As planned with Cornel and Iulia, we extended our trip to the city-state of Singapore by a few hours, before returning to Europe in an A380, following our mission to Hanoi.
The city center is quite impressive, as it comes very close to perfection, perhaps too much so. The streets and subway are incredibly clean. Within an area of several square kilometres you can find banks, telecommunication companies, cultural sites and malls. They can be seen everywhere and are often thematic (restaurants, luxury or IT shops etc.). After having visited the IT mall in Bangkok, we found the one in Singapore to be as exciting. The Surcouf IT mall in Paris could use a bit of revamping. We passed by the legendary places of this city:
- Marina Bay with its enormous hotel
- A nighttime tour in the Flyer (Giant wheel)
- the Merlion, the half-lion, half-fish symbol of the city
- the Raffles Hotel, with its 19th century colonial architecture
- the Chinatown which blends well together with the rest of the city
- Boad Quay, a series of tourist restaurants by the water
This 700 km2 city of approximately 5 million inhabitants is very cosmopolitan, with an estimated foreign population of 40%, of which 70% is made up of Chinese immigrants. It has a high living standard (its GDP ranks 18th worldwide – it is almost equivalent to that of France). When visiting the zoo outside the city, we didn’t witness fundamental changes. The towers disappeared, only to make room for decent blocks of flats (we didn’t see all of them). It was a hot day without air conditioning.
As part of Pentalog’s cloud plans, we could return to Singapore (or Hong Kong) in order to set up local Cloud Computing services. The major telecom operators in the region are SingTel (important sponsor of the nighttime F1 grand prix), PCCW (Hong Kong) and NTT (Japan) and we will undoubtedly use their boards for installing our infrastructure in order to benefit from the best latency times. As regards the IT hardware in Singapore, while the iPad price is quite appealing there, they didn’t have it on stock in the stores I visited. There is a global shortage.
The airport follows the same line: commercial mall, huge proportions, extremely clean etc. It handled over 42 million passengers in 2010 (as compared to 58 million for Charles de Gaulle).
Cornel and Iulia were charmed by the perfectionism of this city. I have a more moderate opinion, as even though I admit the city comes close to perfection, I think that, over time, our Latin temperaments could grow tired of this neatness.




























