Made it home safely. I left Changi Airport at 6 pm Singapore time on Sunday, and arrived in SFO at 8 pm PST. So that's about 17 hours' travel time, I think.
Since everyone put their windowshade down right after takeoff, I was in darkness the whole flight. So in a sense I missed a day. Kind of strange, but probably not as dislocating as having seven hours of daylight.
I finally got onto the free wireless here at the airport, though it's what you might think of as a typically Singaporean process. You have to create an account first, which involves (among other things) giving them your name, address, and passport number. Once you've done that, they send a text message to your cell phone-- forget giving you your account information on the computer, much less just letting you start using the network.
After you've got your username and password, you log in. What the instructions don't tell you is that your username isn't just whatever name you've got-- joebob123-- but it's joebob123@qmax.com.sg. If you don't include the @qmax.com.sg, it doesn't work. Obviously.
Also, they send you an e-mail with information about how to change your password to something you can remember-- but so far as I can tell, there's nothing on the Web site it self that tells you how to do that. No "My Account" button, no "Change password" link, nothing. You have to refer to the e-mail... if you've gotten online and been able to read it, that is.
So I figured this out just in time to pack up and go catch my flight. More from Hong Kong, perhaps.
[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "Let's Go Out Tonight," from the album "Hats".]
I'm at Changi Airport, wandering around Terminal 3. My flight leaves in a couple hours, so I've got lots of time to do stuff-- mainly take pictures and draft e-mails to people.
This has been a very good trip, quite eye-opening.
Spent the morning at the Asian Civilizations Museum, which is a remarkable, jewel-like place. Really fantasic. And only $5 SG on Sundays.
I woke up this morning just before 7, read a few pages of Accelerando (which is quite a good book), and soon will start getting organized to pack. I need to send a few more messages first, though: I find if I don't send out thank-you notes as soon as possible, they drift down to the bottom of my queue, and it's weeks-- or never-- before I get to them. And when this means when it looks like you're ignoring people who've put time and effort into helping you, it's a Bad Thing.
via flickr
My flight leaves this afternoon around 5:30 or 6, so I've got a full day to do things. I doubt I'm going to be very ambitious, though I do feel like I should get out somewhere new. I feel a bit like I've been spending all my time in malls and other air-conditioned spaces, like I was in a tropical version of New Jersey. Which might not be the worst comparison for Singapore, come to think of it.
[To the tune of The Eagles, "I Can't Tell You Why," from the album "Greatest Hits Volume 2".]
Technorati Tags: Singapore
At about 7 I stopped working, and went out for my usual on-the-road evening walk.
via flickr
via flickr
Technorati Tags: Singapore, travel, Orchard Road, night
I'm at the Raffles City Starbucks, doing some work. The cleaning ladies basically threw me out of the room-- it was obviously very suspicious that I was still in there in the mid-afternoon, and I needed to get out and get a life. I was starting to run a caffeine deficit anyway, so I trooped down here.
via flickr
The scene is pretty crazy: there are tons of people here, and I had to wait a few minutes for a table.
I'm at that strange and not very pleasant part of the trip where I've met a LOT of interesting people, but am feeling the absence of that casually intimate contact that you have with friends and family, and which go a long way to reminding you of the fact that you're a human being. I think this is one of the toughest parts of traveling extensively: there's a huge gap between how much contact you have with people, and how much you can connect with them. It's probably the closest I ever come to being one of Karl Mannheim's "free-floating intellectuals," those minds whom Mannheim believed would, through their rootlessness lack of attachment to nation or social class, be able to see the world more clearly than others.
Given enough time, of course, you can close that gap; but on a short trip like this, where I'm spending a few hours at most with people under pretty structured circumstances, there's no way to do that. At the same time, I think that dislocation or psychological distance has a certain utilitarian value: it can heighten your capacity for observation, and for me, at least, force me to think more about things.
I'm impressed at how many Europeans there are here: not just tourists, but people who move with the knowing casualness-- or hurried single-mindedness-- that I associate with people who live in a place. It makes Singapore sort of a mirror-image San Francisco: on the other side of the world, repressed rather than radical, and mainly Asian with a substantial European minority.
All Starbucks really are the same. It's really astounding how much they've managed to create a unified corporate image, a set of spaces that, whether one is in the cafe in Dupont Circle or Raffles City or Harvard Square, are always identical in the essentials. There's actually an interesting, Freakonomics-like study to be done of the standardization of cultural spaces, but I think my room should be clean by now, so I'm going to leave that for later.
[To the tune of Gladys Knight & The Pips, "Midnight Train to Georgia," from the album "'The Motown Years".]
I slept a solid nine hours or so, and am almost in danger of actually adjusting to the time zone-- just in time, as I go home tomorrow!
Last night there was an extraordinary thunderstorm. I don't know if the hotel was actually struck by lightning, but give that it's one of the tallest buildings in Singapore, and it was all REALLY LOUD, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I've got a few hours' work I need to do, and a couple informal meetings today, but I'm going to head up to the Singapore Botanic Garden, then walk back down to the hotel via Orchard Road and Fort Canning Park.
I'm a research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley. I'm also an Associate Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Science Technology and Society program at Stanford University.
At the Institute, I work on the future of science and technology. In my free time I'm working on a book on the end of cyberspace. More details are available in my c.v. (PDF). My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.
I also keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.
The banner is from a picture taken by Anthony Townsend, while we were walking along Raday Utca in Budapest, Hungary, October 2007.
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