I got me a Prince!

So this week I put an end to my misery and finally bought myself a tennis racket. It's a Prince oversize, about $50 USD. It's one of the heavier rackets, which I like for more control, but the salesman tried to get me to buy the lighter, more expensive rackets, which gave me a flashback to the classic scene from "Snatch" where Tommy is buying a handgun from Boris the Blade. You must watch that movie if you haven't already:

Tommy: "It's a bit heavy, ain't it?"
Boris: "Heavy's good... If it does not work, you can always hit him with it".

And damn did I hit with it this week. Quite an international crowd as well. This week I played a Korean and a Malidivian from New Zealand, and next week I'm up against a Frenchman. The racket performs pretty well, I'm pleased. I'm so flabby from lack of playing though that my right hand now has blisters all over it from playing so much.

In less exciting news, a bird shat on my head yesterday. I was pissed, but fortunately I was on my way home anyway so I could wash it out, but it was under the category of most distasteful on the bird's part. Singapore should add to its long list of laws a ban against bird shit, and it should be strictly enforced by regular F-22 patrol. Those of you who laugh at the thought of Singapore having its own F-22s should see all the fighter jets here training pretty much everyday from an airbase on the west side of island.

Yesterday I also went with some other exchange students, including fellow Sidizen Rachel Chiu, to see the Chingay Parade (very important you put "Chin-" in there, this is definitely not San Fran here) This was their Chinese New Year's parade, which beats San Fran's (the Chinese New Year's one haha) by a loooong shot. There were tons of firecrackers, beautiful floats, good performances (not as good as the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, but think of that sort of style), but of course it had to be all over by 11PM before the public transport came to a merciless halt at midnight. Some of the performances were a little high-school in grade, but there were lots of children in the parade. I was most fortunate to be able to even see the performances. To see the areas where the parade participants each put on their full performance, you had to buy a seat ticket for certain designated areas. The other exchange students all bought their own tickets, but because I'm so lazy/cheap to buy one I had to look for my own spot somewhere in the common crowd. I ended up going up to the roof terrace of a mall just across the street from the ticketed audience, so I got to see most of it just as well as they could. Pretty impressive, wish we had more lax fireworks laws in the US so we could put on shows like that.

Well that's pretty much all that's newsworthy of this week. Lately I've been thinking to myself of the kinds of things that I assume exchange students are supposed to think about, like figuring out how people from these new places think differently than we do. For instance I asked some natives as well as the Europeans who come from non-English speaking countries what they thought of the globalized world forcing them to all learn English, our own mother-tongue. I always assumed that they would think of that as unfair to them, as we are putting ourselves (the US) to an advantage. I was surprised to find out from the natives that they had not much of that feeling, but rather they only wished their own schools from primary school onwards would have been better at teaching English. It seemed to me like they actually used their own ability to speak English as something they could use to put themselves ahead of their fellow citizens who don't, and therefore took pride in speaking English. I now wonder what non-English speakers here think, but of course, I can't really ask them. I imagine they want to learn English too, rather than just feeling resent against us.

Another thing I noticed is that Singaporeans are pretty much all their own amateur economists, even those who aren't business majors or whatever. When I talk to these engineers and scientists who I meet at meals in the Engineering faculty, they all have a very solid knowledge of global economics and are always asking about the economic meltdown in the US. They generally don't have their own stocks or anything, they're just really into it. My professor for my class on solar power systems always refers to economics when he is making a point to us about global warming or whatever, even when this is supposedly a technical-oriented class. He made some point of how weather changes will influence the gold market, as well as pointing out to us that Singapore's main fear of global warming is not the fear of the entire country going underwater, but that if the Arctic ice cap melted, cargo ships would be able to pass through the Arctic Ocean and therefore Singapore would lose a lot of its trade economy that it heavily relies on. Is that a funky way of looking at it or what?

Gotta run to meet Yaliang Chen now... Cheers!