Hello guys:
It's time for yet another (large) installment of the not-so-regular update. This should provide you with some holiday readings to go along with those nice holiday cards. I'm sending you this by email instead of my normal means of addressing written cards because a lot has happened in the past couple of months. I guess all of you know that I have made the migration to Singapore for the next couple of years. So this is a record of some of the things that have happened here. I won't bore you with all of the details, I'll save some of it for the website (yes, I'm publishing this letter with addendums on the web, yes, how geeky is that – don't bother answering).
I haven't written for many months due to a lot of different things. During the summer I was promising to do my bicycle tour of the U.S. once the thesis was finished. Very unfortunately, I didn't figure in enough time to finish the thesis and a number of personal issues also arose that made life more interesting and complicated. Anyways, I only completed my thesis in September and had to wait until all of my committee members were able to meet for the thesis defense. That turned out to be in November, less than two weeks before I was to take the new position in Singapore. I wasn't very happy about that, but the defense went very smoothly, almost without a hitch. I was not very nervous and the presentation of the thesis and the following question-answering period went well and the committee chose to let me off the hook with a minimum number of revisions to the thesis. Originally, I was (rightfully) scared that I wasn't going to be able to make the thesis deposit (with the revisions finished) before leaving to Singapore. That could have caused major problems, as Singapore might not have been able to employ me without the thesis deposit finished. In any case, I was able to finish the revisions thanks to the generosity of my committee members (they could have been quite sticky about things if they had really wanted to).
A number of going away and Ph.D. completion parties followed, and a quick home visit to see my family and home friends. All this made me very sad to be leaving the comfy and relaxed environment of New York. I still miss all of you in NY so much! However, here there is almost too much to do at the start, and classes begin soon and there is very little time (right now) to relax. I began packing and making arrangements for subleasing the apartment and air mailing my spartan set of material possessions to Singapore.
It was a long night before leaving for Singapore. A cold time in New York, I remember the winds biting at my fingertips as I was wheeling the last of my possessions to the Fedex branch next to Columbia. I recall the same U2 songs playing in the Amsterdam Café for the last time for me to hear, as a few friends gathered to help keep me on my feet as I started to adjust to Singapore's time zone while still standing in place in my neighborhood.
At 5:00 am, Michel helped me with my two remaining suitcases from my old room on 121st street and left for LaGuardia airport. The United flight was a single flight from NYC to Singapore via Chicago and Tokyo. The first leg was almost did not happen as the big snowstorm that hit the East coast arrived on schedule and started snowing as we were boarding the aircraft. After a big de-icing procedure (which only allows the airplane an hour of leeway before having to have the procedure run again), we queued and finally left the airport, with only five other planes allow to take off after us. In Chicago, I made calls to family and a friend on the old U.S. cell phone (anyone want one? It's used on the Sprint/MCI network) and a final call to cancel the service.
On the long plane ride, I was sitting next to a family with three children. Turned out that they were very respectful and were very well behaved. I was initially very worried that it would be an extra long plane ride with no rest (remember, I didn't sleep the night before). I was sitting next to Grandma Jean, whose son was based in a Christian mission around Tokyo. She was flying with her grandchildren and daughter-in-law from Lincoln, Nebraska to visit him. Isaac, her grandson, spent a lot of time coloring flowers and doing assorted activities in the picture book. I slept only for about four hours but I felt okay when we touched down 20 minutes early at Narita.
It's funny about Narita. I've been to the airport a number of times now and always at the same international gateway intermediate terminal, and never really outside of it. This is the only way I know Japan. I guess for me it is akin to being on another planet or at a subway stop in the city that you always go through but never connect to the rest of the world you know.
Okay, so I arrived in Singapore, and shipped off to the pre-arranged hotel. The university was putting me up for two weeks before I had to move into my apartment. I thought, well, surely, two weeks is more than enough time to choose an apartment! I would move out before then. Well, it took all two weeks in the hotel before I could move in. I guess preparing the flat (a.k.a. apartment) takes a bit more work. It was Friday night in Singapore when I arrived. Saturday morning at 7:00 am I left to report for duty at the University.
Well, in the span of a couple days, I had to do what all international students had to do when they came to the U.S. Those of you who are reading this who have done this in the U.S. know the amount of stress this type of move can place on you. I will say that doing these similar things in Singapore are considerably easier (although much of it was undoubtedly handled by the support staff at the university). In the span of three days, I had a working permit, an apartment, opened a bank account, applied for power services for the apartment, and installed Linux on my laptop. When I arrived, the university email, staff card and departmental email was already prepared and a newly renovated office, complete with desktop machine, laptop, whiteboard, new chairs and laser printer. The apartment was also newly renovated, but lacking basic appliances. So I have been spending many nights rushing to stores to spend my salary advance and some savings to get the proper appliances.
It's amazing how many stores there are here in Singapore and also how many people buy things here. I thought America was the bastion of consumerism, but I'm beginning to see how other countries can rival it. Case in point: it is very difficult for me to find anyone selling used goods here. At Columbia, it was always easy: just look at the bus stops. Here, there are strict rules about posting fliers in public places and harder for a newcomer to know where to look for bargains. Luckily, I asked the housing office for help on how I might be able to buy these items. I was able to arrange to get a used split-system air conditioner (a unit that cools multiple rooms by having a single compressor and separate blowers for each room). This saved me about 1000 Singaporean dollars (enough to pay for a new refrigerator and microwave). I also have bought an old cooker (well, that's what people here call a stove + oven combination), a new stereo and a washing machine. Dryers are less common here, but they do exist. I guess expatriates from the U.S. are responsible for buying most of them. There are hooks in the ceiling to support hanging clothes from poles, so that's what I have been doing. Trying to follow the way things work here.
That said there are still a number of things to get used to here, such as the food! There are many food stands here, gathered into food plaza or eating centers. In English (UK English, I guess) they are called hawker plazas, named after the hawkers (callers) who used to go around the neighborhood crying out loudly to advertise the food that they had to offer. In more recent times these mobile food vendors were legislated and localized to a specific food stall for inspection purposes, among other things. Each center consists usually of about 5-10 stalls offering various Chinese, Indian, Muslim and occasionally other foods, such as Japanese, vegetarian or Italian. Within each plaza there is always a central stand serving drinks (thus you buy your beverages at a different stall), which sometimes doubles as a fresh fruit stand (because many of the beverages are freshly squeezed/pulped fruit juices). There are many variants of Chinese food I don't recognize here and for the most part I have been ordering what I can pronounce reasonably ok (yes, I can use English, but as most of the hawkers are Chinese, it sounds less pretentious to use Chinese). Also, family is a big thing here. There are practically no single people eating at these plazas, unlike the food courts of the US. Mostly families or friends or couples going out. The price of food at these hawker stands is also very cheap. Your average dinner at the food plazas will be around 6 Singaporean dollars, although at the school's food court, you might be hard pressed to spend more than 4 dollars for a regular meal. Also, the eating times vary a bit from New York where it is always possible to get a meal 24 hours a day. That can be done easily in Singapore too, but just not around the University area. During the first couple of days, recovering from jet lag was tough and my offset in time caused me to miss some meals and to have to take random buses before finding an open food plaza to satisfy my stomach. I find the hawker food good to eat and sometimes have a hard time in justifying the difference in cost to eat at an actual restaurant (the cost is about 15-20 sing dollars or much more), since the hawker food is already quite good for my taste. I guess I'll have to adapt a more refined palate. I don't know whether many people do this or whether it's really more akin to those people in the U.S. who eat fast food everyday.
Many people, even when I was interviewing here, referred to the difference in climate here. Yes, it is a big change, the weather is quite constant year round, nothing in particular marks the passage of time acutely. So it's actually hard to believe that I have been here over three weeks now, and that is a very balmy Christmas, instead of a chilly one. The humidity here is seldom below 50% here without the help of an air conditioning unit. I still have a bit longer to adapt to the weather here. I might be standing still at the bus stop, sweating to pieces, while others here are exercising, running around and not breaking much of a sweat. Even those who are a bit overweight, they still don't seem to sweat very much, at least compared to me. Even the other expats here, I would have thought they would sweat a lot too, but they have gotten used to the weather. There's a jogging group of professors and IT staff that I may join; although I may have to ramp up to their level of competence first. They do a circle around campus, which overall is about a 5 km circle (my guess, could be completely wrong. There also a climbing gym on campus, and I knew this before I came to the school, as they had a webpage about it. I went one day to check it out and although it was during break there was somebody there. It's a pretty big room, the size of the City Climbing center in New York on 59th street. It consist of several walls about 3 meters in height and a bunch of man-made bounders in the center with some overhangs and roofs for practice. It looks great. I talked to a student that was there off hours climbing (as the facility is officially closed since it is semester break), and he said a bunch of students constructed the facility entirely on their own. That's quite an amazing feat, given the complexity of the place and the number of holds on the walls (in the U.S., holds aren't very cheap to come by in the first place). I will have to take some pictures of the facility and post it up so that those of you who are interested in climbing can see what you can try out once you've decided to visit.
There are a number of other professors that have also started around the same time I have, so there is some little sense of community here. That is a good thing. Two weeks before I came another professor interested in bioinformatics arrived from Stanford. Two days (yes, two days!) after I came another professor, Wang Ye, came to the department from Nokia research. So I was the newest professor on the block for only two days. I can already say I'm not the lowest on the totem pole. So you can see the department here is expanding at a fantastic rate. Giving the number of students the school has it's not surprising. The faculty to student ratio is about 100 to one.
At the outset, the first week here was quite hectic. There was a regional (Asian) conference on digital libraries, a research field that I will continue pursuing from my previous work on it during my Ph.D. In the second week, I had a few meetings concerning the coordination of teaching duties for the class that I will be teaching with three other lecturers (two groups, two halves of the course = 4 lecturers), and a paper submission to meet. And there was a research start-up grant due on the following Monday (this past Monday). I also had to buy the appliances for the apartment and start to furnish it, so it was a bit too rushed.
The semester starts on the seventh of January and not long after that conference deadlines for the summer approach. There is a lot of work for me to get done as far as research, but also very much so in the way of finding a social hold here. I am trying (so far been too busy) to set aside time for myself to go out and explore and try social things. Climbing is one thing, and others have recommended the ballroom dancing scene. So I will have a look at that as well.
So this email comes around Christmas time. It is still not really sunk in that it is holiday season at all. The climate around here doesn't remind me that there is such a thing as a winter holiday. So I guess I'll have to wait until it actually feels like one.
Well, I've come to the end of my letter. Enjoy your holidays and stay in touch. If you want more details (I don't know any one who would, but...) you can take a look at my periodically updated web page journal on my website (yes, I'm vain, I have a vanity domain name).
Best wishes to you and yours in the new year.
Min