Category Archives: Personal

How to Get Around in Los Angeles

There’s a lot of driving to be done in Los Angeles, and it drives me bats. One of the major reasons that I love New York so much is the fact that the whole city is accessible to pedestrians — most of it anyway. All this time spent in cars in this city is mind-numbing to me.

Anyway, I hope to have a Journal entry detailing my relocation to this city posted sometime soon. It’s been really hectic for me, so thanks for your patience.

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Get Outta Here

I’m leaving Singapore. All my things have been packed up and shipped, except for two suitcases that I will take with me on the plane. My comings and goings here are comical, I know. I’ll explain in a forthcoming journal entry why I’m leaving for Los Angeles. Seeya soon.

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And Away I Go

I’ve fallen down on the job of posting to my blog lately because I’m exhausted. This week will be the third week in a row of travel for me. First, I went to Saigon for the lunar new year. Just this Sunday, I came back to Singapore from a weekend in Bangkok, which was hot and full of weirdness in my personal life. And now, on Thursday, I’ll be flying off to Los Angeles, where I’m spending the next four to six months on assignment. It’s a long story, but it looks like the Singapore chapter of my travels is over, at least for now. More on this later.

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Journal: 02 Feb 01

It’s a day early (well, in Singapore it’s only about forty minutes early) but I’ve just posted a new entry to my Journal for Fri 02 Feb. This one is about my trip to Viet Nam last week, and how I learned to drive a Honda scooter in the Saigon traffic. And for those put off by the verbose length of my last entry, don’t worry &#151 this one’s shorter, and it has a pictures to boot!

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Visa to Vietnam

VisaNext week is Lunar New Year, often referred to (in the West and in Asia) as Chinese New Year, but known in Vietnam as Têt. It’s the biggest holiday of the year in Viet Nam, and I haven’t spent it there in over twenty-five years. Today I bought my ticket and received my entry visa to go and see my grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins in Saigon next Wednesday.

This is the great thing about being in Singapore — or being in this part of the world, at any rate. A trip that would have taken me nearly twenty-four hours from New York instead clocks in, according to my itinerary, at just 01:55. I mean, wow.

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Just as I Left It

When I left New York and moved away to Singapore the first time in July, I told my office coworkers not to be sad, it wasn’t as if I were leaving the family (which is to say, it wasn’t as if I were leaving the company); rather, it was more as if I were heading off to college. It was a convenient analogy then, and it’s kind of a convenient analogy now that I can use to describe how odd it is for me to be back here in Singapore, finally, after four months away. Imagine that, after the first month in your freshman year at university that you had to slip back and do four more months in high school.

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