Singapore: Week One

After waiting all summer and stacking paper to the ceiling at the Oregon AFL-CIO, I’ve finally arrived here in Singapore, my home for this school year. I bid a tearful goodbye to my parents at PDX, and 17 hours later I touched down in the Lion City and was treated to this view.

Singapore, I’ve learned, really loves an indoor waterfall. And who wouldn’t? I met Petar, one of my five suitemates here, and we hopped in a Grab (SE Asia Uber) to the Yale-NUS campus. After wandering around campus in the dark dragging heavy suitcases for what felt like an hour, we finally got our ID cards and gained access to our suite.

The campus here is beautiful, full of trees and buildings heavily featuring wood and big windows. Our suite is on the 11th floor, which gives us some great views.

I’m just going to take you through some of the highlights of my first week here.

After some initial confusion/panic, I’ve got my classes for this semester sorted: Global India, Key Debates in Urban Planning and Policy, Empires’ Outlaws (a class about piracy in the Age of Exploration), and Labour in Capitalist Societies. You no doubt noticed that I spelled Labour with a u, and that was deliberate. I’ve got to get used to writing in British English here, lest I get points off an essay for misspelling.

The organizers of the study abroad program took us to an Ikea in a mall to get some room supplies, and you know I had to hit the food court afterward for some grub. I really doubt there was any Henny in this duck, but it was amazing and only like $7.

Together with my suitemates Will and Petar, I hit up the Maxwell Hawker Centre in Chinatown for some much-needed dumplings.

I got some fried soup dumplings, which I had never seen before, and some Sichuan chili dumplings, which were exquisitely thin and tingly-hot. I followed that up with some soursop shaved ice.

The next day I paid a visit to the Gardens by the Bay, an epic botanical garden complex.

For lunch we patronized Little India, which is right next door to Chinatown, for a solid lunch including pakoras and pani puri.

Cool Hindu temple in Little India/Chinatown.

There’s plenty of great food on campus, too. This jajangmyeon (Korean black bean noodles) with pork was only like $6 or so. And I was delighted to see Oregon’s own Kettle chips more than 8,000 miles away from their origin.

So yeah, that’s about it. I know this wasn’t the most organized or eloquent blog post, but I wasn’t trying to win a Pulitzer here. I’d like to do some more refined/concept-oriented posts in the future, but for now I just thought I’d update the people. Stay tuned for subsequent updates.

Peace,

Zev