a little piece of singapore

my friend christophe, as i like to call him, has urged me to write something since i hit submit on the previous entry.  since then, i've thought of blurbs here and there, but no little blurb has grown into a full fleshed paragraph.

however, being as skilled as i am at picking just the right time for things...i am now writing.  why?  because i have two of my hardest finance tomorrow from 9am-3pm of course.  rarely has there been a better time to write a blog entry.  no doubt about it.  consider this a hodgepodge of the happenings [or rather, the mental on-goings] as of late.

snaps to you, singapore/NUS...

for promoting the anti-plastic bags campaign!  in addition to overwhelming the shops with "i'm not a plastic bag" bags, the school also charges for take-away bags now.  10cents/bag.  even those odd ads that talk about turtles..and plastic..and choices..and...well, who knows what point they're trying to get at; regardless, snaps to you, singapore, for promoting the plastic-reduction campaign.  and while paper recycling isn't wildly popular (or even slightly available in most cases), the school has set its printers to print double-sided on default.  genius!  esp. good for me b/c i always mess up when i try to print double-sided.  [i mean, seriously, that tiny little indescript instructional image about which side is up is HARDLY instructional.]  gg, singapura

also.  i sincerely feel that i've met some of the brightest people here.  really.  singaporeans seem to combine a good mix of work ethics & discipline with lots of ingenuity.  maybe it's bc asia really is growing & exploding & they're in the right place at the right time, but really, my classmates are so freaking bright.  seeing that my classes here are graded on a bell curve & i have two of my hardest finals back to back tomorrow, their bursting intellects are not currently working in my favor...

along the lines of the whole changing dynamics of asian growth, i think the resumes the students here hold are quite impressive.  i'm not talking about killer gpas, but one guy in my group has been running his own international, 30employees+ business since he was 21 [4 years now].  another girl works for the UN 7 does relief work in Africa, another girl works for Bloomberg, and another guy moved to the US for a year to run the marketing department for a start up in Pittsburg.  of course, not only do they pwn me & then some on all sorts of US knowledge, they also seem to have a vast mental storage of asian & european insights that put me to shame.  again, back to how all this intellect is currently working against me as my textbook sits in my backpack, which is still zipped. 

this blurb has sufficiently been exhausted.

moving on.

mayhaps i will dump some semester wrapup thoughts my last four days here, post vietnam trip, but in the meantime, i have to say that the most refreshing thing about this land of merlions & hainanese chicken & egg pratas & queueing is how chill it has all been.

i remember being led around my dorm on move-in when someone pointed out the tv room as the chill-out room.  i chuckled a little thinking it was the strangest title [confession: 'chill' always seemed like a geographic buzz word to me.  along the lines of mad, wicked, hella, etcetcetc].  also ironic is that the temperature here never seems to fall below 85*F and your skin is never quite dry [nor your laundry].  and yes, i probably should include a significant factor in that i really did live for the past 4 months plane ticket/bus to plane ticket/bus with a few hours of lectures a week in between, hardly much to complain about.  but yes, taking it all into account, singapore has been so chill, and hopefully, this will cast its lasting effect on me. 

there is something so simply reassuring [despite being scientifically inaccurate, yes yes] about realizing that while being 13 hours ahead [of typical life, as i know it back home], the sun still comes out [tomorrow, techincally] and yes, there will be rain [in fact, at approximately 3pm everyday for approximately 30 minutes], but the sunshine will come back, and the day after, too.  life keeps going, and we'll all float on all right.

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