Bloomin' Good Times!

Hello All!

Very tired today, but I wanted to check in with my loyal readers, who were no doubt foaming at the mouth for an update (although I suspect many of you did not read my last post, as nobody commented. Must have gotten lost in the MLK holiday shuffle, which I totally forgot, as it's not celebrated here obviously.)

First thing's first, I had a very interesting conversation with Lisa the other night. We were on the train discussing movies (her boyfriend is a documentary director, mine was a film major). She mentioned Quentin Tarantino, and I started yammering on about "Inglorious Basterds", realizing about a minute into my monolouge that OH MY GOD I WAS TALKING ABOUT NAZIS TO A GERMAN COULD THIS BE ANY MORE AWKWARD? It's not that I suspected Lisa was a Nazi sympathizer or anything, but still, the Holocaust is a rather touchy subject...desperate to salvage the situation, I took a deep breath and asked, "How is WWII addressed in schools in Germany?" Then I shut my big fat mouth and listened. Lisa said that when she was a girl, WWII was discussed ad nauseum as the most terrible thing that ever happened and that she was told that they could never stop discussing it so people never forgot it. She added, as an aside, that many dictators had killed many people, like in Somalia and the Sudan, and that she wasn't sure why that wasn't mentioned before. She did not mention, either out of tact or ignorance, the Japanese internment camps the US was running during the same war (although admittedly we were not gassing Japanese, but it was still a ghastly thing to do). The conversation moved on, but I just thought that it was an interesting cultural experience that I ought to share. It's funny, the things you learn about other countries on exchange, not things like population densities and all that, but more like which American curse words translate to Danish and so on.

I've been really busy with school, but I feel like I'm settled in fully. To be quite honest, after the rigors of G'town, classes are a breeze. One class has a final paper...of 3-5 pages! I had to bite back a laugh. My four classes have a total page count of roughly what my one class had last semester in terms of final papers. That's not to say that they're not interesting classes, in fact they're all quite interesting, it's just that I am not particularly worried about doing well in them. Either G'town is needlessly complicating things, Singapore is not complicating things quite enough, or some hybrid of the two options. Perhaps also there's something to be said about being plucked from one's environment and having the slate wiped clean. Nobody here has ever seen my resume, and that's liberating. We all get to be who we want to be for four months. I find what I want to be is a serious student, something that I had been for years until G'town whipped the pride out of me. I feel like I'm getting my groove back, if you will.

Today I went to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. They're free and a five-minute walk from campus, so today was to be the first of many visits. Let me tell you, they advertise this place as "the gardens of eternal summer" and it lived up to its reputation! It's just glorious. There are so many plants and flowers (duh) and it's just a merciless onslaught of verdant beauty. There's an "evolution garden", where as you walk through it, you chart the progression of plants since the beginning of time. It's very quiet there (not the big ticket attraction) and I felt very alive as I walked beneath the towering pines. The leaves that crackled under my feet sounded tremendously loud and the alien bugs buzzed like buzzsaws. Along the way, signs mark what was alive when. As soon as you cross into the threshold of the time of the dinosaurs, you can sense it. The air becomes thick with the fecundity of the soil, and you can almost hear the rumble of colossal footsteps in the distance. I can't explain it, but the eras felt different. I felt very at-one-with-the-universe, something that hasn't happened in several years. It was quite nice. I will definitely be taking any visitors to Singapore to the garden.

And then there's the orchids. The blockbuster attraction of the gardens, they charge S$5 to go see them. Students get in for S$1, which I think is lovely. There is an embarrasment of riches in the orchard garden. You're literally tripping over them. My camera battery died when I had just arrived, and I STILL photographed more orchids than I'd seen combined in my lifetime. There were dark and mysterious ones, white pure ones, ones bigger than my whole hand, ones smaller than my thumbnail, in every color and shape. I can't even begin to describe them all and you wouldn't believe me if I told you. It was ridiculously gorgeous. I laughed out of pure joy. I will stop blubbering and just post pictures. 'Tis but a meager sample but still, they're stunning. Any mediocrity is due to my camera work. I'm coming to understand every day that my camera skills cannot do Asia justice. I think I like it that way. Although I love sharing things with you, dear readers, a part of these adventures are mine alone, locked in a secret cavern of my heart to marvel at on rainy days.

(the dark purple ones are Andrea Bocelli orchids, Mom and Dad! Singapore named them after him after he did a concert here in 2008.)

Well, I need to shower and do homework. Until I do something cool (probably friday), stay tuned and Sionara, suckers!