sat in a public housing seminar at HDB on Friday; some variation in work routine at last! it was interesting for me, cos i got to learn a lil more about Universal Design, which includes, but is not limited to creating barrier-free access for the disabled; rather, it strives to make facilities/designs as user-friendly as possible to a broad spectrum of users. I also realized how impt it is for planners to take such things into acct, and applaud the move :) i used to admire how disabled-friendly buses and places in the States are; am happy to see progress here in sg too! i want to refrain from making this sound like a sales speech or something, but now HDB flats will come with wider corridors; bigger switches, bigger toilets, ramps instead of steps at appropriate spots etc... it really doesn't seem like it requires too much trouble to make these provisions and it's heartening that changes are slowly being introduced :)

lastly, on a random note.... we were briefly discussing recent news events in Japanese class today... and someone raised the coup in Thailand. so apparently in Japanese, the katakana for coup is not simply coup; rather, it's based on the original French coup d'etate... i guess it makes sense, since French should be as 'foreign' as English for the Japanese... why should i assume that all Katakana words are based on English? (though most of them are..)