Singapore #3: Zoo and Reimbursements

The Mustafa Center in Singapore is the go-to mall for affordably priced items. Everything from phones to clothes to watches to daily use items. We spent a few hours there shopping for various things. Most malls in the city have a counter where you can apply for the reimbursement of VAT (only for foreigners like us). The details (including your passport) get keyed in, but the reimbursement happens later. How/when?

 

When you are leaving the country, at the airport, there’s a section for the reimbursement. Go over to the scanners and scan your passport. Bingo! It pulls up all the reimbursements from all those shop counters, adds them up and asks you whether you want it paid in cash or credited to your credit card. That simple. Quick, frictionless, no struggling to find receipts (The contrast to the difficulty in equivalent reimbursements in Europe is zameen aasmaan ka farak).

~~

 

Then we went to the Singapore zoo. It is way out of the city (not surprising) which meant going by metro + bus would have taken a lot of time, so we took a cab (only place we went by cab – the metro is so great for everything else). The zoo has multiple subdivisions – rainforest, river wonders, bird paradise etc. We went to the river wonders section and got to see a bunch of pandas. They are every bit as cute as advertised.

 

We saw two shows, the first one called Creatures of the Night. It had a host describing the habits of nocturnal animals, which would then appear on stage. Owls, civet, porcupine and (best of all) a hyena, all did their thing on stage. A bunch of small school kids were part of the audience and they were clearly having a great time. Then there was another splash show with a sea lion giving an unbelievable performance.

 

We also went on a night safari which turned out to a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t sure how much we’d be able to see at night, but they had the lighting worked out perfectly. Not so dark that we humans couldn’t see; but not so bright as to disturb the animals either.

~~

 

Singapore puts a lot of effort into making everything attractive and friendly for tourists. And they keep adding and changing the exhibits on a continual basis. No wonder tourism constitutes a big chunk of their economy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Need for an Informed Aadhar Debate

As Aadhar increases in scope, supporters consider it necessary, says L.Viswanath : “We have Aadhaar getting linked to ration cards, NREGA payments, PAN cards, bank accounts, mobile SIMs, mid-day meals in schools, school admissions, university admissions…the list is endless. In a country plagued by corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, the hope is that Aadhaar will help eliminate fraudulent identities, thereby saving the direct and indirect losses to the nation.” Conversely, opponents don’t cite concrete use-cases of how it might be abused apart from throwing phrases (“Orwellian state”) that sound scary. Until its opponents provide such details, supporters will win the argument by simply asking why Aadhar should be restricted only to subsidy schemes, as Subhashis Banerjee points out : “Admittedly there are substantial leakages in these schemes, but surely the need for de-duplication and strict record keeping and audits are as much, if not more, in the domains of tax co...
Read more

Nazis and the Physics Connection

When the Nazi government seized power, they started removing Jews from more and more positions, including the civil services, and the science departments of Germany. Those physicists who saw the writing on the wall fled to either UK (like Schrodinger) or the US (like Einstein), writes Adam Becker in What is Real?   The great physicist, Enrico Fermi, wasn’t a Jew. But when Mussolini aligned with Hitler, Fermi came under suspicion since his wife was a Jew. To make matters problematic, Mussolini’s new laws had made it illegal to take “more than pocket change” out of Italy. Neils Bohr broke an unwritten rule of the Nobel and told Fermi that he (Fermi) was in the running for the Nobel that year. Perhaps Fermi, should he win, could consider escaping from Stockholm with the prize money to start a new life? Fermi agreed, but it was touch and go – his wife’s passport had been confiscated, which meant she couldn’t come to Stockholm. Fermi managed to pull a few strings to get her passport...
Read more

1991 - Liberalization

After the fall of Chandra Shekhar’s government, elections were called in 1991. During the campaign, Rajiv Gandhi got assassinated. That set off a sympathy wave – during the phases before Rajiv’s murder, the Congress won 50 of the 196 seats; post-that, it won 177 of 285 seats. The Congress now had enough seats (227) to try and form a coalition government. But who should head it? There was no obvious “heir” from the Family. With 100 of the 227 seats being from the south, PV Narasimha Rao (PV from here for short) had an edge, and he became the Prime Minister, writes Sanjaya Baru in 1991 .   The first order of business was, yes, that balance of payments crisis. PV’s first choice for Finance Minister was IG Patel, who had been Chandra Shekhar’s first choice too. Patel declined both PM’s offers to be the Finance Minister (FM). As PV continued his search, he found Manmohan Singh.   In his first address to the nation, in his deadpan manner, PV made a couple of statements that ...
Read more