I like it a LOT

...is the standard answer to the usual question of '...So how do you like it in Singapore'. It's two months today since I landed here, and if I just think about all the specifics of my situation, I have a little grin stretching across my face...

There are two main reasons for it:
It was a while back on one of our walks to his car when Boxy asked me: 'what do you want?', and my answer was 'different lifestyle'. And on the arrival here, all that the word 'lifestyle' implied at the time, was basically handed to me. Nothing against my previous lifestyle, but it was just that after 20 years of doing the same thing in a very much the same way I was well due, or should I say overdue, for a change...

The second reason is rather simple: I've expected it to be a working holiday and it is. My first travelling destination, not counting that little trip to Malaysia, is India. The furthest destination West I was thinking about was Myanmar, India came as a possibility and then a realisation very quickly and very 'accidentally', very me!

As they say 'without sorrows there is no sweets', and the reason I find all this so 'sweet' is that it took me five yeas to get here. Similarly to recently retired Michael Schumacher who explained why his best memory was his title win in 2000: "We had a lot of hard work and setbacks so when we finally won it, it was the most beautiful championship." I say it took me five yeas, and not 20 to get here, because it was then, when I first moved to Melbourne, that I started thinking what is it that I've done during my undergraduate degree, and what kind of a job would I want to get, and how could I get... it was a while after that that I came to, what I see now as even more important question, why is it that I want it...

In summary, what it is that 'I like a lot', is mianly due to my outlook to the context. I like Singapore, but this is not about the city, this could have been Melbourne, Auckland, Zadar or abc...

Routine

...fighting it, while looking for it at the same time...

It's been now almost 2 months that I've been here, and I guess I'm sort of developing the pattern in everyday things and slowly but surely settling into the comfortable lifestyle:

Breakfast: cereal, sometimes in addition a boiled (in a kettle) egg. I have assortments of cereals and few fruit and yogurt types available so the nuber of combinations keeps variety (sort of) present.

Work: It's 2nd week of teaching now. I have 4 classes, two for each subject that I'm teaching. Each class has between 20 and 23 students; this is the same as the case used to be at the Melbourne. The main difference is that with the groups of students I have been assigned, I run lectures, tutes as well as labs. Another difference is that I'll have to put in some extra effort to get the students to appreciate different mode of learning - after all, as my job title implies, I'm suppose to provide a different classroom experience.

Swim: I am getting better and better by the day. Paying attention to the technique by keeping in mind all the lessons I picked up from reading swimming articles, is paying dividends. As the end result, I can ‘feel’ myself being ‘pulled’ through the water by ‘holding’ onto it for increasingly long periods.

Dinner: with David/Shan/Ed. We end up at Auntie’s place on most nights. It is the restaurant in the stretch of restaurants that is located 5 min walk beyond the Hawker centre. The restaurant has a similar menu and prices as a Hawker place, plus a friendly customer service with a smile – an old little Auntie that likes us – CRM truly goes a long way. [Auntie/Uncle == Madam/Sir].
On nights that we’re not at Auntie’s place for dinner then we provide Shan with an opportunity to further practice his already excellent culinary abilities – you are welcome Bhai!

After dinner it’s either the bed time, or meet down here in the lobby area of the building for a drink (beer/cider/whisky...wather/tea) while browsing the net and talking cock (BS).

Cleaning: on most weekends I do some cleaning. I finally figured out what my sister was talking about when mentioning those machine cycles – clothes come out clean and somewhat nice smelling (maybe I should put in more softener) – thanks Yogic.
(Cheers) Suzanne, an IF fellow, left us her things, that got accumulated in the appartment during her one year stay, once she moved back home to States few weeks ago. Guess who picked up majority, if not all, of the cleaning stuff – once a cleaner, always a cleaner :)
Ideally I’d be swinging that mop around once a week, as the apartment gets rather dusty even though it is on the 8th floor. It must be due to the near by motorway and the fact that I keep all windows open all the time…

In a way it seems like the two months have gone by very quickly, but on the other hand acclimatising to lifestyle here felt rather effortless, mainly thanks to David, Shan and number of guys at work, so in a way I feel like I've been here for a long time. This reminds me of a comment from the (local) colleague, who joined the School few weeks after me: "Thought you’ve been here for at least two years."

Honeymoon period, no more

Officially, as of Monday this week the 'do nothing most of the time while at work' period is over. Yesterday I had 7 hours of teaching... in addition had to work on some exam questions (procrastination) as well. To make the welcome back to 'work' after 3 and a half months away from teaching even more exciting I only managed to get 4h of sleep the night before. Conditioning is truly a funny thing - unsurprisingly I couldn't just fall a sleep 4h before the usual bed time.

The 2nd day of teaching is in the books... - and the 3rd - so far so good...

The pictorial representation of the 'honeymoon period'

Ideas...

...are cheep. It was at one of DIS Phd seminars where I first heard the story that ideas are like mushrooms after the rain - when the conditions are right they pop-up all over the place. The same, or at least very similar ideas tend to surface at a particular point in time and context. [The moral of the story for the Phd students was to publish early and often.]

I never considered myself to be an Idea person, until the last year when my Honours supervisor Sandrine mentioned it quite a few times... didn't want to argue with her on that one. Guess that's just one of those relative adjectives.

Well what has my emotions kind of split tonight is the article about the rumoured acquisition of YouTube by Google for a cool $1.6 billion. See, the idea of doing something with a user generated video content on-line was between my ears for about a week or two even before I read about this new website called YouTube in MX newspaper on one of my daily train rides from the uni to home.

My initial reaction was 'F, if only....' But luckily my reasoning is much quicker these days as I got to be quite good at shortcutting my initial, occasionally not so positive thoughts. So the 2nd reaction was ' Hey, that's cool! The same mushroom that pooped up between my ears has turned out to be a very lavish one.' This makes me optimistic, maybe as Ray once said it, unreasonably optimistic, that eventually there will be a time, the right time, when I'll act in time to turn one of my ideas into the lavish mushroom.

Ps: Repetition of the word 'time', in the previous sentence, reminds me of a line someone once said: 'Timing is everything.'

Team building

Well that Botanic Gardens trip last Friday afternoon was all about a team building exercise. The HR department at the Poly organises this kind of fun activities for the staff every so often... And I couldn't miss the opportunity to swap the office for the afternoon in the park. If I had a 'to do' list of things to see, like some very organised tourists (e.g. my first visitor Hrvi :), I could have experienced the satisfaction of ticking one item off...

The staff that attended the trip were split into groups by the department. Each group had to complete the tasks that required finding the answers by exploring the park and at the same time solve a set of questions that resembled IQ testing. The album tells the story:

From GreenEscapade...