok. The reasoning is practical rather than sentimental. Singapore has one season, so going to Korea in deep winter means buying an entire wardrobe for two weeks....

 The escape staircase was built about ten years ago. Structure only, no services, sealed up and left waiting for whoever came back to finish the job. We're the ones who came back. And the clear headroom under that existing roof slab is 2.1m, which was plenty when it was bare concrete, and is turning into a proper headache now that real cables have to run through it. I've been raising this in CCSM meetings for months. It's still not resolved. What CCSM Actually Is Coordinated Combined Services Model. Every services-wide contractor builds their own model with real installation detail in it, then everything gets combined into one and reviewed together before anyone installs anything. On some projects the main contractor runs this. On ours, the client's BIM consultancy role went to one of the SWCs, so they handle clash checks, model aggregation, SEM drawing generation, and coordination between the contractors. I sit on the main contractor side. My job in that room is ...

 My wife handed in her resignation on a Tuesday. The day before that, her company called everyone into a room and announced that the client contract had ended, there would be no extension, and the entire team was being let go with two months' notice. She'd already signed with somewhere else. Three rounds of interviews, offer accepted, EP application in motion. One day earlier and she'd have been sitting in that room like everyone else, suddenly job hunting with no plan. I've thought about that timing a lot since. There's no lesson in it. She just got lucky, and I'm aware of how thin the margin was. She Was Here Before I Was People assume I brought her to Singapore. It's actually the other way round, sort of. Around 2010 she was studying in Korea when a placement opportunity came up, and she ended up here teaching design at a primary school. From there she moved into the design team at a Korean construction firm and stayed about two years. Then living ab...

 Our landlord told us he was moving back into the flat. That was it, that was the whole reason we had to leave Bishan. Nothing had gone wrong. We loved that place. Bishan Park was right there, enormous, and both girls were at a childcare centre five minutes on foot. Everything about our week was built around a two hundred metre radius, and then one conversation ended it. He gave us notice well ahead, which I appreciated at the time and appreciate even more now knowing how these things can go. So we had three months. Three months sounded generous until we actually started looking. The Non-Negotiable Was Childcare, Not the Flat My wife and I were both working, and even with a helper, the thing that genuinely could not break was childcare continuity. The girls needed to walk out of one centre on a Friday and into another the following week. No gap. That single constraint shaped everything else. The other constraint was commute. My office is basically central. My wife's sits betwe...