Food and sights!

Hooray! AIESECers finally got back with me this weekend! The reason it took so long for them to get back to me was because most @ers in Singapore are foreigners and aren't here in the summer. Anyways, Wei Wei and an AIESECer from Slovakia, Michal, took me around town on Saturday night to a city event called Nightfest, and giant tourist attraction statue called the Merlion, pronounced Mer-Lion, for obvious reasons made apparent with pictures that will follow later. They also showed me around Clarke Quay, which was a very beautiful part of town. After all this we went to a couple of bars. Alcohol is much more expensive here than anywhere I've ever been, S$17 for a pint of beer at a bar. We also ended up running into another AIESECer from Indonesia who was working for Kraft Foods while bar hopping/exploring and got her to join us for a bit!

On Sunday I met up with Wei Wei and Rachel, another AIESECer from Singapore. They took me to an MLE eating competition where we got to see Kobayashi vs. Joey Chestnut (who beat Kobayashi in hot dog eating) rematch with Chicken Sautee. Kobayashi won, it was momentous! After that we met up with Michal and went to eat at a place called Makansutra Glutton Bay, and we had Sting Ray, Chicken-on-a-Stick, some Coconut drink that was served out of an actual coconut, a sugar cane drink and some other stuff that was pretty delicious, but I forget the names. My camera kicked the bucket today, which is what I get for having a pretty cheap camera :(. I'll probably buy a new one next weekend. I'll post pics soon, just getting around to it.

Anyways, I'm not feeling particularly inspired for writing this morning, so I'll make a better post later.

Walkin 'round

I took it easy tonight. I walked around the city for a few hours and just watched all of the people. I got watched too, you kinda stick out like a sore thumb when you're a tall white guy in a crowd of asians. Even the rare white person would look at me and other white people in sight with a look that said "you are rather out of place here". It was kind of fun I guess, but very lonely. It's so much more fun to explore a city when you're with friends.

I've seen more beautiful asians tonight than I believe I've ever seen in my entire life! I learned that you should avoid a beautiful woman who is sitting or standing around by herself and staring at you (I know its common sense, but I've never been solicited before). People watching is fun, its interesting to see that no matter where you go, there tend to be the same general types of people and situations. Varying cultures just put a different spin on these common situations. It's one of those things that's really hard to explain, so I'm just not going to try here.

I was reading Masato's blog, and man do I wish I could cook. There's a lot of interesting foods here, but I don't have anything to cook with here at the hotel, nor do I have the know-how to cook jack.

Anyways, someone from AIESEC Singapore finally got back in touch with me. There's nothing happening this weekend, but next weekend there is an AIESEC-Singapore monthly get together and the pre-IC national legislative meeting, which guests are allowed to attend. Sounds like fun to me! Guess that means I'll stay bored for this weekend. Talking to my boss is fine and all, but there's definitely that 20 year age difference keeping us from actually being buddies that hang out together.

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!

The first couple days in Singapore

It's the beginning of my third day here in Singapore, and I'm in love with this place! I left the hotel on Sunday morning before 9am and walked around until about 2pm, I have no idea how far I walked, but I didn't stop moving almost the entire time, so it was pretty impressive. Every inch of this place is beautiful, even when we drove down to the port, it still managed to remain beautiful!

I wish I could take pictures of the port area, Jurong Island, it's extremely beautiful in an industrial way. The jungle of machinery and metal walkways climbing hundreds and hundreds of feet into the air is incredible! Especially the oil rigs that they're assembling, those things are freaking juggernauts.

It's a much more international city than I expected, there are people from all over the world walking around. The majority are the Chinese, followed by the Malay, Japanese, and Indians. The majority of food is Chinese and Japanese. I've never seen so many Asians in one place before! I stand at least 2 or 3 inches taller than 99.9% of the people around here. The Malay are interesting because I've met very few in my life, mostly just Firdaus. I see a whole lot of versions of Firdaus walking around, both male and female, and yes, I do find that funny.

One of the cool things about working with Varec, my boss got me upgraded to a room on the Executive Floor, which means free breakfasts (which are actually incredible and feature a ton of different foods), and free drinks in the executive lounge if I want them. All in all, it's a pretty sweet deal, they're taking good care of me to be here.

Lessee, I'll be posting more often on this blog since I'm 12 hours off from Atlanta and it's rather hard to talk to anyone unless its early as hell in the morning. I'm still fighting off jet lag, but I'll adjust pretty quickly, I think. I've always had a knack for changing my sleep schedule on a dime.

July 19th, 2pm in Tokyo

July 19th, 2pm in Tokyo

So here I am, enjoying what little Japanese culture I can as I sit in a 4 hour layover between the US and Singapore in Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. I’ve been awake for 3 days and 1 night in the last 48 hours. It’s literally been the longest day of my life! I just got off a 14 hour flight from Atlanta during which the sun never set. We flew west---west---west, the hours ticked down, then suddenly BAM! It’s Saturday, 24 hour jump ahead as we cross the prime meridian, but the sun never stopped shining. Essentially, I skipped a night. What a weird feeling.

I’m lost, slightly confused about what’s going on, I’m hungry, I don’t recognize any of the food options, and I’m pretty broke at the moment. It’s good to travel internationally again! I’ve been staving off insanity by playing Super Nintendo emulators on the plane, but it really isn’t the worst I’ve ever been through. Try sitting on a Greyhound bus for a 30 hour bustrip that ends up taking 50 hours, with layovers at least every 8 hours, THAT, my friend, is hell. At least here I wasn’t afraid of people stealing my stuff and/or knifing me.

Haha, I turn my head to see McCain and Obama debates on the local TV. I wish this shit wasn’t spread all over the world, I feel like I can never escape listening to election news.

Oh, so I sat next to this guy on the plane, and we got to talking about why we’re flying out to Tokyo. He said he worked for a company called EMA, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of SAIC, so I had to shake his hand, because apparently we’re co-workers and we didn’t even know it >.<. Of course, we work in completely different divisions of the company, but still, it was kinda cool.

I need a socket converter. I think I’m going to dedicate the next few hours to 1. finding this socket converter, and 2. finding a socket to convert, then 3. playing games until I can fly again. I’m so tired right now, it’s about 1:10am EST, AND I’ve been up since 7am on Thursday morning (also EST). I got sick earlier this week and had to take a day off work because I was contagious at the time, but I HAD to get work done, so I worked through the night on Thursday night after seeing friends for a couple hours. I got about 90% of the work that I needed to get done, done. I’ll have to rely on another project manager to ship this server out the door on Monday since I couldn’t get it out by Friday morning. I called my boss at 3:30am EST, which is 3:30pm in Singapore, and he said that some of his equipment was defective and he desperately needed me to bring a backup along. He then shot off a bunch of names of people that I needed to talk to, to which I responded, “Dude, it’s 3:30am, I’m the only one here”, and he said “What the hell are you doing in the office at that time? Whatever, this is lucky, just grab the test equipment we’ve been using and bring it.” So hooray, I do not feel that my exhaustion is in vain.

I’m going to try and post regularly while I’m in Singapore. Most of the people I love to annoy on instant messengers are now on opposite schedules, so, as per the norm, the blog will be the method of update while traveling internationally.

I wish I some actual time in Tokyo. Just from what I’ve seen so far, I’d like to spend some time here and just check everything out :-P. Plus, the Japanese language is amazing to listen to.

Singapore n' other fun stuff

Leaving for Singapore on Friday morning. I can't wait! I need to look up AIESEC Singapore and try to contact someone there to see if they're up for some company :-P. I also need to figure out how to pack for it...

Work has picked up, it's nice to feel productive again. I have a lot to do still before I head out on Friday, including another trip to Chattanooga on Thursday. I gotta order a bunch of stuff for work and confirm a bunch of other stuff. Woo stuff!

Last weekend was interesting, and when I think about it, the last couple of weekends have been interesting. I've managed to find something to do almost every Friday and Saturday night. Slowly, I feel like I've gained some sense of positive perception back. I'm all but back to good. This trip to Singapore is happening at a good time, I think it'll be the last thing I need to really get back to normal and on top of things. Who knows?

I'm curious about whats going to happen, still unsure of what I want to happen, just sure that I want to be there when it does happen. There's a lot going on with AIESEC US and AIESEC in general right now, which is interesting to listen to and be a part of. I'm being trusted with more work at my job and learning more about how everything works. As I become a bigger force at work, I'm going to feel better about where I am in life. I am still working to get over the insecurity that comes with being "the new guy".

I was reminded by a new friend this weekend how much I enjoyed doing geeky stuff like watching Anime. I'm gonna start that up again, so feel free to suggest 'em. I have a 19 hour flight on Friday and could go for something to watch. Feel free to suggest any more fun geeky stuff that you can do on a plane too!