Aiesec, Singapore, and how compliments fit in

So to start, I haven't heard back from AIESEC Singapore all week, which kinda sucks, but I've found enough to do here in Singapore to last me the weekend anyway. I'll probably hunt down some AIESECers eventually anyway.

One thing that sucks about being 12 hours away from home is that I have no one to talk to in the evening when I can finally be online, but my buddies on Horizons have been trying to fill that gap. A bunch of them are from Australia and so forth, so they're around when I'm online.

I went to the Executive Lounge with my boss again tonight, and we ended up talking to some random stranger again about business and his life story and so forth. Afterwards, when both my boss and I were pleasantly buzzed, I told him a bit about my experiences with AIESEC and my time as the VP of Incoming Exchange at GT. We talked about networking and so forth, and he told me that he could see that I had learned alot about building networks just by the fact that every time we were in the executive lounge, I found a way to talk to someone we didn't know about what they did and how our jobs correlated. He said that he was only really good at the technical side of things and wasn't very social, and that all he could really teach me were the technical skills of the job. Earlier today he said that I was progressing very quickly and that I probably understood more than some of our other coworkers (who he named but i wont name here) did after a year in the position. He told me to start watching how the COO of Varec, Marty, works. I took all of this as a massive compliment and major ego-booster of course :). I really do hope to progress quickly in this company and this industry, it really doesn't seem too hard to understand so far.

Anyways, I've been working with my boss on getting my roommate a job at Varec. He's the kinda guy that would do them a lot of good. He's good at coding, he loves to do it, and he has experience in working with databases and scripts, which seems to be the kinda thing they need. My boss said to get him to send a resume, and Dan sounded pretty excited about the opportunity. We'll see what happens there, but I hope he can get the job.

Singapore is great, I have had some very strange food since I got here, but not nearly enough yet! It's amazing how much smaller portions here are than at most places in the U.S., but I can't say that it's a problem. I've been wanting to lose weight anyway. This weekend I hope to eat a lot more street meat and a lot more of the strange items that I've been wary of so far. Chevron has been feeding us pretty damn good food though, every day. Nate asked me to document the food with pics, but we're not allowed to use cameras on Jurong Island, no matter what. Normally I'm lax on these things, but they definitely have F-15s flying over the island every half hour and armed guards with automatic guns all over the somewhat public parts that are shared by the companies on the island. Biggest port in the world, its crazy how big the cranes and stuff are that load the ships up.

The climate here is so strange to me, it's like the sky hangs lower than I'm used to. It's never just sunny or just cloudy, it's always a really strange mix of the two, and never one that I've ever been used to. It's really hard to explain. The equatorial sun is much stronger too, I haven't been outside far too much, but the intensity is much stronger than what I'm used to. I've taken on a fair bit of a tan already in just the past few days.

Fun so far, we'll see how the next couple weeks go!