Ah, feels good to be back in my sweet home Singapore. So last weekend was the extremely rushed adventure to Manila, with no leftover time to visit the rest of the Philippines. I think I got the gist though, in essence it's a bunch of American-accented, very tanned, and devoutly Catholic Asians living over a large group of islands with lots of jungle, beaches, and volcanoes, riding around on jeepneys and eating lots of almost Mexican-like seafood and fruit. Haha OK so I'm really oversimplifying the Philippines here, but what else can I do in just 2 days?
I was afraid at first that there would not be enough to do in Manila to entertain me for the weekend, but that turned out to be wrong. First of all, it takes a while to get anywhere in the Philippines, I've realized. After a 3.5 hour trip over from Singapore, it takes another 2 hours to actually get into Manila from the far-flung Clark airport (an airport which apparently was once a US airforce base). And that day I had just been up all night the night before celebrating at a friend's birthday party (it was a mostly Indian crowd, and Indians, I've learned, know how to party... as well as being notorious for showing up late to anything, including their own birthday party, which I was advised to come at least an hour late for myself haha) and packing at the last minute for the trip. So by the time I got to the hotel in Manila, I crashed. Getting up again in the evening, we walked around the Makati City area, where we saw fancy new malls (wow, just like Singapore...) and the red-light district. Also tried Filipino food, which tastes a lot like Mexican food, with more seafood. Some notable examples are stuffed squid, fried pig's trotter, milkfish, fried baby crabs, etc. Next day, Sunday, was extensive touring, which consisted mostly of many churches, so hopefully Jesus will forgive me for missing Easter Mass last week by making up for it now by visiting Manila Cathedral and others all at once. We also went to Imelda Marcos' infamous Coconut Palace, a palace made entirely from local resources, notably coconut wood/shells/bark that was constructed to host the Pope when he came to visit, who actually refused to even visit the Coconut Palace in protest of Marcos' lavish, ill-placed spending that could have been put to much better use in this poor country. I didn't get to have any coconuts myself, though, like I did at practically every meal in Thailand, but I did have mango at pretty much every meal this time. Know those bags of dried mango from Costco that you always get that say they're from the Philippines? Well, now I know why they all come from here.
Ok now I'm trying to Skype and blog at the same time, when I really should be studying... the whole reason why I came back so early from my vacation. Let me just upload some pictures of Manila, and you can ogle all you want.
One of those colorful jeepneys, basically a homemade elongated jeep vehicle meant to carry about 20 people... a local form of public transport
Inside a church
Statues of Moses and a Chinese stone lion together... what are the odds?
St. Augustin chapel
Manila Cathedral
The national park and grandstand, where we saw some political rally with a crowd of red-shirted people, which reminded me of the pictures I saw of Bangkok with the red-shirt protests going on there now... thankfully it was not that kind. They were some pro-Imelda Marcos group I think, which I thought was pretty strange.
Viva Filipinos! I was actually mistaken for being Filipino myself a few times... That stretch of road behind me is actually where we had to sprint a long block to catch our city-tour van, which passed its regular stop without stopping for us, at least I caught up to the damn thing when it stopped at a light
Another old church...
The coconut palace tour-guide was off-duty, so we were given a tour of the Coconut Palace by the cleaning maid (who apparently also had a degree in finance?!), and she was actually really good, but she did cut me out of this picture with the coconut chandelier...
Leon and I sitting on our coconut thrones... notice the architectural obsession with hexagons, that's apparently the shape a coconut tree trunk is...
I certainly hope Mommy doesn't read this blog. My intended audience is mainly myself, more precisely myself in years to come. I guess there's the chance I'll end up like my mother after a few more decades, so if my mother reads this it wouldn't be such a travesty anyway. So please keep reading, Mother dearest, just know that this isn't actually the handsome son you know and love, just an ugly impostor who hijacked his laptop in Singapore. Jerk.
So here's a question for you, Mr. Pei-in-20-years-time-if-you-manage-to-live-that-long-which-would-actually-say-I-was-wrong-about-you-lucky-bastard. What's the most dangerous thing in the jungle? I hope you aren't turning into Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, with images of lions, tigers, and bears roaring and growling in your head. That's just plain childish. Unless you're reading this blog right after reading a traditional bedtime story to your kids (holy cow, you have kids!? are you actually normal now?! good for you, old man). Would you say something like the monsoon then? Mosquitoes? Technically those are more of a threat to your health than the former type. Or are you some kind of freak environmentalist now, with the world succumbing to severe global meltdown in these days of the future, and your answer is mankind himself, wrecking havoc on the natural habitat with his greed of resources? Errr. Wrong. Get over yourself, we're all going to die eventually, unless they found the cure for death, in which case, this answer I have for you makes even more sense than it does now. So what is it? Boredom!
I'm already starting to see the look of disapproval on your face, Mr. Pei. You think I'm some wild youth with no commitments, no responsibilities, just a love of fun and adventure, someone who would say something like "boredom" being the root evil of the jungle. But think about it, why is there even a jungle in the first place? Would the world be a better place if it was all pine trees and Great Plains and deserts and what not? No, the world is a fun and happy place because the jungle is part of it. Just this weekend you were feeling soooo bored after a long, stressful week in school, and you finally went out with your friend Leon to a local reservoir/nature-park which was of course, in the jungle. And there you saw all sorts of cool things that you used to love as a child, insects, fish, plants, birds, etc. You were also impressed that Leon, a finance major with no background in biology or anything, knew what an arowana is when you pointed one out in the reservoir. Leon's a cool guy, I hope you're still friends with him. And I also hope you have some cool pet fish, like an arowana. If this video is still on YouTube in 20 years, watch it to see what I mean:
Badass right?! If you don't have some of these yet, go buy an aquarium now and restart the awesomeness that your life was meant to embody.
Ok, getting a bit off-track here. So you were walking around the jungle, looking at cool things here and there, when towards the end you were just sitting at the shore of the reservoir looking at the water and the forest with beautiful wisps of mist floating around. So tranquil and pretty, it was nice to look at, but granted, you were starting to get bored. That's when the jungle came to save you. You saw the dark clouds start to roll in, and a drizzle came. Then a distant siren was calling somewhere, and Leon said that was a cue for everyone out hiking to start coming back, because there was a danger of lightening strike in the area. So you gradually got yourself up and walking towards the entrance to the park, when it really started to rain hard, and the thunder and lightening was cracking loudly all around you. And you were walking right next to the lake, a prime lightening strike area, and you even had to cross the lake on a long, twisting pier/bridge to get to the entrance, with electric death roaring at you from above with every step you took, eventually motivating you to run for it through the mud and puddles. Now that was exciting.
Granted, if you died, that would have been a damn shame. No more fun and adventure for you, unless God has a crazy amusement park of eternity planned out for you. But you have to give it to me at least that life is no fun without risk. And running through a lightening storm by a lake is pretty mild compared to things you've done so far. Remember that spring break you were racing Jaimeet on a 4-wheeler on your uncle's ranch back in Texas, and you flipped it and your body was pinned underneath? That was some scary, but very exciting, stuff. So let this be a lesson to you, don't be a boring dude. On the other hand, I'm really glad you decided not to go to Bangkok this past weekend. You were actually about to buy tickets too, and now the city is bogged with protests, troops are firing into the mob, and the prime minister just declared it a state of emergency. Not your thing, I know.
Oh but Mr. Pei, I hope you aren't so lazy anymore, either. You just slept through church on Easter Sunday, you dolt! Jesus is not pleased. That's probably why He gave you such a hard time on this MRAM project you had to do with a group for class. Only one of your fellow group members bothered to do anything useful for the project, and you ended up staying up all Sunday night working on it while the others slept, and eventually turned in a half-ass piece of shit that, if lucky, you'd get a C for. But seriously, who would let the one exchange student in their group become the lead man on this sort of thing? Are you guys crazy? Do you care about your grades even less than I do? Maybe I'm more of a tightass than I thought, but that just seemed outright negligent on the part of my team members. NUS is one of the top schools in Asia, right? No evidence of that on Sunday...
But, but, buuuuut.... did get an email "Easter egg" that same night around 6am that really cheered me up. Prof. Lou and the ETH Zurich group sent me a draft of the paper that they want to publish in IEEE, and guess who they put as one of the authors... That's right, "R. Pei", read and weep suckers! Who knew 4 simple letters on an obscure science article could bring me such elation. I'm on my way to become a professsional paper-pusher in no time, so watch out Mr. Pei, here I come ready or not.
I'm so full of sarcasm today, it's even getting on my nerves now. Sarcasm is a precious thing, but it can't be used all the time. I've seen a lot of variants of sarcasm in my day, and I'll try to take some brief note of the ones I notice in particular now. This is not a case-by-case study, mind you, just an observation of which groups of people are the "most sarcastic" in their own form, named by prevalence of use over the group as a whole.
Most politically sarcastic: Americans We like to be full-blood patriots, but we also love to insult ourselves under our breath. I think it makes us actually feel even more powerful, that we can be smart and witty enough to make such sneaky observations about ourselves and our quirky ways. I think in no other culture will you find such popularity of political satire like "Daily Show", "Colbert Report", and especially the cruder varieties like "South Park". I think the Brits were like this too just when their own Empire started to fall apart, with the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Cockney-accented jests and self-defamation leading them to their downfall. Lousy Brits, please let's at least promise ourselves to never become like them. Unless it's like Winston Churchill, he was a total badass. And completely sarcastic.
Most well-wishing sarcasm: Asians Asians are famous for being indirect conversationalists. They tend to avoid confrontation, and as a result their culture has given birth to the world's most recognized form of complimenting someone while secretly wishing they get run over by a truck as soon as they walk out the door. Asians are very competitive, but they also want to get on people's good sides so they can get help in their rise to success. The historical analogy to this would be China's willingness to take over the State's national debt, but at the cost of completely owning us later. Common Asian sarcastic remarks of note: *when eating at their house* "Why aren't you eating more? Do you think I will poison you?" (actually means, "you're a pig for eating so goddamn much, and I think this relationship between us is beginning to turn into my own self-poison."), and "The point you bring up is interesting, and I can't say I've heard that idea before" (means, "That is inexplicably retarded.")
My heros of sarcasm from literature: Hercule Poirot, Horatio Hornblower, Ellsworth Toohey, so many more... The best heros and the best villains in any story, for me, are those who are masters of sarcasm. Poirot is a egomaniac crime-detective (even the author, Agatha Christie, said after writing Poirot stories for so many years that she was getting sick of his egomania... but I never got tired of reading him), who often uses sarcasm to point out clues that the average joe would overlook. He is also quite endearing to me because he loves food as much as I do. He calls fine dining not just a thing for the sake of pleasure, but "an intellectual exercise". Bravo, Poirot. Hornblower is also a sarcastic hero, who tricks his enemies in various games and battles, not in a manner as blatantly as I would call sarcasm persay, but along those lines of intense deception. Toohey, on the other hand, is Ayn Rand's evil monster from the "Fountainhead", who uses sarcasm to bring down the lives of so many people. He is a genious for making people think he is giving them approving support when he is actually reinforcing their moral weaknesses. In general, poetry can also have very good sarcasm, but I just never learned to like poetry so much. I need a plot, a story, I'm a kid at heart.
Most sarcastic friendship: An ex-boyfriend/girlfriend I am probably the worst. Seriously, ladies, if you ever find yourself attached to me and have to dump me later, do so without saying "We should still be friends". It's better for your health and sanity otherwise. Every new boyfriend you have after me will receive plenty of sarcastic commentary from me, even when I meet him face to face, especially if I think he's too stupid to pick up on it. I'm trying to break the habit though, honestly. I know it doesn't make me a hotshot for doing it, it's just a faster way to lose good friends, and frankly makes me look like some passive-aggressive pansy. Good examples, "I think you two make a great couple!" ("You both suck") and "Wow, that's great that he has the same taste in clothes/movies as you!" ("He's a fag")
Speaking of which, most sarcasm-for-sex: Gays I have a few gay friends, and sometimes watch gay comedy/movies (hey hey hey now, don't start your questioning, I hold dear to my love of women, OK? Never watched Brokeback either). Homosexuals seem to have perfected the art of "sarcastic fishing". They can make comments that could be construed as sexual, but can't be blamed for actually being literal. I think this is what years of social oppression has done for them, sort of like how African Americans invented rap music. Rap is an evolved form of pre-abolition/segregation song and music that was created by blacks for them to be able to freely express themselves without the white people knowing what they were actually talking about. Similarly, gays invented their own code of sarcasm so they could slip under us-straight-folks' radar and still find game among the crowd. Examples? Don't have any good ones, but I've tried some on my friends, usually getting amusing responses. Alec Swafford is a pro though, I still question him to this day...
Most sarcastic business: Haggling All of us in Asia have done this at least once, and those who are the most successful are probably buying way too much to even fit in our suitcases. Haggling is just the street version of business negotiation. But it's all the same, whether you're in a fancy conference room in a suit giving a presentation to an interested client, or out on the street gesturing like primitive apes with a street vendor trying to beat down the price of some tacky t-shirt. You typically use sarcasm. Even if you really really want whatever it is they're offering, you act completely nonchalant and as if you could easily just walk away and find something else. You shouldn't be rude, that just gets on their nerves, but you should be tough. They don't take pride in ripping you off, they just want to earn an honest living, but you are also just trying to get an honest deal. Example, *they just named the price, and you respond...* "What?! Are you kidding?! Is that a joke?!" *keep smiling though!* (you are actually surprised at how cheap it is, but they think you're flabbergasted over how high it is, and will usually lower).
Most "unwanted-guests" sarcasm: Natives to immigrants/foreigners Nothing says "Who the hell do you think you are coming to my own country and flaunting your alien ways here?!" like a bit of sarcasm spoken in an exaggerated accent. Sometimes it's even just a plain insult spoken in the native language if they know that the foreigner doesn't speak it. I experienced this a lot more in Europe, especially French or Italian speaking countries, but here in Singapore you can find some as well if you really try to piss the locals off. Last week my prof gave a surprisingly sarcastic statement about Americans, although pretty benign. He was reading Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us", which is about what would happen to the world if humans suddenly all disappeared. He wrote the title on the board, and then capitalized the "US" so that it read something a bit different... and then told us that some people also wonder what would happen if that were the case, looking at me as he said it. Yeah, I know, very funny. He's just infactuated with everything to do with the US, I mention this same guy in my earlier posts.
bleeeeeehhh sarcasmed myself out... well at least it's out of my system and I can rest easy. I've noticed his blog is starting to have little to do with Singapore itself though. I don't know if that means I'm not doing enough to explore the local culture anymore, or if I'm just too settled in to care or notice. Who am I kidding, there's ton left for me to experience that's new. But this weekend I'm off to the Philippines, so that will be a whole new cup of tea.
Until then, enjoy your week! Finals are not for a at least two more weeks, so no need to stress out yet. But when they come, they will certainly come...
Last weekend was pretty much a deja vu of the weekend before, except this time the French Table became the German Table, the museum I visited was about Southeast Asian civilizations and a special exhibit from Beijing featuring the Kangxi Emperor, and the club I went to on Friday was the world-famous Zouk. Foreign language-centric dinner, museum, clubbing... this has become my weekend routine.
German Table was of course a lot of fun: cheese fondue (brings back sweet memories of Zurich), games, good people, Li Siwei's cooking... the latter of which I would give high compliments even if I didn't know he's probably the only dude who sometimes visits this blog. Will not lie though, the Black Forest cherry cake was "interesting"... I'm not a fan of cake anyway (unless it's made from solid ice cream), so it's no big deal, don't kick yourself in the nads over it, Siwei. Everything else was great.
Also played some interesting games then, of which I remember none of the names. One involved purely betting on dice rolling, for which I was fortunate enough to be teamed up with an NUS statistics major. He actually misunderstood the rules of the game in the beginning, and hedged some really, really unusual bets then which all of us couldn't believe... but against all odds he won, and we just assumed he was a statistics genious. Then when he finally understood how to play even he was very surprised we did so well. I'm just a lucky teammate, what can I say. All you godless peons can join me or die.
I remember being very tired that night though, because the night before I was up late again at the club Zouk, after spending the evening at the Asian Civilizations Museum (special exhibit from the Forbidden City in Beijing was awesome) and touring along Orchard Road, including the seedy Orchard Tower. Zouk is supposed to be Singapore's most reputed club, and it was quite a large institution, with 3 different areas to the club meant to suit the particular tastes of various crowds. We spent our time in the main area, where they had a pretty good DJ from the UK playing... playing TECHNO YEAAA!! I like techno, but honestly horrible dancing to it. So many good dancers there that I saw though, quite impressive, too bad they're all out of my league.
Oh, and I'll mention here for my own future reference that I came up with a name for this new "operation" strategy. BEOWULF. Awesome, right? I'm such a badass "acronymist" (I'll spare you what it actually stands for). BEOWULF makes DILL from high school look like childsplay, just more complex, risky, and would only work if I started at the beginning of the semester, now I think it's too late to finish before I leave Singapore. But I've learned a lot.
On a more publically acceptable note, I think I can say a thing or two now about Singaporean student work ethics. Right now working on a group project for my magnetic materials information storage class. One of my group members does a lot of work for the project, more than I do for sure. He's Singaporean for sure. The other two, don't know if they're Singaporean, but they're also female (what does that say... don't ask me, I'm not sexist at all), and they do pretty much nothing. Singaporean students also seem very hesitant to become group leaders, they're pretty eager to hand over leadership responsibilities to me. Not that I complain, in the U.S. we tend to claw and bite for a chance to be the leader, because we think leaders don't have to do as much of the "dirty" work (when in reality, group leaders tend to get stuck with all the work). So I'm trying my best to get things rolling, this project is due Monday of next week, and we don't even have our paper report outlined. But I'm not afraid to let out a storm of racist/sexist slurs if things get dicey. Haha jk, that would result in an instant exchange student fatality, as I'm grossly outnumbered and outsmarted.
Oh and I finally have a trip planned! I'm going to Manila, Philippines with Leon Choong at the end of classes. I'll just be there for 3 days, unlike other groups of students who I know are also going there for the whole reading week or even longer (how do you do it, Rachel Chiu?!). I'm just way too paranoid, have to study for my 4 finals. So now I just have to figure out what there is that's interesting to do in Manila... unfortunately everyone says the other regions of the Philippines are what are worth visiting, with Manila just being the entry point, but in such a short travel time I think I can avoid getting bored.
Can I talk about food again now? I love food. And food in Singapore especially. Today I had a total of 5 meals. Yes, 5. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon "tea", dinner, and midnight supper. Yes, total spent was probably... mmm... S$ 15-20? So US$ 10-13. My fellow Singaporean students would probably gawk at how much I spent on food, but to me it's as if I've hit the jackpot. And what do these meals generally consist of? Breakfast is usually either, depending on my mood, a congee porridge or just curry/sugar pratha with some tea or coffee and pieces of fruit like watermelon. Lunch is a hearty meal, usually at the ENG canteen, of either Malay, Chinese, Indian, or Indonesian food. Particularly like the fried fish with "lady-fingers" (what we know as okra in the US). In the afternoon I might get some tea with spring rolls or a sweet pastry, usually the Apom Balik (sliced banana wrapped in a sort of pancake), from the the Dilly's stall near my research lab in Microelectronics. Dinner is another hearty meal, just like lunch. Midnight snack is if I'm still hungry while working late into the night in my room, in which case I'll walk 50 m from my room to the late-night burger/fried rice/waffle shop in PGP and order something to tide me over. I love being well-fed, just makes me so much happier throughout the day.
Holy cow it's 4:30 in the morning, what am I doing to myself?! Last night I was up all night doing my solar power on Mars presentation, which I think went alright. Now my sleep schedule is as messed up as it was at Rice during the typical ELEC problem set nights.
Time to sleep, even if I have to force myself. Good night!
