Never draw fire; it annoys everyone around you.
Finally, made it to Singapore! After a fantastic christmas and new year spent with Karin in Davos and Paris, we endured a sad farewell as I buggered off on my way to uncharted territories. Granted, Singapore doesn’t exactly count as the heart of darkness, but I can be forgiven for extemporizing a bit about a reasonably exotic-sounding city halfway around the world that I’ve never been to. Especially when British Airways enters into the equation.
Thankfully I listened to my lovely and insightful girlfriend when she insisted I call to confirm my flight from Paris a few hours before departure, only to find that my online travel booking agency (opodo.com) had managed to delete the wrong booking, leaving me with a flight reservation…from Zurich. To their credit, they put in a marathon effort to sort things out, leaving me with a later flight full of English salarymen returning to cold and rainy blighty while glaring at my short sleeves and panama hat. Dear Nigel, it’s not disgusting weather everywhere in the world — although the tail-end of monsoon season that awaited me at Changi airport did a bang-up job of dispelling that notion.
After a comic-opera bit of confusion regarding my apartment key (Dover Rise BLOCK 1) exacerbated by our moronic IT support department’s decision to not only migrate all of our emails to the Singapore server the week when we actually might have needed the information in our mailspools (including where Ian, who is subletting me his room, left the key) our taxi passed by Heritage, then Dover, then finally by my accommodations — each one seemed a bit less glamorous, until we ended up at the stalinist concrete blocks that make up my little slum paradise.
While it’s expensive for what it is, I seem to have found one of the cheapest accommodations for visiting students far and wide. And I am apparently the only gwailo far and wide at that; this is about as “local color” as it gets. Whatever, it’s a blast to dive head-first into what seems like a pretty authentic set of digs.
Despite (because of?) jet lag, I managed to drag myself to dinner ($7 at Holland Village) and drinks at Barfly in Clarke Quay, at $15 per drink; thankfully the place seems to be one of the pricier bars in town. Nonetheless, it seemed like almost every great personality from our Fontainebleau intake was present, leading us to conclude that maybe we should be the ones throwing the integration party for the Singaporeans, not the other way around.
Maybe I’ll hit the zoo tomorrow after I try to pick up my reading packet for P3. Classes:
- International Political Analysis
- Macroeconomics / Global Economy
- Mergers, Acquisitions, Alliances and Corporate Strategy
- Negotiations: Negotiation Dynamics (bid nearly all my points on that one, promises to be awesome)
- Managing Design
Now if only I could get as clear an overview of my career options as of my desired travel destinations in Asia, I’d be set. Here we go!