DOCKING OPERATION COMPLETE, SIR
We've finally settled down completely with everything weneed, housing, vehicle, furniture, PC etc, and not a moment too soon. Orientation starts tomorrow and school starts in less than 2 weeks.
I'm glad I gave ourselves enough time to make a smooth, gentle transition
into a foreign land. One of my inital fears was that, coming too
early, we might be bored stiff when things are more or less settled.
I now know that this fear was totally unfounded. There are so many
things to do/read/watch that one is hard-pressed to find a moment of boredom.
Of course, it could be because I just came from the land of nothing-to-do-but-shopping-and-eating-and-earning-money.
Maybe in a few months, it would be possible for me to experience boredom
just like everybody else.
WALLED GARDEN
My friend, Mahani informed me that the word "paradise" comes from the
Greek adaptation of the Persian word for "walled garden". Does this mean
that, to the ancient Greeks and Persians, Singapore is paradise?
:) Go figure. Or maybe they were referring to Disneyland.
"So, Alexander, now that you've conquered Greece and Persia, what are you
going to do?". "I'm going to Disneyland!".
*THIS* IS TOO CROWDED?
We just returned from a visit to the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. I've read a hundred articles about how crowded the valley is, about how people are having trouble finding housing, that residences are squeezed against each other, about how companies are being sqeezed out, about the horrible traffic jams, etc etc etc.
I went expecting to see Singapore-style crowding.
And what did I find? For most of my drive, all I could see was space. In most places, I saw corporate buildings surrounded by generous helpings of land. In the suburbs, the roads are wide and housing space is generous. In some areas, one could drive for pretty long and see nothing but undeveloped land.
For those of you in Singapore, imagine driving through the sparsely populated industrial corners in Tuas, that place where very few people go to coz it's "too far away from everything". That's how it's like here.
And my reaction after a few hours driving thru the valley was, *THIS* is over-crowding?! Except for too many cars, this place is less crowded than many of the most sparsely populated parts of Singapore. All these Californias are spoilt. :)
You guys in S'pore, the next time a Californian tells you how crowded his city is, don't believe him. ;)
I hear that some cities in the east coast, such as NY, Boston and Washington
DC, are more crowded even than S'pore. Those of you over there, let
me know.
TV PARADISE
Without a single shred of doubt, America is TV heaven. I mean, heaven, man. In America, it's possible to spend almost all of one's waking hours in a day doing nothing but watching TV. I know, I tried. Whoa. Can't imagine this ever being possible back in Singapore.
There seems to be something on TV for everybody. Star Trek fans back home will envy me, I'm getting to watch ST:TNG reruns twice a day, along with episodes of ST:Voyager, ST:DS9 etc etc. Ally McBeal fans back home will envy me too. We just caught the first episode of the new season. In fact, if you're a fan of any intelligent, watchable show on Singapore TV, you'll envy me, big time. And I ain't getting no humiliating censorship from some absolute dictatorship. I got to watch "Good Will Hunting" uncensored.
If, like me, you belong to the strange sub-species of humans who get excited by intellectual stuff, there's something even for you on TV. Besides the Discovery channel, there is the Learning channel and, my favourite, the History channel. Amazing stuff.
And even some of the TV ads here are fun to watch. Many ads I've
seen are funny. One of my favourites for example, is an ad selling
some biscuits. Starts with a scene where mother and little daughter
were walking along the beach. Daughter asks, "Mummy, what is sharing?".
Mummy answers, "Sharing is when you love someone so much you are willing
to give something you really really like to them". While saying that,
mummy finished the box of biscuits all by herself. Subtle and funny.
:)
SEX, LIES AND (SOON) VIDEOTAPE
No price for guessing which topic the American media has been obsessed with for the past few months. The Clinton-Lewinsky thing occupies the front pages of newspapers almost everyday. Jay Leno makes fun of the couple every night (Jay Leno is very funny. I stay up every night to watch his show for at least the first 15 mins. You guys in S'pore don't know what you're missing).
The strangest thing about the over-exposure of this whole affair is that the majority of the American public actually want to know LESS about the affair, not more. Many people wish the whole thing would simply go away. Parents are wondering how they're going to explain the news on TV to their children. (Imagine your children watching the evening news and you tell them to turn off that pronograhic trash on TV...). What I find so strange is that an institution as consumer-oriented as the American media would continually force-feed the public with something they don't want more of, each and every evening, for months.
The Starr report has been out. Many people think of it as little
more than pronography. And very soon, they'll release the videotape
on Clinton's testimony. My opinion, the whole thing is grossly over-blown
(no pun intended). There are people losing their lives to justice
and democracy in Cambodia and Burma, people in Russia and Indonesia are
experiencing the total collapse of their economies, and the media is obsessed
with some big guy getting blow jobs.
At the end of the day, despite all the ugliness, I suspect that many foreigners in the US, esp those who come from countries run by absolute dictatorships, are secretly habouring some degree of deep respect for American liberty and its system of checks and balances. I mean, here people make fun of the President on a daily basis yet nothing happens to them. In many countries, you can get thrown into jail just by stating FACTS about those in power. And here, the media mades a big scandal out of something as trivial as the big guy's sex life, yet in some countries, open injustices and abuses of power by rulers are rewarded with a disguisting chorus of public boot-licking and ass-kissing by the official media.
No doubts about it. As Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy
is the worst system of government in the world, except all the others".
I was going to write some thoughts on my observation of economic bubbles.
But maybe another time....