The Ultimate Luxury
Last Sunday (19 Nov), Lini and I went for a walk in Sungai Buloh Wetland Reserve. It was Lini’s first time there, and for me, it has been a long while since my last visit. 2 weeks before this, we trekked up the Tree Top walk at MacRitchie. I brought my watercolours for the MacRitchie walk and painted 1 scene. At Sg Buloh, I brought my camera along and ended up painting nothing.
Last Sunday also, the newspaper carried a report of a Finnish guy who came to Singapore to escape the high taxes imposed in Finland. He was paying above 60% of his salary in taxes. He said, “What the lower taxes (in Singapore) have afforded me is time, which is the ultimate luxury.”
When I started teaching, the Director of the School said, “We may not pay you as much as the private sector, but here, you can see the sun set.” My colleagues and I who’d practice in various offices before we took up teaching knew what those words meant. Watching the sun set was a luxury we never had during the week days, and sometimes, during the weekends too.
The architectural market is now hot again. A couple of weeks ago, I had a couple of offers to go back into practice. The pay will be higher, and there are massive jobs are in Dubai and India and China, the construction world’s most exciting places at the moment. It’ll be a chance for me to catch up with the latest technology, before I become obsolete from teaching too long. It was tempting. But Lini was against it. It would mean travel and more time apart. It would also mean more stress for me, and I was never really good with multi-tasking. No, it’s better this way, as I am now, I thought. So I called them back to cancel the interview and settled back to some more time with the academia. And there will be the students to look forward to.
The photos here were taken at Sg Buloh on the morning the Finnish guy said TIME is the ultimate luxury. It has a ring of truth to it…
Chup
Last Sunday (19 Nov), Lini and I went for a walk in Sungai Buloh Wetland Reserve. It was Lini’s first time there, and for me, it has been a long while since my last visit. 2 weeks before this, we trekked up the Tree Top walk at MacRitchie. I brought my watercolours for the MacRitchie walk and painted 1 scene. At Sg Buloh, I brought my camera along and ended up painting nothing.
Last Sunday also, the newspaper carried a report of a Finnish guy who came to Singapore to escape the high taxes imposed in Finland. He was paying above 60% of his salary in taxes. He said, “What the lower taxes (in Singapore) have afforded me is time, which is the ultimate luxury.”
When I started teaching, the Director of the School said, “We may not pay you as much as the private sector, but here, you can see the sun set.” My colleagues and I who’d practice in various offices before we took up teaching knew what those words meant. Watching the sun set was a luxury we never had during the week days, and sometimes, during the weekends too.
The architectural market is now hot again. A couple of weeks ago, I had a couple of offers to go back into practice. The pay will be higher, and there are massive jobs are in Dubai and India and China, the construction world’s most exciting places at the moment. It’ll be a chance for me to catch up with the latest technology, before I become obsolete from teaching too long. It was tempting. But Lini was against it. It would mean travel and more time apart. It would also mean more stress for me, and I was never really good with multi-tasking. No, it’s better this way, as I am now, I thought. So I called them back to cancel the interview and settled back to some more time with the academia. And there will be the students to look forward to.
The photos here were taken at Sg Buloh on the morning the Finnish guy said TIME is the ultimate luxury. It has a ring of truth to it…
Chup
posted by chuplin @ 11/25/2006 11:59:00 PM
1 Comments:
“We may not pay you as much as the private sector, but here, you can see the sun set.”
Great line! We, too, keep on tellng our friends back home that we don't care to be the heads of some big shot departments if we cannot enjoy our dinner together but people think we're just being lazy or worse, we're jealous of some ex-colleagues who are now heads of big departments :p.
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