A Day in the Life

In this post I will attempt to cover the time period from mid-June until now, about a month. CAUTION: Slightly boring material ahead. Unless you are a) a member of my family, b) really bored, or c) looking for recommendations of good books to read, this post might not be for you. You have been warned. :)

This is my bedroom, where I spend a lot of time. This picture is taken from the bed. That wooden thing on the left side is my wardrobe. Most people here have wardrobes as opposed to built-in closets.

Another picture from the bed vantage point. The room that I am staying in actually belongs sistgs to Dan's oldest sister, Xiaozhen, and all of the things on this bookshelf are hers.

Here is a general outline of my day:

1. Wake up between 10 and 12, depending on whether or not I have a phone call scheduled for the morning. (Sometimes I actually wake up after 12, depending on how late I went to bed the night before; it’s easy to sleep until 1 if you didn’t go to be until 3:30.)

2. Eat lunch between noon and 1:30. The maid’s name is Merry, and she’s very sweet. She’s from Indonesia. Recently I’ve started watching her cook lunch so that I can hopefully feed myself once I move out. She usually makes some simple yet awesome-tasting noodle dish for lunch. They do amazing things with noodles here…

3. Read the newspaper. This is something I never used to do, but it’s always lying around downstairs and I usually eat lunch alone, so I start it during lunch and end up reading the whole thing. It’s addictive. Sometimes they use really funny phrases, and although I can’t think of any right now, I’m thinking of starting to save clippings of the really good ones.

4. Use the internet. This includes writing and answering emails, keeping my Facebook account up to date, reading the news and watching YouTube videos. Recently I’ve been watching clips of The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, as well as all the promo stuff about Glee. (Alas, Hulu doesn’t work here. Stupid copyright rules.) Also, clips from Dancing with the Stars (mostly the Apolo Anton Ohno and Shawn Johnson ones) and So You Think You Can Dance.

5. Go running between 6 and 7. To be truthful, I only actually do this 2-4 days a week. I usually do 2 miles. I only go when it’s cloudy or slightly rainy, and only when the sun is setting, otherwise it’s just toooo hot and humid.

6. Eat dinner between 7:00 and 9:00. Sometimes other people eat with me, sometimes they don’t. Mr. Ling is travelling about 50% of the time, and Mrs. Ling often gets home late from work. If Mr. Ling is home, we have a big dinner. If he’s not, it’s usually your basic rice, stir-fried veggie, and meat dish, sometimes with tofu or omelette. It’s always delicious and nutricious, though, and we always have fresh fruit for dessert, which is AWESOME! Since I’ve been here I’ve eaten apples, oranges, bananas, pineapple, cherries, black grapes, plums, jackfruit, cantaloupe, guava, 3 types of durian, watermelon, 2 types of lychee, 2 types of longan, rambutan, mango, 2 types of papaya, and mangosteen.

7. Read. (Sometimes I read in the afternoon and use the internet at night instead of the way I have it listed here. I like to mix it up.) I read A LOT. Since I have been here I have read:

RECOMMENDED:
Books 3-5 of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. (Early 1800s + dragons. Sweet.)
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. (Pop sociology.)
Peony by Pearl S. Buck. (Jewish community in late 1800s China.)
Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley. (About a tobacco smokesman. They made it into a movie recently…)
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. (Race relations in British India.)
The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman. (Theme: Alchemy. Two storylines, covering 1000 years. Phew.)
A Mathematician’s Apology by G. H Hardy. (Famous mathematician describing what he thinks “math” is.)
After theWreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates. (Disturbed teenager story, interesting writing style.)
Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder by Herschel Walker. (Self-explanatory.)
The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth et al. (Great if you do research!)

NOT REALLY RECOMMENDED, BUT NOT AWFUL.

Cut by Cathy Glass. (Foster mother recalls a particular case.)

Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce. (Fantasy—girl law enforcement officer.)

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby. (Modern Indie.)

Confessions of an Air Hostess by Marisa Mackle. (Chick lit.)

Edenville Owls by Robert B. Parker. (JY Fiction set in the 1950s.)

The Scientific Attitude by Frederick Grinnell. (A comprehensive description of modern-day science.)

There ARE other variations to fill in the “use internet” and “read” sections—for instance, I bought a sketchbook and some pastels and have been doing some sketching. I also bought blowpens, because they’re awesome and cheap. :)

Sometimes I go somewhere, for instance, the local mall, and get some food there or see a movie. (I saw “I Love You, Man” on my own. I thought it was hilarious.) Or I go down to school (National University of Singapore) to have a meeting or work out some details of my permit application.

Picture right outside of my building, Arts and Social Sciences 5.

This is just around the corner from my building. The building that you can see is ASS 7. Aren't those trees beautiful? They make me think of "The Lion King". At least I know I'll be working in a nice environment!

I went to Borders once, but I was really pissed off that you weren’t allowed to bring unpaid merchandise into the café. Why should I even bother going to Borders if I can’t read books in the café and then not buy them? That’s the best part!

I have also been meeting some friends. The first friend I met is Pearline, who is a former employee of my grandmother’s boss’s good friend. (This was the Friend Blind Date that I mentioned at the end of my last post.) She is from Malaysia but has been here in Singapore for over 6 years. We went to the National Museum, which was really cool. They had this automatic machine where you press the different numbers on the floor depending on where you are and it tells you about stuff. Then we went to dinner and then had drinks (Singapore Slings! Which were really good). Altogether we hung out pretty much all day, and we got along really well. Yes! Friend score: 1. I haven’t seen her since then because she is really busy with work right now, but I’m planning on getting together with her again sometime soon. Interesting fact: She is also the second of four girls.

The other friend is Sabrina, who is my mentor’s former colleague’s daughter. We met up and had lunch last week at a local mall and chit-chatted about life and stuff. She’s planning to go to graduate school in Australia in January, but at least we can be friends until then. Friend score: 2. Interesting fact: If she ends up living in Singapore, she says she will never have kids because she doesn’t want to put them through the horror of the Singapore school system.

I’ve also got three other potential friend leads, but they haven’t really been confirmed yet. I’ll keep you updated.

Tune in to my next post for: More photos of actual things happening! Including Dan’s new army haircut, army uniform, and army physique, as well as couple of birthday parties. And potentially a photo protrait series, depnding on whether or not I actually remember to take the pictures!

Hello Friend!

Welcome to my first ever blog post. I have been in Singapore for almost exactly five weeks now, so please forgive me if my initial posts are slightly out-of-order and delayed. Starting a blog was one of the many many things that I should have done BEFORE I left home. (Other things include cleaning up my room and talking to the transcript people!) In the interest of chronology, this first post is going to mostly consist of my email update that I sent out a couple of weeks ago, interspersed with a few pictures. Look for new information in post #2! And if you don't get my email updates but you want them, please let me know.

The following update was written Wednesday, June 17th.

I left the good old US of A on Tuesday, June 2. I was supposed to leave on Monday, but I found out late Saturday night that I had lost my passport. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. Lost, like, for real. Like, I think I threw it away when I moved out of my house in Norman with all the perparation and finesse of a typhoon. Anywho, I'm lucky I live in a big city. I took the train to the emergency passport office in downtown Chicago at 7:30 AM, and, several hundred dollars in plane flight changes and passport fees later, walked out the door with a new passport at 3:30.

Anyway, I left Tuesday night. I flew the first leg of my flight, 8 hours, on Virgin Atlantic, which is a pretty sweet airline. Then I landed in Heathrow (London) and actually had to go through immigration, traipse through half of the airport with all of my earthy possessions, and re-check in for my second flight through Singapore Airlines. However, there was a problem; I had a one way ticket, because I'm not sure when I am coming back. However, I also don't have a visa, because you don't need one if you're gonna be there less than 90 days, and I'll have my work permit by then. Problem is, they wouldn't let me in without a visa if I didn't have a return ticket. So I had to buy one. Ugh. (It's refundable, no worries.) Anyway, after I bought a ticket and printed out my itinerary, which involved a lot more traipsing around with my luggage, I got re-checked in. The actually flight was great; Singapore airlines is the best I've ever flown on. 12 hours felt like 6-8. Probably because I slept for 4 of those hours...plus the seat next to me was empty which was great.

I arrived in Singapore at 7:45 AM on Thursday morning, Singapore time. That's 6:45 PM Wednesday night Central time. Total trip length from door to door--28.5 hours. Not that bad.




Me on the plane at the start of my journey, around 6 PM Tuesday night.

London! And me. This is right outside the airport during my layover. I actually sat outside for about 20 minutes and ws thinking about hanging out longer before I checked in for my second flight. I'm glad I didn't or I might not have had enough time!

I basically slept all day Thursday, June 4. Friday, some friends from the Chinese church in Oklahoma (Edmond) were in town visiting on their way to Malaysia and we had to take them around. We went to Sentosa, which is like a beach/theme park/general tourist place in Singapore. It's a little tiny island right off the coast. Then after that we went to the Bird Park. This would have been an amazing day, except that it was about a billion degrees outside and I was super jet-lagged. Basically, from after lunch until dinner I was just a tired, hot, headachy, jet-laggy mess, although I held it together pretty well. And the pictures are pretty! That night we had a HUGE dinner and I fell asleep in the car on the way home. The Lau's, the family who was visiting who travelled around with us all day.

Dan and I on the beach. Actually, Singapore's beaches aren't very good at all--this sand is imported!

We're underneath a dome and there are fish swimming around. Too bad it just looks blurry...

At the bird show I got to be a volunteer! Yay toucans! Their feet are really warm, that's all I really remember about holding them.

Huge buffet a-la-carte dinner. (What that means is, you get a menu and you can order anything you want off of it for one flat fee! Pretty sweet.) Dan's parents are in the center from with the Lau's on either end. The back left is Lisa, Dan's cousin who was visiting from Melbourne, and the three Lau kids.


After that, the next week and a half was very uneventful. It consisted of me slowly de-jetlagging and hanging out with Dan, his parents, and a few of his friends in multiple restaurants, shopping malls, and movie theatres. We drove everywhere, which was pretty sweet, except for the fact that now I still don't know how to use the buses. The one thing I did accomplish was to meet my future boss as well as the people in charge of processing all my work permit stuff, and harass people at OU all week until I could get my transcripts and completion statements express mailed to me.

Swensen's, an American-themed restaurant. (I had a craving for a hot fudge sundae.)

The best ice cream ever that you can't get in the states. That swirly stuff on the end is flavoring, like rasperry or grape or green apple, etc. It tastes AWESOME and they had it in CHina but not in the US and I am super excited that they have it here. (Although it doesn't really make up for the fact that you can't get Pandora or Hulu here...)

This last Monday, June 15, Dan started his National Service Basic Military Training. This is a picture of him that morning waiting for the shuttle bus--and also the last extant picture of him with hair. His dad and I went with him--they have this whole program for parents on the first day so that they don't freak out--and it looked pretty nice. Waaaay nicer and friendlier than US Basic Training. Then we left, and that was that. He's allowed to call at night, but not for very long.

Meanwhile, I've been looking at flats online, hovering around the mailbox waiting for my transcripts, and sleeping and reading a lot. I'm slowly working through a to-do list--the proof is that "Set up Email Update List" and "Write email update" were two of the Things To Do. Haha! I also cleaned up my room, went to look at some apartments last night, and sent several other informative but relatively verbose emails to several other people, many of which were important. I also made Friend Blind Date plans for Saturday, so that will be fun!

End of copy of update email.

The pictures here are just a few of many, and I will be uploading those into more complete albums soon and getting them to you. I will most likely be updating to Facebook, but never fear, you can still view Facebook photos if you are not a member. I will give you the links in email updates or on this site. Some are already posted now, so if you're my Facebook friend, please enjoy!

Stay tuned to find out what I really do all day with Dan gone and no job and very few friends. Spoiler alert: it's not that interesting, but I'll do what I can to make it fun to read! :)