Friday, November 4, 2011 (Singapore)

ROLLING WITH THE SEVENS: Tonight marked the opening night of the Singapore Cricket Club's International Rugby Sevens tournament. It runs through the weekend. We headed over to the club's Pedang to catch the first night. The setting was great, with Singapore's grandeur hovering above the temporary stands and playing field (above).
Much of the day's competition involved high-school-age teams and women's matches (one of which featured the breakaway score at right).
The field in the seven-on-seven tournament included teams from Kenya, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Sweden and France. Attendance will surely be better on Saturday and Sunday.
This was enjoyable, even so. Lots of hard hitting during the ultra-fast games (which have two 7-minute halves with a clock that essentially does not stop. We saw many of the men's teams in the evening, but left after too many one-sided shutouts.
We endured five of those in a row, including one 62-0 spanking. They scored 62 points in 14 minutes of running time. Results are posted here.
I got a kick out of the sideline advertisement shown at the right: www.unfreezemyukpension.com. It's not a protest, as I thought it might be. It's a business pitch. It has nothing to do with a Singapore version of the "Occupy" movements.

A HOSPITAL VISIT: I decided to get back on the case a bit on the death of my great aunt Dorothy Lincoln (right) of Worcester, Mass., who died here in Singapore on April 1, 1909.
She had just turned 19.
Typhoid was blamed.
I had visited the site of her first burial--and described that in the entry on April 19, 2011.
I didn't get a chance to go to the actual hospital where she died in the spring, so I MRT'd my way over to Singapore General Hospital this morning.
The hospital has a very tidy museum (entrance shown at right). The exhibits include a display of a postcard that showed what the hospital looked like in 1908 (above). Since then, numerous buildings went up (including a clutch in 1926), were damaged (during Japanese attack and occupation in the early 1940s) and replaced. Now, the hospital is located amid a large complex of health-related buildings and centers, including the National Eye Centre, National Cancer Centre and Health Sciences Authority. A worker at the SGH Museum said no records remained from as far back as 1909--as far as she knew.

A DISTINCTIVE SHADE TREE: While walking on an overpass from the Outram station to the Singapore General Hospital, I noticed a great lineup of Rain Trees lining the roadway. I find these really appealing. Evidently the leaves fold up in rainy weather. I have not noticed that. The leaves also fold up about sunset, according to Singapore's National Park Service. That's why they are called Pukul Lima in Malaysia. That means "5 o'clock" in Malay. Until the arrival of Standard Time in the early 1980s, sunset in Malaysia and Singapore was pegged to 5 p.m.