changes

The streets of Singapore have changed much.

One evening, I took a evening stroll round our HDB blocks after my dinner. Normally i would see some of my familiar neighbours.

However i noticed that there were many strange nationalities :- Thai's, Myanmar’s, Filipino's and the most frequent people i noticed are those from India. They are mostly foreign worker who worked in marine or construction industries.

How come suddenly that there were so many foreigners around our HDB blocks? I wondered.

It did not happened just one day and it must have took several years before we have noticed them.

Singapore is a multicutured society as one reader has commented. But it appeared that the composition of the population has changed greatly.

There are far more foreigners who normally lived at the worker quarters are occuping our own HDB flats that were meant for us, singaporean. They were seen walking in groups, and smoking and drinking at our own places.

I found myself in my own homeland which was so familiar and yet so strange.

***
A true story.

In the beginning of this month, we have a group of neighbours moved in the HDB flat just next to us. They were foreign workers from Thailand and Maymar.

We did not noticed them at first, but their bad smell revealed their presence just a few days later. as they did not washed properly their working clothes, and did not take care the flat, a strong bad odour coming from their flat. They did not even flushed the toilet and their urine smell lingered into our kitchen.

We wrote letters to HDB and fortunately there were many of us complained to them and the foreigner workers were to ask to vacant the flat within a week.

Later we found out the owner of the flat was from one of our government agencies.

That was really bad.

***
After the general election, we expected the things to go up, and it came quite sooner than we have thought.

The first thing was the taxi fare increasement, which will commenced on 10th July 2006. As i listened to the radio, there was one listener commented that the cab-driver did not take too much profit from these 14-18% increase and they have to wait for 12 years and

the real people who will profit these hike were from the big government taxi rental companies.

As the charging fare increased, it will be their turn to jack up the daily rental fees of the taxis.

Furthermore, these gigantic 14-18% increased, especially the peak hour brought forward from 0730-0930hrs to 0700-0930hr and charged $1 extra which was 100% increment and besides raising the flag down fare and the peak hour surcharge to $2, ComfortDelgro is also making distance-related adjustment: Trips less than 10 kilometres will be charged at 10 cents for every 210 metres travelled, compared to 225 metres currently. For trips above 10 kilometres, the charge will be 10 cents per 175 metres, compared to 200 metres now.

This will otherwise scare off the customer like us.

On the first day, we will expect people to shun away taking the cab and cab-driver will reported vast loss of income.