Singapore Summer

Using an iPhone on hostel wifi isn’t necessarily conducive to writing a full length blog entry, but I’ll try to give you a quick rundown.

Our last week in Singapore was great - fourth of July celebrations, goodbye dinners with new friends that suddenly felt like good old friends, the Duke Idea with some fellow Dukies including President Brodhead, and wrapping things up at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

Friday afternoon we flew to Bangkok and spent two nights there with Vansh and Alex, enjoying some fabulous food and the vibrancy that comes from night markets, tuk-tuks, and Buddhist shrines lining the road. On Saturday we took a river taxi and went to a floating market before touring some of the riverside temples. The river taxi ride was phenomenal - touring through the back alleys of canals, we got to glimpse the individual details of the houses on stilts, the docks floating among the reeds, and the longtail boats weaving around corners. We visited Wat Pho, the home of the world’s largest reclining Buddha, and marveled at the expanse of spires and colors.

We moved on to Siem Reap and loved the French-colonial vibe of open restaurants with clusters of tables and chairs on the sidewalks and the lazily flowing river past manicured gardens. The temples at Angkor Wat were, obviously, awe-inspiring. What struck me the most was the fact that they were built at the same time (1113 - 1150) as Notre Dame and Chartres (or at least the initial structures) and yet the aesthetics were so different - stained glass vs. ceramic tiles, smoothly carved stone vs. blocks pieced together like a puzzle, yet at the same time they served similar functions - wide sweeping places, cavernous buildings built for spiritual purposes.

Now in Phnom Penh, we were able to spend two nights here and spent the day visiting some of the memorials from the Khmer Rouge regime - the Killing Field and S21, where prisoners were held as detainees. One of the most striking things for me was the fact that this regime was terrorizing its people during the same four years when my mother was in college - seeing faces of people who were her age at the time and were persecuted for the same thing she did freely - pursuing an education - made it seem that much closer.

We toured the royal palace before dinner, and it was an oasis of green and ornate architecture amidst all the hectic traffic and hawkers in the streets. We had great local food in a beautiful garden restaurant with some UNC girls and our next stop is Koh Kong on the border with Thailand - a city near the Cardoram Mountains that has access to waterfalls, mangrove forests, and other treks.

After that we’re headed to Phuket for the last few days, with a quick trip to Phi Phi Island. Hard to beleve in a week we’ll be about to go home!

Sorry for the slight hiatus - things have been picking up as we near the end of our time in Singapore!

Since we last updated, we’ve wrapped up our time in the intervention program (our last week included more visits to newly admitted patients on the wards and a home visit) and started our time at the Duke-NUS campus at Singapore General Hospital. This has definitely been my favorite placement so far - the Duke facilities are very new and incredibly nice and we’ve been able to really contribute to the study. Since Monday, I’ve run some statistical analysis on the preliminary results of the study (the imaging portion of the same study that we worked on in the Research Division at IMH, FYI) and created 3D brain images from hundreds of 2D slides taken in a functional MRI scanner and fit them to standardized brain measures, while John’s been busy making a directory of all the different medications, side effects, and lesser known disorders/symptomology of the study participants.

We’ve been trying to fit in everything we’ve wanted to do here in the last few weeks, including some repeats of our favorite places, like another Monday night Happy Hour at Loof. On the novel side, we finally made it to our neighborhood hawker center, Old Airport Road Hawker Center. Hawker centers are dozens and dozens of stalls of eclectic mixes of food, from chili crab to sugarcane juice and everything in between. We picked chili chicken (John) and sweet and sour pork (me) and got heaps of steamed rice wrapped up in wax paper - enough to make two meals out of! The wait was long and the food wasn’t as cheap as we were lead to believe hawker centers are, but it was worth experiencing.

We also finally got to go to Chijmes, the convent-turned-restaurant center, with lots of mid-to-high range restaurants clustered amongst the pillars and courtyards, strung up with white lights. It was lovely and John and I both remarked that it reminded us of al fresco dinners around Europe. And last weekend, we got a taste of home with a dinner at the American Club, which a friend of a friend (classic Singapore connection) belongs to and invited us along for the ride. Afterwards we went to Alex’s apartment with a group of friends and then John and I parted ways: he went with half the crowd to a club, and I went with another half to see more of a traditional, cultural idea of 1am on a Saturday night. We wove our way through some alleys and found a string of open air shops with seating clustered all around and people sitting and hanging out late into the night. It seemed like a much more real version of Singapore than the version catered up to us by all the malls and modernized areas. It was one of my favorite nights here yet. I tried the infamous bean curd, a Singaporean dessert, and decided I hadn’t been missing much by steering clear, but the conversation was great.

Last weekend we checked out the zoo, which was a lot of fun. Not only was it a gorgeous day, but the animals seemed close enough to touch with the cool way the zoo builds deep trenches in between the animals and spectators, but doesn’t use glass or cages. That white bengal tiger? Nothing but air between us. Although the leopard and jaguars were tagged as vicious enough to be kept behind bars, everything else had apparent free range. We even had some up-close-and-personal interactions with lemurs as they scampered about and jumped from tree to tree around us. Overall it was a big success, and we saw the feedings of both the elephants and the orangutans.

Last night, we headed up to the top floors of the Swissotel Stamford to the New Asia Bar, where every last Thursday of the month they open up the helipad for a rooftop party. It was breath-taking: 73 floors up and just removed from the central business district, which was actually better because we could look at the full effect of the skyline: Esplanade (the theater district), the convention center and amphitheater, the Marina Bay Sands, the CBD, Boat and Clarke Quays, and Orchard Road. We ran into some friends we’d made in our search for an apartment and had a great time. Afterwards, John and I took a walk along the bay and walked past the merlion (a giant stone statue of a fish with a lion’s head that spouts a huge stream of water - as ridiculous in person as it sounds, although one of the symbols and “big sights” of Singapore). The views of the bay and its surroundings from both the ground and 73 floors up were gorgeous, and we were able to check yet another thing off of our list.

Here’s to whatever we might get to experience here for our last weekend!

Long Overdue Photos

Time to report back on our first venture outside of Singapore!

This weekend, we ended up going to Malaysia - we knew we wanted to go at some point, but we weren’t positive it would be this weekend, but Thursday night we decided it was the right time to seize the opportunities afforded us by being a few hours’ bus ride away from another country. Thursday night in itself was a great time; we went to a Singapore Young Professionals dinner at - you guessed it - an al fresco bar in the middle of the Central Business District with stunning views of the sunset over the city: the Flyer (the giant ferris wheel, sort of like the London Eye), the Marina Bay Sands, and the bay stretched out beyond. We met a lot of really nice people and even ran into a few we’d met elsewhere, which was a nice reminder of how small Singapore can be.

Friday morning we were overly optimistic in thinking we could get tickets for the noon bus at 11:45am, so we ended up having to settle for 6:00pm tickets to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. We went back home and enjoyed the sunshine and pool until our bus, and then made the five hour trip to KL. We got there and went more or less straight to Sky Bar, a bar facing the Petronas Towers (formerly the tallest buildings in the world). If inquiring minds wanted to know, there is very much a sin tax in Malaysia, hiking up the cost of drinks. We were fortunate to have points of contact in the city - our friends Davis and Matt took us to the bar and kindly let us crash on the (comfortable?) floor of their apartment.

Saturday morning we caught the 9am bus to the Cameron Highlands, but not without picking up some roti prata with curry for breakfast first. The bus ride culminated with an hour or so of winding up hairpin turns in the hills of Malaysia, but it was a beautiful ride. We arrived around 1:30 in the afternoon, secured our return tickets, and then found a great hostel recommended by our trusty and faithful companion, Lonely Planet. The highlands were so lush and great for cultivating everything from tea to flowers, and our guest house had a beautiful little courtyard and garden. We went to lunch at a great, inexpensive Indian place where John and I got murtabak and Matt and Davis got the combos, meaning an assortment of Indian dishes, ranging from dal to rice and yogurt to lemon chicken and vegetables.  I loved the food in Malaysia for two reasons: it was cheaper than in Singapore and also easier to get/more authentic.

After lunch, we went to the trailhead of some of the trails that wind through the hills/mountains nearby and set off on what turned out to be a fairly strenuous but fun hike. We were kept company by monkeys that called to each other but never quite showed themselves as we hiked mostly uphill, using the terraces between tree roots as our steps and enjoying the mossy vegetation. We reached a 6,031 foot peak, Gunung Berembam - one of the highest peaks in the area. We then made our way to Robinson Falls - powerful but unfortunately not very conducive to swimming - before returning home to Tanah Rata, the town that serves as the home base for Cameron Highlands backpackers. We had a great dinner at a mostly Chinese-influenced restaurant, where I stuck with sweet and sour chicken but the boys tackled a steamboat experience - kind of like the Chinese version of fondue. Two types of boiling soups are brought out (a more traditional chicken soup and a very spicy Tom Yam) and all manner of food are dumped in to cook - chicken, fish, tofu, prawns, vegetables, and lots of things we weren’t sure about. We hypothesized that they were tofu-stuffed crab claws and slightly misshapen scallops, among others. Overall, it was a successful outing, even though we stayed past closing and couldn’t get the strawberries and cream we’d hoped to have for dessert. 

The next morning we set out early for the Boh Tea Plantation after a delicious breakfast of banana honey roti. We found a great taxi driver who ended up saving us and sending a friend to get us in the afternoon when we needed to get back to Tanah Rata for our return bus to Kuala Lumpur. The plantations were the culminating jewel in our whole trip - they were truly gorgeous. Winding through the roads up to the estate, we got a brief explanation of the way the tea leaves are blasted with air to oxidize them and remove most of the moisture, then pressed to release the rest of the moisture before being sifted to separate into different strengths of tea. We toured the factory itself, then set off an a self-guided tour of the fields. We made our way down to a service road and then crossed a creek before heading up the steep, twisting paths between the individual bushes. We crested one hill and followed a second service road around a few bends and then found a good place to make the final haul up to the highest point within a few miles, where we all spread out on a rock and enjoyed the gorgeous view. There’s really no way to describe the beauty of the green, nearly-symmetrical rows of tea bushes carpeting the rolling hills, so I’ll post pictures soon. We made our way back down and headed to the cafe, where we enjoyed delicious varieties of tea and scones/sandwiches - definitely a good reward for our hike. One of the best parts about all of this was the beautiful weather: clear blue skies, warm sun, and cool breeze that kept the temperature around 70 degrees - a welcome relief from the heat of Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia.

We hiked out on the road that we’d driven in on before getting picked up by our taxi. We paid him a few extra ringgit to swing by a strawberry farm on the way back to town, and we were able to get our hands on some strawberries and cream after all - definitely worth it and definitely delicious.

We left mid-afternoon and got back to Kuala Lumpur around 8pm, where John and I had to navigate the public transit system to get to the bus station with departures to Singapore. We were lucky enough to get tickets for the 10:00pm bus back home, so we grabbed some dinner in the station and made it back to Singapore around 3:30am. As for our internship, tomorrow I’m scheduled for a home visit with our supervisor and John is visiting the satellite clinics in the community that I went to last Tuesday. Overall, being halfway through with our time here, we’d say it’s been a great experience thus far!

So I guess it is about time I make my inaugural post on this joint blog Charlotte and I have …

Picking up where Charlotte left off, Saturday we woke up to thunderstorms and pouring rain.  That gave us very little incentive to roll out of bed until about noon or so.  By then the rain had let up a little bit, but it was still gray and gloomy outside so our plans to visit the zoo and other outdoor Singapore sightseeing weren’t really options anymore.  With nothing else viable to do really, we took our talents to the malls of Singapore.  After discovering our new best friend the previous night, Bus #7, we took it again on Saturday afternoon to the Somerset mall on Orchard Road.  On the bus was a little girl who seemed to have lost her parents.  The bus driver tried directing her where to go, and we hoped she figured things out.  However, when we saw her wandering around by herself amidst the crowded mall we contacted a mall security guard who promised to help the girl find her parents, which made us feel much better.

The Singapore mall experience is quite interesting.  Upon walking in, we stumbled onto a random concert being performed in the middle of the mall.  They band(s) were local and actually pretty good.  There were a bunch of other people lingering around taking photos, and being photographed too, which gave the mall a very surreal feel.  These people were apparently contestants on a reality show and they had to live in the mall.  We found their glass rooms around the corner, complete with beds, clothes, and TV.  Currently the Great Singapore Sale is going on.  It is advertised literally EVERYWHERE in Singapore with ads that shout 75% off for just about every store.  However, we didn’t exactly find those discounts in any of the stores we ventured into.  In fact, the clothes were generally more expensive then they would have been anyway.  Getting hungry, we took the maze of elevators up to the top floor to the Food Republic, basically what food courts are called in Singapore.  Seeing a stand for Prata, we ordered some to tide us over before dinner.

From there we took the bus (the 7 again) to The Botanic Gardens.  By then, the rain was pretty much over but there was still a mist lingering around.  This gave the botanic gardens a very Jurassic Park/Lost-type feel.  It really was like we had entered into a completely different world - we couldn’t see any of Singapore’s skyscrapers from beyond the tall trees that filled the garden.  Following the pathways around the garden, we eventually came to our goal for the afternoon: Opera in the Park.  Opera in the Park is a performance of popular tunes by the Singapore Lyric Opera, very similar to the many “Pops in the Park” that take place in the US.  Overcoming our hesitation to sit on the wet grass, we eventually found a spot amidst the families and sat down.  The music was all superb, but our favorite was probably Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s Turnadot.  I played that piece with the Sound of America Band around Europe during the Summer of 2007 so it was fulfilling to hear it performed with a complete orchestra and soloist.  The concert also provided great people watching too.  There was such an eclectic mix of people, mostly young families, and we enjoyed being around them.  It was yet another side of Singapore that we hadn’t seen yet.

After a return to the same mall’s food republic for our first Chicken and Rice, we went out to Haji Lane (near Zam Zam that we went to last week) to meet up with friends.  We tried coordinating meeting up with two different groups of friends and they both actually ended up making it and sitting across the street from each other!  Two of them were guys from Duke we had never met before who are in Singapore for the summer too.  From there, we went back to Emerald Hill for a second night in a row for drinks.

Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day, thankfully, so we did what anyone would do living in SE Asia … we went to the beach.  Sentosa is Singapore’s manmade playground essentially.  It was a bay that they closed off to make an island, and on that island are beaches of course, but there are also upscale restaurants, a casino, indoor skydiving, and even a Universal Studios Theme Park … not kidding.  In order to get to Sentosa you have to survive the right of passage of navigating the busy crowds of the Vivo City Mall.  Interesting that you have to go through a mall to get to the beach.  We took the tram expressway out to the island and took another tram to make our way to the farthest beach (fun fact: its also the most southern point of continental Asia!), Tanjong Beach.  It was beautiful and not too crowded either.  However, the beauty of the sand, water, and palm trees were marred by the barges and factories in the background, but we tried to ignore those.  There was also a swanky club on Tanjong Beach that was hopping with ex-pats lounging on beach beds with house music pumping.  On the way back we decided to walk instead of take the expressway and we passed by all of the novelties Singapore installed.  Once again, it felt very surreal going from the beach to an imitation of the mosaic bench in Barcelona, to a Thinker Statue, to a Giant Merlion statue, to Universal Studios, and more.

This week we have been working at EPIP, the Early Psychosis Intervention Program.  Like the previous two weeks we got our schedules; however, we quickly found out that things were subject to change very last minute because so many of our activities depended on the patients.  We also found that we would be participating in many of EPIP’s events separately as well, which could potentially complicate things with the single key situation for the apartment.  We spent most of Monday familiarizing ourselves with EPIP’s literature and meeting the staff.  I was able to sit in with one of the case managers as she talked to an in-patient in the ward, but the patient wasn’t very cooperative so the case manager didn’t accomplish the check-up.  For lunch that day went back out to eat with our friends from Research and they took us for Chicken and Rice, but they also introduced us to Curry Puffs (our new favorite food) and Bubble Tea!

Tuesday I returned to the ward again with another case manager as she interviewed a patient to discuss the terms of her release.  The case manager spent time with me afterward explaining her procedure and describing to me many of the different drugs they prescribe and why.  Like I saw in Argentina, there was definitely a discrepancy in the quality of medicine in Asia.  There are two forms of drugs, the typical and atypical.  Typical drugs are the older forms of drugs that are much cheaper, but have more severe side-effects such as rigidity and loss of hair.  Atypical are newer, more expensive, and contain less intense side-effects that cause fluctuations in glucose levels and weight.  According to the case manager, the typical drugs are the most common in Asia, and atypical are only used when the typical ones fail generally, or there is an allergy.  She cited that many studies find very few differences between the side-effects so they do not think it as “barbaric” as one Australian doctor called the practice.  During lunch I sat in on the Clinical Review in which a team of case managers discussed followups of patients from 3 mo. and 6 mo.  Charlotte spent the day working at the Clinic Wellness Center (CWC) in Queenstown and the CHAT (Community Health Assessment Team) office on Orchard Road.

After recouping from our long day, we mustered the energy to go indoor rock climbing with some of our friends we had met here, who are avid climbers.  We took the MRT all the way West (close to Malaysia!) to a sketchy warehouse, but managed to find the indoor climbing gym.  After suiting up, we spent 2-3 hours scaling the walls with the signature Singapore club music blasting.  It was definitely rewarding making it to the top, since we had really only climbed on pWILD before!

Today, on Wednesday, we attended two EPIP-wide meetings, the General Ward Review, and the MDT (no clue what that means).  The GWR consisted of a mock exam that one of the case managers was taking in order to get her masters.  We learned exactly how to present cases, summarizing the information most effectively.  The MDT was a review of all the current in-patients and what future actions should be taken.  We went out to lunch with the EPIP crew who actually took us to the same center we went to on Monday.  Everybody ordered Bubble Tea - we easily had 12 on one order!  In the afternoon I participated in Club EPIP that provides activities every afternoon for patients.  Wednesdays are Sports Days so I joined in playing Captain’s Ball with a frisbee (essentially a variation on Ultimate Frisbee).  It was a ton of fun hanging out with everybody, and it was nice to see how everybody warmed up to each other over the two hours.  I got to know my team really well, and we definitely bonded.  I’m excited to return to Club EPIP tomorrow for “Art Frenzy” … I guess I’ll have to see what that entails!

Great second week in Singapore!

Monday night we explored the area around North Bridge Rd. a bit and met up with a friend of a friend (and her friend) for drinks at Loof, a rooftop bar (they’re really popular around here). Monday night happy hour means you buy one drink and get a second one free as well as free satay with peanut sauce (basically like kababs… very tasty). That basically turned into dinner for John and me, and we had a great time hanging out with some other ex-pats, one British and one American. They’re a little bit older than us (25-26) and have lived here for a while so were able to give us some good pointers.

Tuesday our coworkers took us out to lunch again, and we had beef noodles (a Chinese dish) at a nearby hawker center. It wasn’t our favorite meal here, but it’s nice to try all sorts of different meals to make sure we don’t miss out on anything!

Wednesday we had the morning off, so let’s be honest - it’s 85 degrees with clear blue skies, a cool breeze, and there’s a pool a 30 second walk from your apartment. What would YOU do? So yeah, we laid out. After work we went all the way to the other side (the western side) of the city to wander around Holland Village. It was one of the neatest places we’ve been to in Singapore so far - a very welcoming vibe and little twisting warrens of streets off of the bigger thorough fares with dozens of restaurants lining the sidewalks. After much debate, we picked what turned out to be a great Indian restaurant and had some chicken tandoori (me) and chicken curry (John). Thus far we’ve managed to have Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, Indian, and Chinese food - and so far so good.

The rest of our work week was a good way to wrap up our time in the Research division - we were able to help with some more recruitment, participate in case presentation discussions, and sit in on/help with initial screening assessments for participants as well as follow-up clinical assessments. We’re looking forward to our next rotation at the intervention program - we’ve been told that house visits are included…

Friday night we managed to stumble upon two great things: first, we met up with our friend Alex along Orchard Rd. and wandered up into Emerald Hill, which has definitely got to be my favorite place we’ve been in Singapore thus far. It had a great vibe with lots of cool boutique-y bars and outdoor seating with lots of landscaping and lighting but all somehow fitting in with the traditional Asian-architecture shop fronts. We enjoyed a drink there before meeting up with some more friends at Tab, which had lured us in with the promise of free entrance and “free flow” (read, free drinks) for girls and $20 entrance including 3 drinks for guys. In Singapore you just really don’t find those deals very often. We had a good time, for a large part because Singaporeans in the 18-22 year old range dance with no self consciousness and complete abandon. People watching would have been amusing enough without the good company.

John and I were a little bummed that it managed to be thunder storming this weekend, too, but we’re going to try to go to the art museum and find some more prata for dinner. He also submitted his med school applications, so theoretically he will be contributing soon… I’m starting to be worried I accidentally started my own blog.

Well, if the title didn’t convey it well enough, we had a very interesting weekend. Also, John promises me he’ll actually start contributing more once he finishes his applications for med school.

Friday night we set out to get our hands on some of the best and cheapest food in Singapore at Zam Zam, where we had delicious chicken murtabak (flaky flat bread filled with egg, chicken, spices, and onions). It was quick, authentic, and so delicious that even when I came across what I am 100% sure was the brain of the chicken as well as something I’m about 75% sure was either the liver or one of the kidneys, I kept eating (just discreetly putting aside the innards that AP Bio taught me how to label).

Afterwards we explored the area a bit - we were in a part of town known as Bugis, near Arab Street, and across the street from the restaurant was the Sultan Mosque. It legitimately looked like something straight out of Aladin. We headed to BluJaz on Bali Lane, and the entire street was filled with people sitting outdoors smoking hookah and enjoying the gardens in front of cafes. Although the jazz was great and it seemed like a fun spot, BluJaz wasn’t quite what we wanted - it was a lot of 50-year-old white men hitting on 20-year-old Asian women, so we relocated back towards downtown to meet up with a fellow Dukie in Singapore. We ended up at Altitude One, the highest alfresco rooftop bar in the world. It’s at the top of One Raffles Place, and it was so surreal to be, literally, at the top of Singapore. We met up with Alex (the Duke student) and some of his coworkers and enjoyed the breath-taking views. Landmarks like the Marina Bay Sands looked preposterously miniature from so high up.

Saturday we spent enjoying the hotel pool and warm sunshine - we couldn’t stray far because we were moving units within the same condominium complex, or else we would have tried to explore more of the city. We found a great Vietnamese restaurant in our neighborhood, which we actually went to for both lunch and dinner… no shame. Fun fact: we live a couple of blocks away from the red light district, but government-restricted blocks doesn’t do much to actually keep the ladies of the night from wandering a bit farther up the street. As a result, both Friday and Saturday night we saw our fair share of prostitutes wandering the streets, and Saturday night at dinner there were multiple tables of girls who could be described few other ways than escorts at best - hence the first half of the title. The second half of the title comes from our experiences at both of the bars we went to Friday and Saturday - alcohol here has a 100% sin tax, making it incredibly expensive and thus only the very well off can patronize these bars. So far, John and I have relied on the free drinks you get when paying entrance…

We finally were able to switch our stuff over to the new unit after dinner, and then we went to Clarke Quay to meet up with some of our coworkers at Le Noir - a bar with lots of outdoor seating by the water. Clarke Quay is one of the more hectic night life spots I’ve ever been to; it’s extremely concentrated and has a full range of casual to luxe spots. There were people sitting on every available surface of the bridge over the water, and throngs of people along the walkways. We changed locations after a while to Attica, a popular (and as a result extremely crowded) club - my favorite part was the interior courtyard where you could take a break from the dance floor and enjoy some fresh air.

Sunday we tried to make our apartment more of our own by finding the local grocery store and stocking up and then unpacking all of our stuff into the wardrobes. It was a pretty dreary day, so we didn’t do much else - compounded by the fact that we didn’t have a key of our own to the apartment, so we couldn’t come and go as we pleased. On top of that, while cooking dinner, we accidentally locked our room door behind us with the key inside, so we were stranded with nothing but the clothes on our backs and a million ideas for ways to pick the lock (none of which worked). Our landlady was… less than helpful, but she eventually came home around 11pm and let us in.

Today marks the start of our second week in the Research Division at IMH. A culinary highlight of our time here came at lunch today, when a group of our coworkers took us to an Indian restaurant nearby and told us to try prata, which are basically the Indian equivalent of crepes. Yes, please. I had a cheese prata with chicken curry and a plain prata with sugar, while John tried the egg and onion prata.

Next on the agenda: we’re meeting with a friend of a Duke friend tonight for happy hour after work, and hopefully exploring the City Hall area!

A few things I’ve noticed about Singapore/Singaporeans up to this point:

-Number one is definitely that Singaporeans are some of the absolute nicest people I’ve ever met - seriously. They are so kind, thoughtful, welcoming, respectful, conversational, polite, good-natured, good-humoured, nice, and every other adjective along those lines you can think of. Everyone has been incredibly helpful, engaging, and kind to us as we’ve started to find our way around the Singapore lifestyle. Everyone has invited us to share a meal the first time we’ve met them, and they’re very sincere. It makes our lives so much easier. They are falling all over themselves to help us, have wonderful advice, and are so easy to talk to. We met some of the co-workers who are closer to our age today and they were so eager to get to know us and help us in any way possible - we ended up getting a driving tour of Singapore from one of them, Caroline, and we met one of her Singaporean friends and had some local Korean food together.

-Side note, Singaporeans have the coolest English accents. It’s odd because you wouldn’t think so, but I guess it’s the remnants of colonialism. It’s not super-pronounced, but it’s definitely evident. I love listening to them talk!

-Everything is very well-labeled, which is great, but ironically directions/maps AREN’T readily available. So having a well-marked destination is great if you happen to stumble upon it, and a well-marked street is great if you know which street you want to turn on, but without maps, these things aren’t as helpful as they could be. I miss my Paris Pratique, which was a 30-something page grid map of Paris with an index of streets/places and my literal saving grace in Paris. However, we’re getting to be better with the bus system, which combined with the MRT can get you just about anywhere in Singapore.

-Singapore is big on the green trend - a lot of buildings have efforts to conserve water, energy, resources, you name it. John and I have both commented on how we feel that much more compelled to act green because of the general attitude about it around the city.

-Singapore is defined by contrasts: the MRT (mass rapid transit, aka subway) is incredibly sleek, clean, and efficient. Downtown Singapore has the same feel: gleaming skyscrapers, lights sparkling off the water of the bay, and a very modern aesthetic. However, other parts of Singapore are littered with shops whose goods spill out onto the sidewalks and men sitting around plastic tables and chairs eating local food at all times of day and night (our favorite is a restaurant a block away from our apartment named “Turtle Seafood” - and yes, they eat turtle). About 70% of Singaporeans live in government housing (which is nicer than what we usually think of as government housing), but the point being that expats and the few elite, rich Singaporeans are the ones that live downtown in the nice condos and apartments, so there’s another contrast between those two lifestyles, as well - although the standard of living does seem to be generally pretty high.

That’s it for now - we’re both falling asleep after a whirlwind evening of walking around Orchard Rd., so we’re hitting the hay (aka our IKEA sheets we had to purchase ourselves, since the apartment didn’t come with any).

first day of work! the entrance to the IMH campus and the view from our office.