Day 4 and Day 3

It's Tuesday morning in Singapore. We've basically been pretty lazy. Hanging out at the hotel, some pool time, both catching up on reading and relaxing.

On Sunday night, we watched the F1 race on local TV. We probably saw more than the folks who paid a lot of money to see it at the course. Really impressive. Not only a night race on city streets, but the race went under a couple of freeways as well as under part of the stands. You know now by now that Hamilton won the race, leading all the way. As with a lot of sports, the information we got watching on TV was probably much more than the people saw live. Quite a race. A big event in Singapore and glad we watched so we could talk about it with people.

Yesterday morning, we went to the National Museum. A lot of what you would call pop art. but a very interesting exhibit on local food history including an outline of the history and origination of all of the spices. Had no idea that, until the Portuguese brought peppers here from South America, there were no hot chili peppers in Asian food. So we have the Portuguese to thank for Szechwan food? Pretty amazing. But also learned a lot about many of the other spices that caused this area to be called the Spice Islands in the middle of the last Millennium.

After that, we joined Fionn Hyndman for lunch at a British Pub called the Penny Black. We first met Fionn at the iMedia Summit in Hunter Valley Australia where he talked about his testing on attribution protocol. I wrote about this for MediaPost Metrics Insider. Fionn always has good ideas and thinking about where our market is going and it was great to get a perspective on the business in this part of the world prior to heading up to iMedia in Phuket Thailand next week. Actually we are going up on Wednesday (tomorrow) but we're going to spend a few days R&R prior to the conference.

After lazing at the pool in the PM, we had dinner with Ann Burgraff Rowell and her husband Chris. Chris works for Oracle and Ann is a web advertising consultant here in Singapore. Very good food at IndoChine along the Singapore river. Great Pan Asian food in a very beautiful setting. Funny, one of our favorite restaurants in the Pacific Northwest is IndoChine in Federal Way.

I don't think I posted a link of the Shangri-La that we are staying at so here it is. Our room is in the Garden Wing, overlooking the pool. Highly recommended.

Heading out into the day in Singapore. More later today or tomorrow when we get to Phuket.