SE Asia Travel Destinations Advice

I know its been a while since I last wrote in my blog but yes, I'm still in Singapore. The Fulbright is long over and I'm finishing up my MSc in Building.

For the sake of my buddy Kevin who will be traveling to SE Asia, I thought I would outline all the places I've traveled to since I've been here to give him an idea of the must see places! No sense in only sharing with him though so here we go:

Indonesia
West Java - Mt. Bromo and Ijen Crater - Magnificent and well worth it! Only problem is getting there. I was in a big group and we went through a tour company which was around $100 USD per person. Probably cheaper (but a much bigger challenge) if going by bus or even hitch hiking.

East Java - Jakarta and southern coast - I had a friend who is from Jakarta and we drove down to this little fishing village called Sawarna on the southern coast which was insanely awesome and no tourists. Awesome surfing if you could find a board down there. Once again it is really tough to get to. Jakarta is huge, dirty and uninteresting unless you know someone there. I have some friends there so ask me if you want a hookup.

Bali - Bali is VERY touristy in some spots. We stayed in Kuta which is the "party" area which I don't recommend unless that is what you're there for. Better to stay in the north or the west if you want quiet and culture. The temples and culture there are unbeatable.

Malaysia
Kuala Lampur - just another big city but the food is good and it is interesting if you know someone there.
Penang Island - supposed to be the food capital of Malaysia but I was unimpressed. Skip this one.
Malacca - cool little colonial style town near Singapore. Great history and vibe.
Borneo - Sarawak - Kuching is a charming city and the jungle that surrounds it (Bako National Park) is fun to explore.

Thailand
Phuket - Tourist central. Beaches are not that good. Skip this place.
Krabi - Near Phuket but much better in my opinion. Still quite touristy. Try getting a boat to one of the adjacent islands.
Bangkok - Culture is awesome and the bars are fun and cheap. Kao San road is a must to hang out with other back-packers. There is a weekend market in the northern part of the city with is worth going to

Cambodia
Phnom Phen - Interesting city if you dig in a bit. A lot of crazy history from the Khmer Rouge.
Siem Reap - A MUST SEE in Asia. The temples will blow your mind. My strategy there was to go to the smaller temples to get away from the mobs of tourists and just chill with a little picnic or something. Siem reap as a city is probably the most touristy place I've ever been in my life.

Vietnam
 Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) - This city is crazy, fast, and the number of motorcycles on the road will blow your mind. Lots of really awesome food and a few things to see. I have some friends there as well.

Philippines
Manila - a big, dirty city. Not much to see
Cebu Island - lots of amazing beaches, food, and the people are the coolest in Asia. This culture is the most similar to Latin America that I have seen

Now for some places that I'm dying to go to:
Sumatra - Lake Toba
Kota Kinabalu - Climb Mt. Kinabalu
Laos
Burma
Beaches in central Vietnam
Philippines exploring
Langkawi, Malaysia
Tioman, Malaysia
Perhentians, Malaysia
Koh Samui, Thaliand

What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of Singapore?

So a couple weeks ago, I was having a slight debate with a few of my Singaporean friends regarding the world's perception of Singapore - what is the first thing people think of when they think of Singapore?

My guess was that most American, specifically mid-westerners, wouldn't know too much about Singapore, and what they did know would probably be based on two things: Banned Chewing Gum and Caning (from the infamous American kid in the 90s who got caught spray painting cars). My argument was that if Singapore did something as simple as just lift the "ban" on selling chewing gum - they would be more successful in attracting foreign talent from developed western countries. No matter how silly the chewing gum ban may seem, I see it as a symptom of the fundamental authoritarianism that exists in the gov't here.

So the results of the survey came out a little more random that I thought - I didn't get many "chewing gum" or "caning" responses like I anticipated but the responses were very much varied and interesting. There was about 70 total responses:




When focusing only on Nebraskans, the results are highly skewed towards neutral and negative. I think a lot of this is due to Nebraskans having absolutely no clue what to think about when someone mentions Singapore.

Philippines and Fulbrighters

It was a busy last couple weeks as I headed to Manila for a Fulbright Conference and presented my research.



Afterwards, my fellow Fulbrighter Lauryn and I took a trip to Malapascua on the northern edge of Cebu Island. Pictures are here. Plus a few videos a I took on the way there:

Me chillin' and waitin for a Mango shake in a beautiful resort on the island.


Our awesome bus ride complete with interesting smoke coming from the wheels.


Little kids on the island making their own fun!

Quick Survey

Ok, so I have a very easy favor to ask of everyone - please take ten seconds and fill out this two question survey:  http://goo.gl/AvPU

Lots of Work to do! Such a nice day outside! Dilemma?

With my project in full swing after a 3:45AM EnergyPlus conference call last week and fifteen million other obligations which I have committed myself to, I have a lot of stuff to work on this weekend.

But it's sooo nice outside! Probably around 75F, sunny, and breezy. Dilemma? Nope:

"Singapore's producing far too few babies"

Gong Xi Fa Cai!! Last week was the first of the Chinese New Year! It is officially the Year of the Tiger now. While I think that it would be pretty awesome to be born under such an awesome animal - the Chinese disagree and probably plan to have fewer children as the Tiger is seen as "inauspicious".

The Prime Minister even had something to say about that in his address for the new year.

For those of you that aren't familiar with Chinese New Year festivities, its bigger than Christmas for the Chinese, a time to visit family and friends and wish them "Gong Xi Fa Cai!" (literally "wishing you enlarge your wealth" - here are some good examples of the meyhem:

What do you know about the world?

I'd like to consider myself pretty passionate about learning about the world and I thought that I was doing decent job by traveling, talking, meeting people from different cultures, etc. While all of these things are very important in developing an accurate perspective, my viewpoint is still skewed by preconceived notions and it is still very difficult to see the big picture when one can only be exposed to a relatively small view of an new environment and is left to form an opinion from that experience. That is why it is important to also understand the actual facts from behind the scenes - facts which are usually hidden in survey, statistics, and databases which one must search for, aggregate, normalize, visualize, etc, etc - things the average person isn't going to do or be interested in. 


Earlier this morning I watched a lecture by Hans Rosling, a Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of the Gapminder Foundation. He gives an amazing demonstration of a statistical visualization software which he has helped developed for the purpose of "Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view." After watching his lecture I was really blown away at the potential for this type of data visualization in the energy field and haven't gotten a single thing done today besides read about Gapminder.


I encourage you to spend twenty minutes to check out the lecture - it's well worth it.

The Singapore Solution — National Geographic Magazine

Thanks to my fellow Fulbrigher Lauryn, I was clued in on an article from the latest issue of National Geographic magazine. If anyone out there wants to understand the atmosphere of the place I'm living right now then you must read this article! Lee Kuan Yew, the youth, the food, the culture, everything is spot on.

The following picture is an awesome diagram of how much Singapore has changed over the last 44 years. I'm not using this with official permission but don't turn me in. :)

Also, if you have a chance and are interested in Asian politics, check out this interview with Singapore's very own Lee Kuan Yew. He has really seen it all in this region and his views are fascinating. The video below is the first of a series on youtube:

Saigon

The next December trip which I will chronicle is my adventure to the Mekong River delta in Cambodia and Vietnam with my old roommate from Omaha, Kyle. Kyle stopped in Singapore on his way back to London where he studying to take over the world at the London School of Economics. Our adventure began after a rowdy New Year's Eve in Singapore and a victorious Husker bowl victory. The latter was all that more sweeter since I was able to enjoy watching it with a fellow Husker fan - a rarity in Singapore.

Our journey began in Saigon (the communists named it Ho Chi Minh City after the war but Saigon sounds cooler, in my humble opinion). We arrived in good shape, found our guest house at the end of a weird narrow alley and started to explore. Later that evening we met up with one of Kyle's old coworkers, Dan, from Omaha who moved with his family from Vietnam almost 20 years ago and was just visiting his home for the first time since then. Dan also hooked us up with one of his friends, Calvin, who also is a native but has since moved to the US and became an American citizen. Between these two guys and their nieces and nephews, we were given as full of a tour of the city as one can get in two days!!

View Saigon in a larger map

Below are a few of the main pictures from our escapades around Saigon. The rest can be found HERE.

The war remnants museum from the Vietnam War was one of the most fascinating places that we visited. It was essentially the Viet Cong's propaganda-filled account of how the war went down. There were numerous references to the "War of American" aggression and the "Liberation Armies" march towards Saigon. After the war, the city was renamed after the father of Vietnamese Communism, Ho Chi Minh.

This is our tour guide group - the nephews and nieces of Dan and Calvin. They showed us around and helped us understand the culture and we helped them practice their English.

An example of the prominently posted quotes which filled a majority of the museum.

Some less than pleasant descriptions and photos of what war can do.

"Reunification Palace" aka the Presidential Palace of the old South Vietnam

The President's Conference Room

The helicopter pad on the roof that was utilized during the Fall of Saigon

And now for some entertaining videos from our adventure in Saigon. The first one gives an example of the RIDICULOUSly crazy moto traffic that can be encountered in Vietnam and the other is an amazing Vietnamese BBQ meal which we shared in our first night in town.

West Java, Indonesia

The month of December began with final exams for my courses and then a series of adventures around the region combined with many attempts at making progress on my project. I was able to cover parts of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia over three trips with many good friends, epic scenery, and mind-blowing cuisine. In an effort to document these trips, I'm going to start doing a weekly blog post on each of the destinations from my holiday adventures. This can help make up for the lack of excitement that the next few months will probably entail as the project will get priority over the fun.

The first adventure that I'll cover is my journey to Jakarta and West Java Indonesia to visit my friend Fitria who was such an awesome host to me in her home country. For the geographically challenged out there, below is a map of the destinations.

View West Java Adventure in a larger map

We spent the first few days hanging out in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Jakarta is a massive, crowded, chaotic city that you really need to have a local guide to appreciate. It is the largest city on the island of Java which has a population of over 124 million people. Java Island itself seems sort of like one huge village; the population density is 979 /km² (2,540 /sq mi). Compare that to the state of Nebraska at 8.88 /km² (23 /sq mi); almost 100 times more dense!! We explored Jakarta for a couple days and ended up going to one of Fitria's friend's wedding which was a neat experience for a westerner like me.

Old Dutch Colonial Headquarters in Jakarta

Me chillin downtown with some Indonesian dudes

The Bride and Groom at the wedding just after finishing the reception line

Street Performer in Jakarta who didn't quite have his act perfected

After Jakarta we headed for the coast to an awesome beach village called Sawarna to meet up with a bunch of other Indonesia friends. It was a seven hour drive despite the fact that its only about 100 miles away - the crazy traffic and roads are hard to describe but we made it in one piece thanks to Fitria's driving skills. We stayed at a family's home in the village for a few days with all meals cooked for us and motorcycle transportation provided to beaches, caves, and other random places in the village. It was truly an awesome experience to hang out in a really non-touristy area with local people, food, and deserted beaches. Someday I plan on coming back to this place!!

Enjoying a Bintang on our own beach

Mind-blowing lobster fresh from the sea

Java cave exploration

The whole Sawarna crew!

Sawarna Beach

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Christmas in Singapore was bitter sweet. I wasn't able to spend it at home with my family but I was able to watch the kids open presents over skype on Christmas Eve which was really fun! I was able to spend Christmas Eve with some new Singaporean friends by going to midnight mass and Christmas Day included an awesome feast at the Paulaner Brauhaus with some other really great friends! I'm now looking forward to New Years with my good friend Kyle Hoback and then our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia! Will have tons of pictures from that trip and also Java, Thailand, and Malaysia soon!

Seasons

Something that has really been freaking me out lately is the fact that the temperature/weather here in Singapore has remained relatively unchanged since I got here in July. Adding to this is the fact that Nebraska July and Singapore July are pretty similar as well. This equates to almost eight months now of continuous 80-90F (25-32C) weather! This is inconvenient when, as a continental climater, I base my perception of what I should be doing on the weather - For example, when it starts to get cold then I should be watching football; when it gets really cold I should be preparing for Christmas. Since none of those things have happened I feel as if I'm stuck in summer vacation forever!

Singapore Weather:

Omaha Weather:

Source: Wolframalpha.com

Oh well, I guess I should stop complaining. I'm sitting by the pool writing this blog entry! :)

"So, you study air conditioning?"

After scanning through previous blog posts I have realized that many times I promised a post which gives an overview of what my Fulbright research project actually entails. (ie: where your tax dollars are actually being spent to support my conquest for cultural mutual understanding between Singapore and the USA). Therefore I'd like to give a brief, yet enthralling explanation of what I'm doing here and where I'm at so far. Disclaimer: "enthralling" used with sarcasm.

In a nutshell, the main goal of my project is to further develop a new type of air conditioning system which has the potential to more efficiently use cooling energy in buildings and increase the thermal comfort and indoor air quality for the occupants. How? Well, let me explain

I don't think this is news to anyone- Singapore is HOT and HUMID. Air conditioning systems are designed with two main functions: to cool the air (known as the sensible cooling load) and remove moisture (the latent load). Most systems in the world do this by cooling the air down to a certain point (around 55 deg F/12 deg C) and then supplying it to all of the spaces at whatever flow rate is requested by the thermostat. Sounds simple right? Well the complicated part is when the system has to supply a certain quantity of "fresh" air from the outdoors in addition to the recirculated air from the space. In potentially densely populated zones such as classrooms and movie theaters, this amount of fresh air could be very high - sometimes more than what the thermostat is asking for. This situation is what we is referred to here as "Singapore Winter". The system is required to supply more cold air to the space to accommodate the fresh air requirement than what is needed to cool the space.  Since the fresh air and recirculated air are mixed before cooling and only a small percentage of the supplied air is from the outdoors, a significant supply of frigid air is dumped into the space resulting in a refrigerated case-type feeling when the space is not a max capacity.

In many cases in the US, the way this situation is mitigated is by having a reheat coil in the duct serving each room which can reheat the air back up so the occupants don't get too cold. Common sense tells us that this is silly - cooling air down and reheating it back up in the middle of the summer. Many energy codes, including Singapore, restrict or ban such reheat systems as they are wasteful.

In an attempt to solve both the cooling and dehumidifying problem in an energy efficient way, a group of professors here have developed and tested a new way of orienting a typical A/C configuration so that the fresh air and recirculated air are not mixed and are controlled separately. Without going too far into the details, this system, called the Single-Coil, Twin-Fan System (SCTF) saves energy by allowing the fans to decrease speed in response to both thermal and humidity related loads which translates into fan and cooling energy reductions. A very good, albeit lengthy, animated presentation can be found on the website of a spin off company which the professors created (and I guess I'm sort of working for).

My task in all of this is to modify or create modules within the building energy simulation program EnergyPlus which would allow it to simulate and predict the energy consumption of this unique system type. This would allow engineers to test this system in theory and compare it to conventional system types in various climates and building types. All-in-all it could help reduce some of the 700,000,000,000 kWh used in buildings per year (40% of all energy consumption), create more awareness of poor conventional A/C practices, and promote communication between Singapore and other places with similar climates (many located in the USA)

Those of you with technical interest, (and who knows, maybe even feedback!!): below is a graphic with my major tasks outlined on a schematic of the SCTF system. 

Singapore Housing Conquest

As many people may know, I have been looking for places to stay for the last few months as my current apartment's three month lease came to a close in Oct. It turned out to be one of the most frustrating processes in my entire life. Housing in Singapore is a much different concept than in the US. Local young professionals/students generally live with their parents until they're married and most expats have cushy jobs in big companies which allows them to live in really nice expensive condos. My unique situation put me in the market of the numerous "room for rent" ads that are placed online. I conducted an extensive investigation and had about 15-20 viewings (not kidding) - the biggest challenge was to find a room that wasn't with a family or weird land lord who would have all kinds of really random and weird restrictions. Examples include: curfews, daily cleaning schedules, no electronic equipment, and my personal favorite, no washing of socks is allowed in the washing machine. This type of random room market is the results of basically no apartment-type complexes on the island due to the rules by the HDB (Housing and Development Board). The HDB builds and regulates most of the housing in Singapore where 70-80% of the population lives in public housing.

In the end, I was able to get really lucky and find two housing options; the first for 20 days in a high-rise luxury condo by Marina Bay and the second is a room in a much more humble yet convenient condo very close to school in which I'll stay till I leave in April. The luxury condo, The Sail @ Marina Bay is a "six star, super luxury" place which is excessively upperclass for my needs but I found it on craigslist and the guy who lives there (an American, Mike) was looking for a short termer in kind of a small bedroom and gave me a good deal.

Things worked out well and now I get to hang out in the coolest residential building in Singapore for a few weeks!

Pics of the view from the skydeck of my new condo at Marina Bay:

Nebraska Engineering Alum Magazine

This came out over a month ago and I'm finally getting around to putting it up. I made it my alumni magazine from Nebraska, not once with my Fulbright story but twice with the Sand in the City coverage!

FULL ONLINE VERSION FOUND HERE

Volcano Trekking in East Java Indonesia

This weekend I put down the EnergyPlus manual and flew off to Indonesia with a group of the Chinese graduate students from my program. We flew into Surabaya, East Java and spent three days in a hot van on extremely "Indonesian" roads (you'd have to be there to understand) to go to the two Volcano groups of Mt Bromo and Ijen Crater.


View East Java Volcano Trekking Trip in a larger map

Mt Bromo and surrounding volcanoes at sunrise (Yoyo's Pic)

At the edge of Mt Bromo

There were two new life experiences rolled into one for this trip. First, my senses were exposed to some of the most unique and epic views of the volcanoes. We were taken up to the summit of a nearby ridge to see Mt. Bromo at 4:30AM sunrise and climbed to the top of Ijen Crater to see the milky blue water of the sulfuric lake within the crater. The pictures that were taken can never do the view justice.

The second experience was to hang out and get to know the fellow Chinese students from my program. It was very interesting to get to know their culture and individual personalities.

The whole crew

Ijen Crater

Below I've posted some of the videos that I took on this trip - kind of my first psuedo video blog attempt.

Formula One Race

Despite my American ignorance about the rest of the world's sports obsessions, soon after arriving in Singapore in July I realized that the Formula One Race that was held here last weekend was a big deal! F1 is the world's most popular racing event - it's kind of like the rich man's Nascar. My Swiss friend Jerone scored a few tickets and had one  "walk around" ticket that he was able to sell me. The race was ridiculous! You can see the pictures here


Also here's a little video - it's hard to describe the noise and the excitement that you get when those cars fly by. Soo much power.





The next week or two I will be spending night and day on my project outline. I hope to make the time to have a good post regarding the SCTF system and the specifics about my project when that is completed. And after all the hard work is complete, I'm heading to Java for a trip to Mr Bromo at the end of October.... pretty excited about that.

Borneo!!

So, I managed to make it off the tiny island of Singapore for a few days last weekend on a trip to the much bigger island of Borneo - focusing mainly on the city of Kuching and Bako National Park in Malaysia.

View Kuching in a larger map

Overall the trip was amazing! There was a group of seven of us - I was the only non-lawyer in the group as most of the people were from the LLM program at NUS. There was Andrzej from Poland, Fitria and Toufiq from Indonesia, Holly from USA, Tina from Germany, and Erica from Australia.

To summarize the trip consisted of: Thai massages in Kuching, the Indonesians explaining (and a fully clothed demonstration) how to squat over the "hole toilets", crazy monkey trying to steal stuff, camping on the beach, and trekking through the jungle half the day and laying on the beach the other half.

Below are the highlights:

Fitria, Andrzej, me and Erica having our beach picnic before dark

Saltwater Crocs at the Crocodile farm

Most of the crew on the way to Bako National Park

Our wild orangatan friend and the lady in the background with the Orangatan-colored hair

Yummy chili crab in Kuching - cheap cheap!

Angry Polish Headhunter slaying his next victim

Finally the sea after a two hour jungle trek!!

AND HUNDREDS MORE pics can be found here

And last but not least - a video of my Polish friend Andrzej teaching me the most difficult polish phrase in the world - it means something about a "bug in the grass":

New Friends

As much as everyone knows I love all my friends and family back home in "the States", it isn't really possible for me to see them on a regular basis; this has prompted me to meet and make some new friends here. I'm not sure if many people can relate to getting off an airplane in a city that is about 9000 miles from almost every person you've ever met in your life. At first it kinda made me feel a little bit panicky - like, if I don't get out there and stop every person on the street, I will be stuck at home every weekend playing solitaire and watching Southpark by myself. This has been far from the case as now I find it hard to tell people No when I get offers to go out on weeknights or bum around all day on the beach.

As of yesterday I have been in Singapore exactly one month and in that time I have managed to meet the most widely diverse group of people in the world. Here are a few stories about how I met some of the people that I hang out with around here:

My roommates: so I live in sort of a packed apartment. There are three bedrooms with two people in each room. I have lived here for one month and have had a total of seven roommates (two moved out and two moved in to take their place). Julian Tan, a medical school student from Brunei, lived with me in my bedroom for the first three weeks. Really cool guy whom I was able to introduce some Bob Marley songs to and who educated me on where the heck Brunei is. He goes to school in Malaysia and I hope to catch up with him again when I travel up there in Sept. After Julian moved out a 19 year old Vietnamese kid named Duy (pronounced Zwee) moved in. He spends a majority of his time playing games on his computer and chatting with friends. We get to spend a lot of good quality time together - both on our computers and with the occasional conversation about each other's culture; he's a pretty funny guy. My non-bedroom-sharing roommates have been Mosh, a Bangladeshi doctor who was never around; William and Billy, two funny Chinese dudes, some Indonesian kid that I've only seen once, and a Korean who at first wanted to be called Nick, then Daniel, now he's back to Nick (although his real name is Hyemin). I could write five blog posts about adventures and discussions with Nick - we're going to become good friends here I think.

The Koreans with their various modelling poses (Nick is the guy on the left)

Me, Julian, and his girlfriend
Duy, William, Billy, and I getting ready to go watch the National Day fireworks

NUS people: within the first ten minutes after the Graduate orientation I approached one of the only other Western-looking people in the auditorium, a girl from Germany named Teresa. I had been in Singapore for a week and had yet to meet a non-Asian (don't get me wrong, I came here to meet Asians and immerse in their culture but the culture shock was taking its toll a bit by then and it was nice to converse with someone who I could relate to). After chatting with her for a few minutes and deciding to go get a cup of coffee we were approached by an Indian-looking guy who asked us in a British accent, "Are you alright?" (meaning "how are you?")- this in turn caused a bit of cultural confusion which we laughed about and caught a drink together. Taz, the British guy, Teresa, and I have hung out quite a few times since then and have been each other’s Asian support group basically. Other Europeans from NUS I've gotten to know include Jerone from Switzerland, Floris from the Netherlands, Aurilie from Belgium, Gerda from Lithuania, Teresa's boyfriend Marco from Germany, Rob from England, and Fitria from Indonesia.

Rob and Gerda enjoying an evening at the St. James Power Station

Jerone, Teresa, and her boyfriend, Marco

NUS Dept of Building: in my program of study at NUS I have met quite a few fellow engineering and building science "nerds" whom have made my transition back into academics pretty smooth. I have cubicle within the School of Design facility and my closest cube-mates Qiaoyan (pronounced Chow-yin) and Yun (both from China) are the coolest – they help me with things like finding the printer room and posing for a mock academic photo to send to the College of Engineering in Nebraska. Jovan, a PhD student from Serbia, has been my main mentor in terms of getting up to speed in the program and adjusting; he is a good source of advice as he has been here for three years and has been almost the only Westerner in the program during that time. Others that I have met include Lala from Indonesia, Guichen from Beijing, Mingxu from China, and Jafaar who is probably the only Singaporean I’ve really gotten to know very well.

Me, Dang, Lala, and Guichen at the Grad Student welcome party - we showing the huge wad of cash that we ended up spending on our meal

The whole Building Research Group out for a few beers after Guichen's going away party

The staged academic photo that I made Jovan, Mingziu, and Qiaoyan take with me to send to Nebraska

SMU people: During my four hours waiting in line at the Immigration Office a few weeks ago I met Olga, a girl from Russia, who it turns out lives in a hostel right next to my apartment complex. After spending all that time sitting in line waiting to get our number called together it was only natural that I ended up going out for her birthday with a group of her friends from the Singapore Management University (SMU). Turns out there are about 100 foreign exchange students who live in that hostel and I now see them almost every time I leave my apartment. So far I have gotten to know Jacek from Austria (who studied at CU-Boulder for a few years), Peter from Switzerland, Carlos from Spain, and Antonia from Germany. There are like five million more SMU people but due to my bad name memory, I get to reintroduce myself every other day. They are a fun group but I have to ration my time with them as it seems the exchange student mentality might be a little too lively for a guy trying to finish a project like mine in one year.

Happy Birthday to the Corporation/City/Republic of Singapore

Singapore is a country that is the size of a city that runs like a corporation. Let me explain.

This last Sunday was Singapore National Day - commemorating the 44th year of Independence of the Republic of Singapore. On Aug 9, 1965, the Father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, with tears in his eyes, announced that Singapore would be an independent country due to being expelled from the Malaysian Federation. At the time Lee Kuan Yew considered this a blow to the Singaporean people as he felt that his country had the best chance for prosperity as part of Malaysia. In his speech he broke down emotionally and uttered, "For me, it is a moment of anguish. All my life, my whole adult life, I have believed in merger and unity of the two territories."

In 1965 Singapore was not much more than the colonial shanty town. The GDP/person was on par with most of the other third world countries of the region and now Singapore was on its own without many natural resources, water supplies, or security forces to protect it from it's neighbors. The challenge was at hand and as the first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew was up to the task.

He first set up a few main goals for the Singaporean people: establish Singapore's sovereignty in the world, set up an armed forces and security force to protect it's people, encourage education and social moral value, and infuse the economy with a mixture of capitalistic spirit and heavy government, corporation-like oversight. This formula combined with the rich diversity of the people and the controllable size of the country resulted in one of the most single greatest rags to riches stories of any nation in history; Singapore was able to increase its GDP by a factor of 260 in just 50 years!! (See Graph)

Now I say that Singapore operates like a corporation in that many of the national decisions and the overall atmosphere here seems to operate with regards to the bottom line. Lee Kuan Yew's son, Lee Hsien Loong, is the nation's third and current prime minister and in his National Address to the public on Saturday he first and foremost mentioned that Singaporeans mustn't give up hope because the second quarter GDP numbers were not as bad as the predictions had shown. It sort of sounded like the type of presentation a CEO would give to the BOD - a lot more financial terminology than I expected. He went on to encourage the public to keep up the efforts in terms of security, harmony amongst cultures, etc. to maintain this trend - it's almost as if this financial number was the main benchmark and the aforementioned benefits were just a means to this end. A few of the strict rules here also remind me of working in a big corporation - "don't chew gum and throw it on the ground", "don't cause problems by publishing something that would upset the cultural balance.", "you can't look at anything you want on the Internet". These are all the types of things that Americans see everyday in their companies/jobs.

The result of this type of prosperity-focused culture are apparent in the way Singaporeans value their stuff: shopping, eating out, and working are basically a few of the main national past-times (...hmmm, remind anyone of the USA?). However, despite living in this fast-paced, capital-focused society, the people heavily concentrate on their families, respect for elders, and individual cultural traditions.

In conclusion - I have observed many interesting characteristics of the culture here, and whether you love them or hate them - Singapore is one of the most successful, safe, and culturally diverse yet tolerant cities in the world; pretty good for only 50 years of work!

Now that the 9th grade essay portion of my blog is over, here are some videos I took from the National Day Celebration. The first is a mock naval battle of the Singaporean Navy vs a "terrorist" on a jetski (I didn't have a very good view); the others are self explanatory....