Cultural Differences

Reflecting on some of my experiences from last week, there were certain cultural differences both inside and outside the hospital that were striking.  The weirdest thing for me was that at a meeting with a bunch of physicians, everyone's phone was on ring tone.  During the meeting, I think nearly each of the physicians' phones rang once and the most surprising thing is that they actually pick it up and start talking!  Apparently it's not considered rude here.  Also, instead of using pagers to contact other members of your team here, people just text each other's personal cell phones to communicate within the hospital.  I've found that for the most part, you can get a strong signal anywhere in the hospital so that makes it convenient for everyone not to have to carry an extra device, though I don't really know what that means for the HIPAA equivalent in Singapore.

Even though English is spoken here, there is a lot of local slang that even the physicians use and takes some getting used to.  A lot of times the doctor will say "can?" meaning "is it ok?" or "sounds good?"  They might also say "can!" meaning "yes that's fine" or "let's do that".  A lot of other terms come from British English because of Singapore's connection to the UK.  When people exit the subway train they "alight" instead of "get off".  My Californian accent probably sounds very weird to them!

One last thing, I've been finding that a lot of American things are extremely expensive here:

That's right, $13.90 for a pint of Ben & Jerry's!  And their stock is kind of low so people actually are willing to pay for this stuff!