I swear I would think better and be more organised with my blogs if I could work in my room in air-condition rather than out in the hall with the tv blaring and lots of back ground noise amid the heavy heat of singapore.

Anyway, two interesting things that i want to contrast about something I noticed yesterday while I was in Chinatown. Being the first day, there was quite a crowd.

The first observation was that singaporeans are so much less civilised than Japanese when it comes to common courtesy. Well, what made me draw this conclusion? I guess it was two main things, when getting on the mrt, people started pushing their way in before others could even get off the train, and not only that, but despite the fact that people had been waiting patiently at the sides of the lines, others would just push in front of those people in order to do the former. Ouch. And this example applies to getting on the escalator or walking in a crowd too. Singaporeans have no daily common courtesy.

The second thing I saw that completely redemmed singaporeans was when a tourist was trying to buy a ticket for the mrt and the machine wouldn't accept her money even though it was in sing dollars. A singaporean couple behind her in line ended up buying her the two tickets with their money because she didn't have the small change to change the note with them anyway. And they not only volunteered their help but completely waved aside her trying to pay them back. That kind of made my day. Especially because that's really not the kind of thing that would be seen everywhere and in singapore that could actually occur. It definitely wouldn't really happen in Japan despite their courtesy and niceness to tourists in general.

It's interesting to me, that there can be such contrasts between the occurences of everyday courtesy and random small acts of kindness. I mean one would assume they go together :-p