Good Times in Singapore

The last week has been a real blast here in Singapore. AIESECers have been taking me out every night and showing me the town! They haven't taken me to much of the touristy stuff, but that's fine by me, I'd rather do the more student-like stuff anyway.

On Tuesday night, Michal came to the hotel and we drank in the executive lounge, talking about Singapore and all the regulations and its pros and cons. When the lounge closed at 8:30, we left to find another bar and ended up exploring the Orchard Towers building. There were massage parlors and bars on every floor, and women eying us and offering us discounts. There was a disco club on the top floor, we walked in for a few seconds to see what it looked like, and it looked like a regular bar, with no dance floor or anything, but with music that was so loud that it would be impossible to talk and with strobe lights and stuff everywhere. We also found that there were two strip clubs, one on the first floor, and one right above it on the second floor, we avoided both. There were also all kinds of souvenier shops in the basement and first floor. From what I hear tourists usually love this place. There were "ladies of the night" standing around outside as well. Extremely sketchy! We ended up heading to an Irish Pub across the street where there were less women, but that was a good thing since it was hard to tell who you can trust.

On Wednesday, Wei Wei and Rachel picked me up from the hotel and we went to meet several AIESECers down in Geylang, which is a much cheaper and slummier part of town (one of the very few in Singapore). Everyone refers to it as the red light district of Singapore. There were cart loads upon cart loads of Durians and open-air fruit stands on the left side of the road, and tons of sketchy bars, hotels, restraunts, and women on the right. I didn't even want to see what the back roads of the area looked like. We walked many many blocks from the bus stop and ended up going to an open-air restraunt place where we had $5 beers (cheapest in singapore!) and some strange foods. Frog legs, which were delicious, then some kind of chinese omelet, and then a couple of things that were tasty but I can't really describe them. It happens a lot when food is so foreign to you. Another crowd of AIESECers joined us soon after we arrived too, I wonder if I can remember everyone's name >.<. Wei Wei, Rachel, Grace, Cheryl, Alex, Joel, Nabeel... I'm forgetting one guy's name but I think that's most of em. We stayed until the bar closed up around 2am and then ended up at the McDonalds near my hotel because I offered to treat everyone to some late night snackage. I had to bail out around 3am though because I wake up for work at 6am (VERY BAD IDEA). Coffee was the only way I survived Thursday, but I made it and did pretty well.

On Thursday night, I met everyone at the Manhattan Fish Market. All the AIESECers from Wednesday night were there except for one, plus some. Nadia, Aman, Mayas, several AIESEC alumni, and a bombshell from Holland named Vera who was only here for 2 days on a layover heading back to Holland. We spent dinner chatting about AIESEC and how we all ended up here, and I had an especially interesting conversation with Mayas. He asked about the situation in AIESEC U.S., and we discussed it for a while. He had read the whole letter and the forum, but he was probing for more information on everything. Before he left, he asked if I was coming to the Annual General Meeting on Saturday, and I told him that I needed to go so that I could talk to some of the MC and see if they'd be willing to support the LCs of AIESEC U.S. at International Congress. He said that it shouldn't be a problem, and handed me a business card. At the very moment I looked down and read the business card, he said, "I'm the MCP." Rather shocking, I wasn't expecting that! After dinner, everyone headed out to Clarke Quay to a bar called the Pump Room. I decided not to drink because I was still tired from the night before, and like a lame-o I left at midnight to go to bed.

Friday was a good day overall. I finished a big part of the project at ExxonMobil, 2 days ahead of schedule! The customer was very pleased, and I get the feeling that if we get more work here in Singapore, they'll be sending me back :). After work, I joined my boss and two salesmen at a country club for dinner. There's a complicated situation going on where Varec's representative in Singapore is passing the rep-job on to a bigger company who can handle the demand, and the salesmen were the heads of each company. Big name people, everyone at the table was at least twice my age >.<. It's always hard to tell if you're saying the right thing to salespeople, because they'll always make it sounds like you are, but my boss said I did well. All this week, I've been training the new reps engineers in how to use our product. I'm hoping that this deal works out, because they were a good team to work with.

On to Friday night! The usual group, Wei Wei, Rachel, and Joel, plus Michal, Grace, another Joel, a columbian guy, a singaporian guy whose name I can't pronounce, the LCP of NTU Wan Xin, a german from Oxford, England named Till, and probably one or two others, were there. We first went to a restraunt called Cuba Libre and saw a great singer and several great dancers for an hour or so, after that we went wandering around for something to do. Several of the AIESECers left because they had work to do the next day, but the rest of us went to a club called "The Ministry of Sound". Sounds like a government thing, and they do have a government office called "The Ministry of Manpower", which both Michal and I were convinced would be the name of a gay club in a few years. Anyways, this place was fun, there was a room for techno, a room for hip hop, and a room for disco. Now, if you've ever seen me dance, you KNOW that I'm a horrid, horrid dancer, but at least everyone in the group was a pretty bad dancer. Joel wasn't a bad dancer, but he was very over the top. Fun to watch and hard to avoid, the elbows and the hands flying everywhere! The club was packed, and no matter where we were, barely any room to move. We left the club around 3am and went to a 24-hour local restaraunt to eat some local food I can't pronounce. It was delicious, kinda like a sub sandwich with egg, sausage, and spices inside covered in cheese, chili sauce, and black pepper. Around 4:30 we were all exhausted and parted ways for home.

Saturday I found my way to the National University of Singapore for the Annual General Meeting. It's one of the legislative meetings in AIESEC Singapore where the LCs and the MC meet to discuss the next year and any motions, mandates, or amendments to the constitution are voted on. There were about 57 AIESEC Singaporians there and 10 - 15 guests (no voting rights for guests of course). Some of the Singaporians said it was boring, but man, do I wish we had something like this in AIESEC US! Motions were submitted before the meeting started (probably online), and for most of them, all they needed was a proposer and a seconder for it to pass. If someone in the room were to object, it would have to immediately go to a vote. Everyone in the room had to vote, the options were to be for it, against it, or to abstain, but everyone had to be accounted for. They wrote all the notes on a projector screen in front of us, that way we could watch and see exactly what was going on. Everything that was decided upon was written, as it should be. The big changes, the amendments to the constitution, were passed by a vote, even if everyone was for it. This ensured a proper procedure for making a decision by avoiding assumption. The meeting took about 2 and a half hours altogether, and it was truly beautiful to me. Afterwards, I had another conversation with the MCP, Mayas. I told him that I loved the meeting and he asked how we did it in the U.S., sooo I described it to him in full. Such a horror story really, the NDAs, the lack of notes, the decisions already made, the 16 hours of debate which lead nowhere, and the years and years of incompetence in the MC and division and derision between the MC and LCs. He was taken back by the story, he had already known some of this, and the MCPs of the world had argued about the fate of AIESEC U.S. in Macedonia last February. I told him that the LCs are going to need their support in Brazil this month at International Congress, and that they're writing a compendium this very week to present to the Global Plenary for the reform of AIESEC U.S. He was happy to hear that reform was happening. We parted ways after that and a Rewards and Recognition ceremony. I headed home and took the rest of the day off because it had been a crazy week, and everyone was feeling pretty lazy.

So here I am on Sunday. I'm going to spend a couple hours working on site reports and a project coming up in a few weeks. I also need to run out to a store and buy a bunch of computer junk for the job. Some final configurations are going to happen next week for a project that they have going on at ExxonMobil, then the all-important Site Acceptance Test where everything will be tested and accepted. Only after this test can everything be invoiced and paid for. I don't think I'll go out as much in the next week, maybe a few times for coffee and to hang out, but I don't really feel like doing a repeat of last week, just too much staying out too late!

My synopsis of Singapore thus far: Tons of people, everywhere. Many times, you'll just see people hanging around in the street because they have nothing better to do and nowhere to go. There are so many women here, and so many of them are extremely beautiful and at the same time, not at all attractive. I think that its like that because most of them look exactly the same, tall, thin, dark clothes, similar makeup, etc. There isn't a lot of diversity in the look, and I have a hard time finding the norm attractive. The AIESEC women looked good though, hard to find a part of AIESEC were there aren't very attractive women! Moving on, I'm afraid that if I were to stay in this city on the long term, I would be superbly bored. There's only so much you can do, really, especially if you stick to bars and clubs which aren't really my scene anyway.

I'll give a better synopsis in person later, so feel free to ask. As a summarized update of my own state, everything is actually going well! I've been able to understand, communicate, and adapt to everything going on at work. I've surpassed expectations there and completed work far ahead of the agreed-upon schedule, creating some flex-room in case things go wrong somewhere along the line. I've enjoyed meeting the people, seeing the city, eating the foods, and experiencing the life of this country. This has been quite the trip, and I feel rather revitalized already! Life simply doesn't seem to hold any problems for me at the moment, and I know that I better enjoy it now, because it never lasts!