Room description without pictures. Pictures are not a priority and will happen later.

First impression: sweet mao this is huge!

At the door, I paused to take my shoes off, but the manager told me not to bother. That surprised me -- I thought all Asian cultures were very down on shoes inside -- but she's the boss.

My personal room is bigger than my old bedroom at home. It's over twice as big as my room in Victoria. This really surprises me -- I've heard so much about the density of cities in Asia, and I read somewhere that Singapore was either the densest (sp) or second-densest country in the world. But I guess that once you start going vertical in a big way, you get a lot of "extra" space. My room is on the 8th floor of 15, by the way.

In some ways the room (not just my bedroom, but also the dining area and living area) are too big. They look quite sparse. Sounds seem to echo a lot and I felt like I was being really noisy when I was moving around at 2am, but apparently it didn't wake up anybody.

Went to sleep at about 3am, woke up at 7am. That's 3pm in the afternoon by Vancouver time, which seems reasonable as a continuation of my 26-hour sleep cycle.

I think the room is facing east. There was certainly a lot of sun. Remember that Singapore is basically on the equator, so sunrise/sunset is pretty stable at 7am/7pm. There's a lot of traffic on the street outside -- maybe a bit more than Canada Way (at home). Maybe the idea of being up at 9am every day will be easy!

Looking out the window, I was struck by the first time I wanted to use the term "riot of colours". The railing on my private balcony is light blue -- I hadn't noticed that at night. There's massive amounts of green on the sides of the road and surrounding the lake. I've commented in the past that my (old) area in Victoria makes Vancouver look pathetic; this place gives Victoria a run for its money. There's areas of bright red bricks on the road. Admittedly the lake isn't a nice brilliant blue. I think I'd rather swim in Burnaby Lake than this one.

Now for the comparison with my parents:

• Bringing sheets: Dad was half-right. The mattress has a sheet (ground sheet? bed sheet? What are they called?), but no upper sheet. I got a blanket (as expected), but I'm not certain if I'd use it. When I arrived at the room, I was going to take off another mark from Dad on this one since I wouldn't need a sheet, but it felt too weird to try to go to sleep without any cover. I didn't think about what "30 degrees C" meant. Remember those days in the summer where you feel overdressed while naked? It's like that here all the time.
• Pillow: Mom was wrong, I got a pillow.
• Slippers: Dad was right, those were extremely useful on the flight, and I think I'll wear them around the apartment.
• Kimono (or whatever the male equivalent is, if that's the female one): my parents were right; my lack of one is distressing. Oh yeah, if anybody has suggestions for what type of Asian light wear I should get, please let me know. As you can tell, I don't know the basics of what the clothing is called or what gender they're for.
• Sweaters: Mom was wrong; I don't need any sweaters. The air-conditioned areas are still 21 - 23 C, which is emminently T-shirt conditions.

In summary, the room is much nicer than I expected.

Ok, I'm here now.

The first flight was very nice. It was a Boeing 777-300, and it had LCD displays on the back of every seat, and power sockets on most seats (including mine -- I chose my seat for that reason). This means that I can use my laptop for the 13-hour 45-minute flight. :)

I've decided to do this blog post piecemeal; I'm writing stuff as it occurs to me. That's easier than trying to remember everything at the end. I'll probably be switching between present and past tense, though. It's currently one hour into the flight.

At 4 hours, I'm listening to current French pop songs. It seems that as long as I can't understand the lyrics, I enjoy popular music a lot more. (yes, I can speak French, but picking out lyrics in the middle of a song is beyond me, especially when I'm deliberately not trying to listen.)

Unfortunately all is not sweets and roses on this flight. The LCD is nice, but a number of features -- include the "Map" menu -- are not functioning. The error message is polite, but I wanted to see where we were on the map, how far we'd travelled to date, etc.

7 hours now. I don't feel too bad, which is good 'cause it's only half over. The thin slippers that Dad brought back from Japan (they was an omake for some first-class train tickets) help a lot. They're coming around with hot beverages, which will be followed by dinner. There's still one more meal coming; 2 hours before the end, they give out hot noodles. I've never been on a flight with three meals and six or seven drinks before... but then again, I've never been on a 13.75 hour flight. I was surprised by the amount of localization. Hot drinks include green tea, and the standard chicken hot lunch meal came with chopsticks. I'm not surprised because this doesn't make sense; I'm just surprised that the business is flexible enough to have different meals on different international flights.

I underestimated the amount of suckage involved in working on an airplane -- and the amount that I normally fidget. It's not unusual for me to have a foot on my desk, for example. Not in the classic "fat cat" pose, though. My laptop is on the desk like normal, and I kind-of slouch sideways. With one leg contorted around. Anyway, as of 12 hours, I've gotten about 5 hours of work done. Spent 5 hours watching movies/TV shows and/or eating, and about 2 hours of snoozing.

Hong Kong airport wasn't fun, since the first flight was delayed and they had poor signage. Seriously, who names the international tranfer flight check-in area "W1"? Also, either Air Canada shouldn't have printed my second boarding pass, or the security guard should have accepted it and not made me jog off to get a new one printed. I entered the security line-up at the time I was supposed to be at the gate for boarding. But after a bit more jogging, I arrived on the second plane.

The second flight was uninteresting in terms of airplane model (IIRC it was a 777), food, entertainment, lack of sights (pitch black and me not near a window anyway). I dozed for a bit.

Singapore airport was a model of efficiency; within 20 minutes of stepping out of the airplane, I was stepping out of the airport. The customs girl was very nice and smiled at me as I stuttered through my explanation of my job (she had previously asked when I was starting my studies, since I look so much like a student). She waved away my attempt to show her my exiting flight (you're required to show proof of the next destination if they ask).

The baggage carousel was actually the most nerve-wracking part. In the future, I think I might get some yellow paint and draw a huge happy face on the suitcase or something... there were just too many black suitcases.

Of course, the airport experience might be quite different if I hadn't arrived at midnight with nothing else arriving. Then again, my supervisor (the one here, not my old supevisor) says that he's travelled in over 40 countries, and the Singapore airport is the best.

Taxi ride was ok. A woman on the flight in said that it would be "really really expensive... like S$30" and tried to think of other ways I could get to my apartment, but in the end agreed that since the MRT was closed and there probably wasn't a direct bus, it wasn't worth it. The taxi ended up being S$40.20, but the driver gave me S$10 back when I handed him a S$50 and waved off my apologies for not having any coins. I figured that S$40 wasn't bad for a 35-minute drive mostly exceeding 100km/h. I definitely couldn't get a deal like that in Vancouver!

Impressions of the city at night: looked like any metropolist in North America. There's a huge port, lots of construction, big skyscrapers.

First impression upon stepping out of the taxi: sweet mao it's hot. And it's past midnight!

There wasn't anybody around when I arrived at my apartment, but the security was very nice and friendly, and called up the manager. She came down after five minutes, and was very friendly and got me checked in. I got the info for wireless, but my computer wasn't set up to deal with their particular encryption scheme (WEP), so I'm still just typing this and will send tomorrow from the university.

Arrival at room, 1:30am. I spent an hour writing blog posts, emails, and attempting to get the wireless working.

Overall impression: Singaporeans are extremely nice and helpful. The manager didn't show any signs of minding being woken up at 1am (she thought I was arriving tomorrow), the security guy didn't give me any glares for not knowing what I was doing, the only reactions to my braid (that I detected) was occasional mild curiosity, and the customs agent didn't transform into a tentacle monster and rip apart my paperwork and suitcases.

T minus 36 hours or so.

Suitcases are packed, other than this laptop + power cord + hair brush. Printed out invitations letters, copied map to apartment, etc. Finally finished moving all files over to my new laptop.

One friend had a really great idea: wear a shirt for customs. I'm taking this a step further and wearing my best clothes (well, best apart from full orchestra dress). Shirt, dress pants, braid, make-up... ok, not the last one. I won't be as comfortable when traveling, but anything that makes government officials easier to deal with is worth it.

I'm also making a few resolutions. New Year's resolutions are a big thing in North America, but I've never bothered with them. And I'm still not -- these are strictly aimed at Singapore, not life in general.

• Work from 9 to 5, unless it's obvious that the research group behaves otherwise. Yes, it's totally unnatural to wake up at the same time every day, but I'm going to try to do it for the five months.
• Do one touristy thing every week (probably on Sunday). I've glanced at a few tourist guides, and the only thing that remotely caught my eye was the crocodilarium (a zoo, just for crocodiles, with over a thousand beasts). But I'll force myself to stop working and go visit something. And with my superior cheapness, I'll do my best to enjoy whatever I pay money to see.
• Impose a strict "1 week and you're out" email policy. I have the evening for catching up on emails, so this shouldn't be difficult, but I'll find some time (maybe Sunday evening?) to do my final replies and then delete whatever's left.
• Never refuse to try any vegetarian non-alcoholic dish. I don't have my PhD so I still won't touch alcohol, and I'm extremely cautious about stuff that came from animals (seafood included). Fortunately, Singapore seems to really push multiculturalism and there's a good fraction of Buddhists, so I can probably ask for vegetarian food without offending anybody.