Off on a great adventure!

So here I am two years out of the AE Program at the Univ of Nebraska in Omaha - two quick years of building design and operations experience complete and ready to take on the next challenge in my career. A Fulbright Grant is part of a dream that I've had since I was a little kid - to live abroad and truly become familiar with another culture (back then I would have been ecstatic with just going to Iowa). Little did I know that I would be taking off to a country which is essentially a cross-roads of several different important world cultures. This blog will be a tribute to the lessons learned and the experiences gained along the way. For those of you that don't know, I'm also taking a trip to Ireland and London starting this Sat - so don't be thrown off when the initial pictures and posts seem to be full of Leprechauns instead of Dancing Dragons.

The title of my blog, "Nonstop Service to Singapore" comes from the witty (well not really that witty) response that I've been giving all the people that ask about my flight. I have yet to get anyone to believe that "Southwest Airlines recently added a nonstop flight to Singapore from Eppley... yeah, I think it's really cheap. Now you don't have any excuse to not visit!" I have a few more pretty gullible friends to try it out on - we'll see.

Now as a beginning theme for my posts; here is a list of Singapore lessons learned:

- Turns out moving to another country involves paperwork and medical exams. I had to send in one of my big toes the other day for testing to make sure I don't have swine flu.

- The NUS (National Univ of Singapore) has only 200 spots for Graduate Student housing and over 800 applicants; boy was I wrong in assuming that I would get one. Oh well, I think I almost have a room set up with a Computer Engineer named Ashish. I found him on easyroommates.com and his post mentioned that he would buy "move in night pizza" - jackpot!

For those of you that don't know anything about Singapore, here is a little informational video:

Yes - he said 15,000 people per square mile.