Remind Yourself: This is Water

Summer Update!

2010-06-18T12:23:00.000+08:00

I made it back alive from the Great Southeast Asia Tour! I am now in the process of going through some 600+ pictures, as well as moving out to Salt Lake City for the summer. I plan on posting a series of blog entries with travel pics and some commentary for each place that I visited, and these will be posted over the course of the summer. Stay tuned for the first post: Hanoi!

The Great Southeast Asia Tour - Revised Version

2010-05-20T18:24:00.000+08:00

Today, RIGHT NOW, was supposed to be the start of my Great Southeast Asian Tour. For those of you not in the know, I finished up work here in Singapore yesterday and am taking three weeks to travel around SEA before returning to the US. I literally have spent months planning this trip and have been looking forward to it immensely. Out of my three weeks, I had planned to spend a week in Thailand, a week in Laos, and a week in Burma* (see end of post). In Thailand, I wanted to visit Bangkok and then Chiang Mai in the north before moving on to Laos. Bangkok went out the window about last weekend due to the continuing violence there. I revised my travel schedule to include a quick transit out of Bangkok without ever coming close to the city center, and stays in Chiang Mai and Chaing Rai (another city in the north). Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse yesterday afternoon. Although the Red Shirt leaders surrendered to the police and asked the protesters to go home, rioting and looting broke out in central Bangkok. Even worse, riots also broke out in several cities in the north/northeast of Thailand, including Chiang Mai. About half the country is currently under curfew (8 PM - 6 AM until Saturday) and most of the banks and stores in the bigger cities are closed. So, 24 hours before I was supposed to be leaving Singapore for Bangkok, I decided to scratch that part of my trip. Hours of internet searches and about $300 extra later, I now have a revised itinerary that includes KL and Hanoi, and then continues on to Laos and Burma as planned. However, I'm still really incredibly upset that I'm missing out on seeing Thailand, not to mention the extra money I had to spend. I'm still planning to fly through Bangkok on my way to Burma in two weeks from now, and I'm hoping that the city will have calmed down by then. If you want to follow the news in Bangkok, some good (read: not sensationalized or over-simplified) sources are the Bangkok Post for pure news, and Bangkok Pundit for analysis.

So, now for the revised schedule for the Great SEA Tour:
Train to KL from Singapore (this is the main part I'm unhappy about. I don't like KL. It's just like Singapore, only dirtier)
Hanoi (thank you, Vietnamese government, for giving me a visa in less than a day!)
Luang Prabang, Laos
Vientiane, Laos
Transit through Bangkok airport (hopefully the airport stays OK)
Rangoon, Burma
Mandalay, Burma
Back to Rangoon
Fly back to Singapore via Bangkok (again, fingers crossed)

Aaaaand, then I fly home on June 11th!

For the geography challenged among you (no judgment, I'm definitely geography challenged), I've created a little map of my journey. For bonus points, I put the land travel legs (bus/train) in blue and the air travel legs in red. Mandalay, Burma, isn't marked on the map, so it's location is a bit approximate (again, geography challenged here).

There probably won't be a lot of entries in the next few weeks until I make it home to the US, so please be patient with me until then!

*Here's the [star] about Burma. Most people have probably heard about Burma and about Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the most vocal Burmese democracy advocate and gets quite a bit of coverage in the foreign press. She has asked people to avoid traveling to Burma because she believes that it gives tacit approval of the dictatorial military government. However, what the foreign press fails to convey is that Aung San Suu Kyi is not the only democracy advocate in Burma. Many Burmese actively encourage tourists to come to Burma, because the presence of foreign observers limits the human rights offenses that can be committed by the government (at least in plain sight). Additionally, even though the Burmese government does benefit somewhat from my $30 visa fee, there are many many other Burmese people (guesthouse owners, taxi drivers, food sellers, tour guides) that are going to benefit much more from the money that I pay them directly. I'll probably write a lot more on this issue later after my trip, but for I'll just say that I've done massive amounts of research about how to travel ethically in Burma, and I'm confident in my ability to do so.

Even More Siem Reap

2010-05-09T21:39:00.000+08:00

OK, time to finish up my posts about my recent trip to Siem Reap. On our third and final day there, we woke up super early to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat. Unfortunately, it turned out to be cloudy that day, so no sunrise. The upside to this was that it was much cooler, which in my opinion was an OK trade! We decided to head out to a temple called Banteay Srei, which was about 30 km away from the main temples. On our way, we stopped at the Pre Rup temple. Pre Rup means "turning the body", which probably references a traditional cremation method. Thus, it is believed that Pre Rup was used for cremations and funerals. Here's a view from the top:

After that, we continued on our way to Banteay Srei, which is one of the most beautiful temples in the entire complex. The temple is built out of pink sandstone, and features many intricate carvings. Banteay Srei means "Citadel of Women", and some people speculate that the incredibly detailed carvings were done by women.

There were lots of monkey and lion statues, who were supposed to be the guardians of the temple. They looked fake and I later read that there were replicas, and that the real ones were in a museum somewhere.

On our way back from Banteay Srei, we stopped at a museum about landmines. The museum was built by a local man who has worked as a de-miner for many years. He started the museum to educate visitors about landmines in Cambodia, since Cambodia has one of the highest concentrations of unexploded ordinances, which are left over from the civil war years. Many of them are still active today, and the founder of the museum also runs a school for children that have been crippled by the landmines. I found the museum to be super interesting, because it exhibited many different kinds of landmines and explained how they work and how to defuse them. Here are just a few of the many landmines that the founder has disabled over the years:

On our way back into town, we visited several other smaller temples. One of these was Eastern Mebon, which was originally built on an island in the middle of a baray, or reservoir. These barays were huge - around 8 km on a side! This temple was interesting because it originally had plaster facades attached to many of the walls. Of course, these are all gone today, but you can still see the holes that were used to attach the plaster.

Another interesting one was the Neak Pean, which was also originally built on an island. This temple had a central shrine surrounded by a pond. The temple also featured fountains in the shapes of elephant, horse, lion and human heads. These fountains were supposed to spout holy water that could cure pilgrims of their ills. Here's the central shrine, which depicts two naga serpents from Hindu and Buddhist mythologies.

The final temple we visited was called Preah Khan, which means "sacred sword". Like Ta Prohm temple, Preah Khan is held together by trees growing inside the temple. I especially though that this decapitated Buddha was a neat example of the power of the jungle:

After a refreshing dip in our hotel's pool, we ate some great tacos at a Mexican restaurant. Normally, I'm pretty dubious of Mexican restaurants in Asia and prefer to avoid them so that I'm not disappointed, but I had heard lots of great reviews of this one from fellow travelers, so we decided to take a chance. It was actually pretty good! Not Antojitos Mexicanos, which is going to be my first stop when I get home to Yakima in a month(!), but not utterly disappointing either. After dinner, we went to an interesting show at a children's hospital in Siem Reap. Every Saturday night, the doctor in charge of the hospital, who is Austrian, plays classical music on his cello and talks about his hospital in hopes of bringing in donations. The music was very nice and I thought it was interesting to hear how he runs the hospital so that all care can be provided for free.

Finally, one last picture, of a packet of banana chips that I bought at the local grocery store:

Future food!

More Siem Reap

2010-05-05T22:00:00.000+08:00

Picking up where I last left off, Elizabeth and I spent our second day in the town of Siem Reap rather than visiting the temples. In the morning, we took a Khmer cooking class. I learned how to cook mango salad and chicken amok. Mango salad is made from unripe mangoes that are grated together with carrots and bean sprouts. It's pretty spicy due to the large amount of chilies that are added, and is topped off with a peanut/fish sauce. The chicken amok is a traditional Khmer dish made with chicken cooked in a banana leaf with a delicious coconut sauce. The most fun part of cooking the chicken was preparing all the spices - we had to chop up all sorts of different spices like ginger and turmeric and then pound them all together in a huge wooden mortar and pestle! Overall the class was really fun and we got to eat our work at the end. We also got to wear fun cooking hats that looked kind of like pioneer bonnets. I didn't take pictures, but I'll post some if Elizabeth sends them to me (if you're reading this, Elizabeth, can you please send me your pics? The world needs more pictures of me in dorky hats!).

After lunch we took a (free!) shuttle bus out to visit a working silk farm. They took us on a very good tour, which showed us the silk process from beginning to end. We started with the silk worms:

Then we saw how the silk worm cocoons are collected before they are unraveled.

Once the silkworms have spun their cocoons, they are boiled to kill the worm inside, and the cocoons are unraveled.

At this point, our tour guide plucked a dead silk worm out of the pot of boiling water and challenged someone on the tour to eat it. I didn't, but one of the other guys on the tour did. He said that it tasted "like an almond". Once the thread was unraveled from the cocoon, it goes through a series of machines designed to spin several threads together. These machines were so cool! They were huge and old-timey and used smart engineering instead of the digital tricks used by most modern technology.

Finally, the silk threads are dyed and woven together to form things like scarves and ties.

Then, the finished products are sold to tourists at extremely high prices! We successfully resisted the guilt that comes with a free tour and didn't buy anything at the end. I appreciated the very well done tour, but that wasn't worth the price of a $25 scarf.

Later that evening, we watched a free traditional Khmer dancing show at the restaurant where we ate dinner. The schedule for the night's entertainment was very strict:

First, we heard some traditional Khmer music.

Then came the dancing. The coconut dance was a Khmer folk dance in which the dancers clicked together coconut half-shells to accompany their dance. All I could think of during this number was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Next was the Apsara dance, a typical example of classical Khmer dancing:

I learned about this dance from a Fulbrighter at the conference I attended in Manila in March. She lives in Phnom Penh and studies classical Khmer dance as part of her Fulbright project. She told me that the apsaras are heavenly nymphs. All the movements in the dance are very slow and deliberate and are supposed to mimic the movement of the apsaras. The most important is to "look like you have detached your ribcage from your spine", as she put it. This is supposed to give the impression of a heavenly/otherworldly being. The dancers also do the cool thing where they are able to bend their fingers waaaaay back towards the back of their hand.

So, that was day two. Again, it's late, so day three will wait for another time.

Siem Reap - Day One

2010-05-02T23:14:00.000+08:00

Finally, it's time for some blogging about my trip to Siem Reap to see the Angkor temples. In order to make it on our 6 AM flight out of Singapore, my friend Elizabeth and I left her apartment at 4 in the morning. This was the earliest we got up during the trip, but not by much. After an uneventful flight, we landed in Siem Reap and headed into town on a tuk-tuk. What is a tuk-tuk, you ask? The usage of the term varies widely, but in this part of Cambodia, a tuk-tuk is a small, three-wheeled carriage that is pulled behind a motorbike. They normally have a roof for shade and space for 2-3 people. Here's a picture, courtesy of wikipedia.

After arriving at our hotel, we hired a tuk-tuk for the day and headed out to the temples. First we had to buy an admission ticket - $40 for three days! Quite steep, but I guess if it goes towards preserving the temples, it's ok. The first temple was saw, of course, was Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is HUGE! The outer walls measure about 1.5 km on each side. In addition, outside the walls is a 200 m wide moat. It's also the single largest religious monument in the world. Construction started in 1113 and took over 30 years to complete. It seems strange, but the temple is actually dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu (the Angkorian kingdom was originally Hindu, but Buddhism took over in the late 12th century). Here's me in front of the main temple!

You can maybe see that I'm a bit sweaty. That's because it was about 100 F and 70% humidity outside. I think it's actually some of the worst heat I've dealt with while in Southeast Asia. It was seriously hot! One of the first things that we saw was crowds of Khmer people taking wedding photos with the temple as a backdrop. They all had on elaborate matching outfits. We sneakily took several pictures:

Around the inner walls of the temple were lots of amazing carvings. They were based on the history of the Khmer kingdom, and also on the Hindu epic of Ramayana. My favorite was called "The Churning of the Ocean of Milk", which is the Hindu creation myth. In this myth, the gods and the demons agreed to work together to churn the ocean of milk for 1000 years. This would create an immortality elixir, which both the gods and the demons were supposed to share. However, at the end of the 1000 years, the gods stole the elixir and didn't give any to the demons. After walking around the inner walls to view the carvings, we went into the very center of the temple, where the highest tower stands. It's quite a climb to the top:

However, we did climb all the way up to the top, from which we had quite a nice view.

After Angkor Wat, we headed to Angkor Thom, which was one of the largest Khmer cities and served as the state capitol in the late 1100s. Apparently it used to house over 1 million people! I thought Angkor Wat was huge, but Angkor Thom was actually bigger. The 8m high outer walls measure 3km on each side! However, the temples inside Angkor Thom are much more spread out than in Angkor Wat. The most famous temple is Bayon. The craziest feature of Bayon are these faces, of which there are 216 of throughout the temple:

The faces probably represent the king who built the temple, Jayavarman VII. As the faces look in all directions, they were supposed to show that the king could watch over all of the kingdom simultaneously. Slightly creepy. After seeing a couple more of the temples within Angkor Thom, we abandoned this temple in favor of a breezy tuk-tuk ride to another location.

Next, we headed to Ta Prohm, one of the most photographed temples. This is because many of the trees growing within the temple have been allowed to remain, making for some very picturesque scenes. It was really interesting to see how the trees had grown in among the stones of the temple.

The trees were enormous! You can see the scale of things in the next picture.

After Ta Prohm, we were too tired to see any more temples. We headed back to our hotel and took full advantage of the hotel's swimming pool. Later that night, we ate some delicious Khmer food for dinner, including a dish called "pumpkin in oven". It was sort of a casserole dish involving pumpkin, egg, shrimps, and some other vegetables. It tasted a lot better than it sounds. After some nighttime shopping, we called it a night (given that we had woken up at 4 AM) and slept for about 12 hours. Speaking of sleeping, time for me to go do some of that right now, so I'll leave this post as just day one. Days two and three coming soon!

PS: exciting news! I just bought my tickets for the Grand Southeast Asia Tour, which commences in three weeks!

Angkor Wat pictures!

2010-04-28T22:14:00.000+08:00

Here's a link to my pictures from my visit to Siem Reap, Cambodia, to see the Angkor temples. Real blog posts to follow!

Chinatown

2010-04-21T20:09:00.001+08:00

A couple weekends ago (I know, it's been a long time), I paid a visit to Chinatown to buy a set of chopsticks for myself as a souvenir. I found a very nice pair with pretty blue designs on the ends. Unfortunately for you, chopsticks are very hard to take up-close pictures of, so no pictures here.

However, while in Chinatown, I also paid a visit to the Chinatown Heritage Centre, which is a very well done museum about the history of Chinatown. Back in the day (early 1900s), Chinatown used to be quite sketchy - gambling houses, brothels, and opium dens galore! Here's a recreation of a night gone wrong in a gambling den.

Not to worry, it has since cleaned up it's act. Chinatown still exists today because, under British rule, different ethnic groups were only allowed to live in certain areas of the city. Since the ethnic groups were so concentrated for such a long time, several ethnic neighborhoods have retained their character to this day. However, what I didn't know was that Chinatown itself was segregated into separate neighborhoods for immigrants from different parts of China. Most of the Chinese immigrants to Singapore came from Southern China, but they spoke a variety of different languages like Hokkien, Hakka, and Cantonese. So, these groups tended to keep to themselves in different blocks of the Chinatown. Here is a recreation of a clan hall, which were kind of like clubs for the different clans.

The Heritage Centre itself was in an old shophouse that used to house various shops on the ground floor, in addition to living spaces on the upper stories. Many of these shops and living spaces had been recreated, and I thought that this was the most interesting part of the museum. Here is a room where a family of five or six would have lived:

And an outdoor kitchen:

And an old-timey tailor shop!

Another very interesting exhibit in the museum was about the "death houses" that existed during the early 1900s in Chinatown. Since families were packed into such small spaces (see above picture!), it was considered a health hazard to make extra space for sick and dying old people in the family dwelling. So, families would instead send their dying elderly members off to "death houses", where they could lay around with other old people and wait to die. Pretty gruesome! Here's an example of one person's area in a death house.

And one final picture:

You may be wondering what "Bullock Cart Water" is. Well, the name of Chinatown in Mandarin is 牛车水 (niu che shui), which literally means "cow car water". Turns out, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the water in the Chinatown area was so bad that drinking water had to be brought in from other places on the island. This water was brought in daily on large carts pulled by cows. I learned this in my Chinese class a few months ago after I realized that I knew what 牛车水 meant, but was completely confused as to why the Chinatown MRT stop was called as such, and asked my Chinese teacher. Mystery solved!

Malapascua Island

2010-04-04T22:46:00.000+08:00

Picking up where my last post left off, my friend Clayton and I headed for the Manila airport at about 2:30 AM for our 4:30 AM flight to Cebu City. Oddly, the domestic terminal was bustling even at this early hour! Also odd was that the plane for our flight from Manila to Cebu City was larger than the plane that we flew in on from Singapore, and Philippines Airlines offers maybe five of these flights per day. After a quick one hour flight, we arrived in Cebu City and grabbed a cab to the bus station. Our destination was Maya, on the northern tip of Cebu island, a four hour bus ride away. The sun came up super early, since it was already light when our bus left at 6 AM:

This bus ride was reminiscent of many of the bus rides that I took in Nicaragua - bumpy, crowded, and very windy due to lack of air-conditioning. However, I actually enjoy these types of bus rides, since they always bring some adventure into the trip. For example, at one point on this particular bus trip, the bus driver braked too sharply, igniting a small but very smoky fire under one of the rear wheels. The passengers, rather than looking at all surprised, patiently filed off the bus and took the bus's mechanical difficulties as an opportunity for a bathroom break in the nearby fields. After about 15 minutes, the bus was sufficiently repaired (by sufficiently, I mean probably not at all, but it's not like we had a choice) and we all piled back on and made it to Maya. From Maya, we then took a ferry to get to our final destination, Malapascua Island.

Malapascua is super small and, as yet, not as touristy as some of the other nearby islands around the main island of Cebu. We stayed at a very small beach cottage - here's the view from our front porch.

The first day, we mostly just napped, explored the island, and went swimming. I made plans to dive in the morning, but then didn't end up going because I was feeling poorly when I woke up. I spent the morning sleeping in, but Clayton walked around the entire island. It's so small that walking the entire circumference takes only about 2-3 hours. That afternoon, we did some snorkeling. The first issue with this snorkeling trip was that the spot recommended to us was on the other side of the island and we didn't really want to walk all that way. The dive shop suggested that we take a motorbike. The second problem was that we didn't know how to get to the snorkel spot, so we required a driver for said motorbike. Unfortunately, only one driver/motorbike showed up. So, we had the pleasant experience of fitting three full-sized adults onto one tiny motorbike. After that experience (and me being smooshed in the middle), I had huge amounts of respect for anyone who manages to fit more than three people onto a motorbike (a common sight in Southeast Asia). But, we made it to the snorkel spot, and saw lots of neat sea animals, like sea urchins, corals, sea stars, and small schools of fish.

The next day, I woke up super early to go on a 5 AM dive at Monad Shoal, a spot off the coast famous for thresher shark sighting. Normally, the sharks stay below 100 ft, but in the early mornings they come up to about 60 ft so that small organisms will clean them. Here's what thresher sharks look like:

(Note: none of the following underwater pictures are actually mine, just illustrative examples). I was diving with the divemaster and two friendly Dutch people who are dive instructors in Thailand. Although I was a little nervous about seeing sharks, I definitely felt better with three very veteran divers alongside! We descended just as the sun was coming up, and we immediately saw a shark, very close up! It was only about 5 m away from us and lazily swam in a half circle around our group before swimming away! The Dutch couple had an underwater camera and actually got a picture of the shark, but I haven't gotten it from them yet. After that first shark sighting, we mostly just swam slowly around the bottom hoping that other sharks would appear. We had one more sighting later in the dive, but not nearly as stunning as the first one. Apparently we were super lucky to get two shark sighting in one dive, and even luckier that both were quite close up. I was completely satisfied and felt really awesome for conquering my nervousness and diving with sharks!

After returning to the island, I had some delicious breakfast with Clayton on our beachfront porch, then we headed back to the dive shop for another dive. While Clayton snorkeled on the surface, I dove with the same divemaster around a small rock island just off the coast called Lapus Lapus. I got a chance to see some smaller ocean life, like a tiny blue ringed octopus. This guy was cool because he didn't look like anything at all until disturbed, at which point his brown skin turned beautifully blue!

We also saw several frogfish hiding under ledges. They mostly just looked liked blobs, and I don't think I would have noticed them if the divemaster hadn't pointed them out.

Overall, another awesome dive. After two dives, I was really tired out, so I took a quality nap in one of the hammocks provided by the hostel. Later that day, we ate dinner at a massive buffet with all different types of Western, Asian, and Filipino food and enjoyed our last night of cheap beer.

Starting early the next morning, we made our airplane-bus-ferry journey in reverse (no smoking buses this time). Funnily enough, the divemaster from the day earlier was also on the ferry and the bus, as he was going to visit his family in Cebu City. He was a bit surprised that we were taking the cheap, non aircon bus - apparently most foreigners take the nice, aircon minivans, but where would the fun be in that?!?

All in all, the trip was a lot of fun and it was very relaxing to be away from Singapore for a week. I'll leave you with this picture of a billboard that I spotted in Cebu City:

Corned tuna - a truly romantic food!

Manila

2010-03-31T19:06:00.000+08:00

So, I'm finally getting around to writing about my recent trip to the Philippines. First of all, the Philippines in general was really awesome. I think this is mostly because being in the Philippines didn't feel like being in Asia anymore, it really felt more like being in Central/South America. A refreshing change!

The entire trip consisted of several days in Manila for a conference with all the other Southeast Asia Fulbrighters, then a quick hop down to the island of Cebu for some island vacationing with my friend and fellow Fulbrighter Clayton. Because I know you'll all (all five or so of you) be waiting on the edge of your seats to hear about the trip, I'm going to split it up into two parts just to up the suspense factor.

First, Manila. This city is crazy. Metro Manila actually consists of 16 cities - it's huge! The first thing I experience about Manila is the traffic. Often, taxi rides of 10km take up to 1.5 hours! Remember those pictures of motorbike traffic from Vietnam? Well, the traffic in Manila is similar, except all the motorbikes are replaced with cars, jeepneys, and buses. What are jeepneys, you ask? Well...

Jeepneys were adapted from American army jeeps and are one of the more common methods of public transportation in Manila. They are always brightly and individually decorated!

The conference was held in a branch of the ShangriLa Hotel. This was by far the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in. The most remarkable thing about the hotel was the breakfast/lunch buffet at the hotel restaurant. It was HUGE! Every type of food you could want - Indian food for breakfast, an entire roasted pig for lunch, handmade sushi, and (I was particularly excited about this one) an excellent salad bar! The dessert area was completely out of control - after surveying an entire area of delicious looking Western desserts and selecting a few, I turned around to find an equally large area of Filipino desserts!

I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet all the other Fulbrighters - everyone in the group was really interesting and accomplished (besides the Fulbright, I mean). Seriously, compared to some of the people there, I felt quite boring! Everyone was asked to give a short presentation about their grant research/work and these turned out to be way more interesting than I expected. Not to be a science snob, but at the beginning of the conference I wasn't super excited to listen to two days of presentations about humanities/social sciences research. But here I was pleasantly surprised, because I found many of the topics to be very interesting. Random examples include studies of female Muai Thai fighters, traditional Khmer dance, and reporting and ethics on the Thai/Burma border.

On Friday afternoon, a couple others and I skipped the scheduled cultural activity (museum trip) and headed out on our own to visit Intramuros, one of the cities within Metro Manila. Intramuros was the headquarters of the old Spanish colonial government and the site of the ruins of the Spanish fort. First, we visited the San Augustin Church, built in 1607. It's survived various earthquakes as well as WWII (no small feat, considering that Manila was the second-most bombed city in WWII).

Next we visited the Manila Cathedral; this church is not as exciting since it's been destroyed and rebuilt several times. The most recent version was built after WWII.

At the cathedral, we sampled some Manila street food: fried bananas on a stick. I think they had also been coating in sugar. They were kind of delicious. Then I spotted on of the guards at Fort Santiago, and had to take a picture of him.

The strange part was that he seemed confused about why I wanted to take his picture - surely this must happen pretty often?!? We then headed to the fort. Here's the entrance archway.

Over the arch is a wooden carving of Santiago Matamoros, the patron saint of Spain. In case you're wondering what "Matamoros" means, it literally means "kill Moros" (Moros is the traditional Spanish word for Muslims, or more specifically North African Muslims). Very cheery art. The park outside the fort was quite nice, though.

The conference ended on Friday evening with a reception featuring native Filipino music played by a very cheery and skillful group. They played xylophone-like instruments as well as big Pan pipes. They also danced around while playing said instruments. It was impressive. However, I headed to bed early since our flight to Cebu was leaving at 4:30 AM the next morning!

Philippines pictures

2010-03-29T21:55:00.002+08:00

Here

Proper entries in a few days.

Greg Mortenson!

2010-03-28T20:59:00.000+08:00

Today, I got the chance to attend a talk given by Greg Mortenson, the director of an NGO that builds schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He's written two books about his works, called Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools. His story is pretty crazy and the books are very interesting to read. I learned a lot about the Middle East and the causes of fundamental Islamic movements through the two books. Mr. Mortenson was speaking at an International Baccalaureate conference here in Singapore. I initially started out just trying to talk the IB Organization into allowing me to come hear his talk, but ended up giving a thank you/closing speech after the talk as well! Later, I got to meet Mr. Mortenson:

Exciting!

Singapore vs. The Media

2010-03-25T19:42:00.001+08:00

.Here's an interesting article about one of Singapore's more recent attacks on various media outlets that criticize the government. Apparently this happens a lot here. This probably explains why the vast majority of Singaporean "newspapers" are no more than tabloid trash.

Oh yeah, and posts/pictures from my Philippines trip coming soon!

Pulau Ubin

2010-03-14T22:42:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, I finally made the trip to Pulau Ubin in the company of some friends. Pulau (meaning island) Ubin is a small (Singaporean island) just off the east coast of Singapore. It only takes about 10 minutes to reach the island by boat. However, it's completely different than regular Singapore. No high rises office buildings or HDBs! Just small restaurants, a tiny temple, and lots of bike rental shops. This is because the preferred method of transportation on Pulau Ubin is by bike. Those of you who have had the opportunity to witness my bike riding skillz (or lack thereof) may be a bit worried, but I am happy to report that we enjoyed a full afternoon of bicycling around and I managed to stay on the bicycle the whole time!

The island is very scenic and features some nice beaches and a wetland. Here's one of the beaches:

Here was a cool tree that we spotted off the shore from the wetlands.

Also in the wetlands there were a lot of crazy looking banyan trees.

A little later, we rode by a very scenic quarry.

And then we spotted a monkey!

Although it was extremely hot and sweaty (35C=95F and high high humidity), it was a really fun day trip and definitely someplace I'd like to go back to before I leave Singapore.

Exciting news alert! On Wednesday, I'm leaving for the Philippines. I'll first be heading to Manila, where I'll be attending and presenting at a conference for all the current Fulbrighters in Southeast Asia. Then, I'll be heading south to Cebu with my friend Clayton to do some scuba diving for a few days. So, exciting pictures will be coming up soon!

Chingay Parade

2010-03-03T20:54:00.000+08:00

A couple weekends ago, I attended the Chingay Parade. Apparently the word "Chingay" is an anglicized version of a Hokkien word that means "the art of costume and masquerade". The original Chingay began in Penang (Malaysia) and the tradition worked it's way south through Johor Bahru (border city) to Singapore. Because everything in Singapore has to be advertised as the best or largest of something or other, Chingay is promoted as "the biggest street parade in South East Asia"!

As I've said before, my camera sucks at night so it was kind of hard to take pictures. I tried taking some of the floats when they would stop midroute - they were really absolutely ridiculous. Huge, gaudy, and often inexplicable. A lot of them had national themes. Here is the Japanese float:

The Chinese float seemed to have some sort of odd theme that we didn't really get:

The weirdest part was that there were people in those yellow boxes on top of the float. We expected them to pop out of the boxes in some sort of grand finale, but they didn't. They just stayed inside and wiggled around a bit instead.

There were also a lot of Singapore themed floats. The Housing Development Board, or HDB, turned 50 this year, so there were several floats celebrating this milestone.

This is, of course, supposed to be a bunch of people from different racial/ethnic/economic backgrounds, all living happily together in harmony in an HDB building.

So, I understand the birthday cake, and I understand the lion (Singapore is the "lion city") but why is the cake in the middle of the lion?!?

Finally, there was this guy. His float was somehow associated with a Universal Studios theme park that is opening soon, but I was laughing too much at this guy to really pay attention to the rest of the float.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

2010-02-16T21:16:00.001+08:00

It's Chinese New Year! Although the first day of the new year was on Sunday, the holiday actually lasts for several weeks. Those Chinese know how to party. A common greeting for the new year is "gong xi fa cai", which literally means "wishing you enlarge your wealth", or, as a looser translation, "wishing you a prosperous new year".

There are a lot of traditions that go along with Chinese New Year. Like, really a lot. Maybe it just seems like a lot to me because they're all new, but it seems like western holidays such as Christmas are much simpler. Here, in no particular order, are some of the traditions that I've learned about CNY. Cleaning should be done before the new year, as cleaning in the first days of the new year is seen as "sweeping out the good luck". In the spirit of consumerism, it's good to buy new things before the new year, especially new housewares or clothes that you can show off during the holidays. It's best if the new clothes are red, as red represents prosperity in Chinese culture. These new clothes can be shown off during they many visits that you must make to extended family and friends during the first two weeks of the new year. It's also a good idea to bring gifts when you go on these visits. Gifts are always given in an even number - odd numbers are considered unlucky. The number four is especially bad because it sounds like the Mandarin word for "death"! The number eight is especially lucky because it sounds like the words for "prosper" or "wealth". Married people also give their unmarried family members or friends hong bao, which are red envelopes containing cash.

What do these visits consist of? From what I can gather, mostly eating. Mandarin oranges are a popular item, because they look like gold coins. A popular dish here is called "yu sheng", which means "raw fish". Apparently it is not found in China, only Singapore and Malaysia. Yu sheng is a salad of raw fish with lots of vegetables and random seasonings. Each ingredient has a special meaning. Once the salad is assembled, all the guests begin to toss the salad with chopsticks, while repeating aloud their wishes for a prosperous and happy new year. The height of the tossing indicates the degree to which the wishes will be fulfilled, so guests are expected to toss the salad very high! Sounds like a messy process. Finally, there are a lot of desserts to eat. All the stores in Chinatown have been selling lots of little cookies - however most of the ones that I have tried taste quite dry and flavorless to me. Pineapple and egg tarts are also popular. Most popular, though, are Taiwanese mochi products. There are many different varieties of these products - from the typical mochi with a soft rice flour shell with filling in the middle (peanut, green tea, red bean, yam, etc) to "mochi jellies" that are pretty much just firm jello with fruit in the middle. These are delicious! I am definitely going to miss their presence in the stores after the new year season is over.

On Saturday night, I met up with a couple of my friends to check out the CNY celebrations that were taking place down by the Singapore riverfront. There was a huge carnival with rides, food, and lots of entertainment. There was a large area with lots of animatronic, light-up animals displays. There was a prominent tiger display, since this year is the year of the tiger.

Besides the tigers, there were displays of the animals representing all of the other years in the Chinese calender (I think there are 12 total). I thought the monkey was especially cute:

There were all sorts of other crazy statues and displays, like this peacock,

which is you looked closely, was made out of spoons and plates!

(Sorry if some of the pictures are a bit blurry. My camera doesn't do very well at night.)
There was also this dragon, who was made entirely out of sugar!

The main event was this guy, although I'm not sure what/who he was supposed to be. He threw glitter down into the crowd.

However, my favorite exhibit was entitled "Panda Joyland". The pandas in the exhibit were not what I would call "joyous". In fact, they were downright depressing. Between the forlorn expressions on their little faces to the overwhelming scruffiness of their fur, they most definitely fell into the "sad panda" category. Observe:

Why does this panda have two other pandas strapped to the back of it's bicycle? Very meta.

These two are enough to put a frown on anyone's face.

Well, a happy Chinese New Year and Gong Xi Fa Cai to all! Also, happy Valentine's Day, that other, far lamer, holiday that also happened over the weekend. Oh yeah, and President's Day.

Singapore Farms

2010-02-10T21:56:00.000+08:00

No, that title is in fact not an oxymoron. Last weekend, my friend Elizabeth (another Fulbrighter) and I visited several farms located in the Kranji region in the north of Singapore. There are actually quite a few farms in the this area, and there's a convenient shuttle bus that drops passengers off at most of them. We thought that this sounded like a nice opportunity to get away from the city a bit, so, armed with sunscreen and bug repellent, we set off.

The first farm we visited was an organic fruit and vegetable farm called Bollywood Farms. This farm was completely awesome!

The owner of the farm, Ivy, greeted us as we arrived and immediately tried to set one or both of us up with another young (male) visitor. Then, she proceeded to give us her opinions on Singapore and the world in general. Her conclusion: "too many stupid women and too many greedy men". According to my friend Natasha, who is my go-to lady about all things Singapore, Ivy is a very controversial and outspoken figure in Singapore (OK, it doesn't really take much to be controversial here). She used to be the president of the Singapore Netball Association, and, according to her website "she is remembered for her stinging observations about the state of sporting affairs [in Singapore]". Now, she has become a leader in the sustainability movement in Singapore by advocating for organic lifestyles and local food production. All in all, a really awesome lady.

The farm grows all kinds of different fruits and vegetables. They are apparently the largest banana producer in Singapore.

We saw dragonfruit vines - I had no idea that it grew on this type of plant.

Also, we encountered a friendly lizard!

After a wander around the farm, we decided to eat some lunch in the cafe, called Poison Ivy. Elizabeth and I both ordered banana curry, since it sounded so interesting! It turned out to be really, really tasty. The bananas were more like plantains than the bananas that we normally eat - if they hadn't told me they were bananas I probably would have thought that they were potatoes. The curry sauce was super delicious and perfectly spicy. We finished off the meal with some jackfruit cake. Since I had heard that the jackfruit was related to the famous durian, I had been too scared to try it in the past. However, Elizabeth persuaded me, and the cake was quite good after all.

The next farm on our list was called Hay Dairies. I was expecting to see smelly cows, but this dairy actually turned out to be a goat farm. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to get up close and personal with the goats. Here are a few of them:

There were also some cute baby goats.

I guess that the goats were kept on those platforms to keep out various tropical pests such as rats and snakes. But, I found myself wishing that they had some nice green fields in which to roam free. Elizabeth and I tried some chocolate goat milk (the milk was chocolate, not the goats (mmm, chocolate goats)), but it just tasted like regular milk, but thinner.

Last on our farm tour was the Jurong Frog and Fish Farm. I guess I hadn't realized that there was such a market for frog in Singapore! Later that day, however, I did notice "fresh frog" being sold at the local grocery store. Anyways, this farm raised American Bullfrogs, and lots of them.

The frogs were all croaking in unison and the noise was incredibly loud. The frogs by my house in Selah tend to make a delicate chirping noise, but this croaking was much louder and deeper. At first we thought it was some kind of machinery or something - it was hard to believe that all the noise was actually coming from the frogs. After looking around the farm and trying to feed the frogs (they were completely unmoved by my offers of dog food), we sampled our last dish of the day: frog legs!

Fried frog legs with spicy ketchup. Mostly it just tasted like chicken, with more bones.

Overall, our farm visits made for a really fun day. It was really nice to get out of the city, as living in such a dense city is driving me mildly crazy. I felt like we weren't even in Singapore anymore - no high rise public housing flats in sight!

Thaipusam!

2010-02-02T21:52:00.000+08:00

Last Saturday was the Hindu holiday of Thaipusam. Ever since I heard about it several months ago, I have been looking forward to witnessing this holiday. Why was I so excited for this? Well, to celebrate Thaipusam, devotees pierce themselves with various hooks and spikes and then walk several miles in the hot Singapore sun. Extreme! Witnessing Thaipusam on Saturday was all that I had hoped for and more. Here's one of many pictures that I took:

In trying to figure out the legends behind Thaipusam, I discovered that there are actually several different explanations for the holiday traditions. Most agree that the festival celebrates the birthday of Murugan, a Hindu god that is especially popular with the Tamils of southern India (this group also makes up the majority of Indians in Singapore). Wikipedia says that Thaipusam commemorates the creation of Murugan by Shiva to aid the Asura forces in their war again the Devas. However, this website has many other possible back stories, including tales of hill-stealing, eavesdropping, and demons. Sorry, I'm feeling lazy tonight, so if you want to read them all, just follow the link.

In Singapore, Thaipusam was celebrated with a procession between two of the main Hindu temples. My friends and I visited the temple at the start of the procession to check out the festivities. When we arrived in mid-morning, the temple was packed full of devotees and tourists. Each devotee who was going to march in the procession had several helpers. Anyone who is going to participate in the holiday has to undergo special purification rituals and fasting. The large spiked cages are called kavadis and are held in place with lots of long spikes that are woven into the flesh. Here you can see a helper weaving in the spikes:

Many of the kavadis were huge and incredibly ornate. Apparently, a few years ago, some of them got so out of hand that they are now restricted to a certain height.

Besides the kavadis, many devotees also wore bells, oranges, or jars of milk that were held on with spikes. Here you can see them putting the bells on this man's legs:

Sometimes the kavadi-wearers had attendants that marched with them. They mostly carried jars of milk on their heads.

The craziest that we saw was this guy - he had a huge spike through both cheeks and was pulling an wheeled altar using huge hooks on his back!

Inside the temple, there was a festive atmosphere. There were several different bands playing percussion and wind music.

There were also various shrines and altars set up, and a large area for serving food.

So, all in all a very interesting holiday!

Lunar New Year Treats

2010-01-27T21:02:00.000+08:00

Today, while doing my usual grocery shopping at the Fair Price, I decided to buy some intriguing looking new year's treats. Chinese, or Lunar, New Year is coming up soon, starting on February 14th. The holiday prep is already in full swing in most places around Singapore - my local mall and said grocery store are all decked out and everything is on sale. And I haven't even been to see Chinatown yet, which I'm sure is much, much more ridiculous.

Anyways, the first treats I bought were these cute turtles. I'm assuming that turtles are some sort of good luck symbol in Chinese culture, similar to carp fish. On the outside, they look just like cute turtles...

...but when you open them up they have some sort of jelly candy inside!

The candy was quite hard and sticky. It had a very sweet, but otherwise faint flavor - maybe coconut?

The next candies I bought were called "mochi jelly". I have been seeing them all over in various shops and stalls. Apparently they are from Taiwan.

I decided to try the strawberry and orange flavors. Here they are unwrapped:

Upon sampling these, I was actually pleasantly surprised! They were not too sweet, and were much softer than the turtle jelly. They also actually had real fruit in them (you can see the strawberry)!

That's it for my culinary adventures tonight.

Vietnam, Part Two: Hoi An

2010-01-26T21:47:00.000+08:00

Alright, finally picking back up where I left off with my chronicle of the Vietnam trip. After several days in HCM City, Chris and I caught a quick domestic flight up to Da Nang, a city in central Vietnam. From there, it was a 30 km taxi ride south to our final destination, Hoi An. Hoi An was a much smaller city than HCM or even Da Nang. It was also one of the few cities that was spared from the extensive bombing during the Vietnam War. As such, the town is full of old things like well-preserved houses and ancient temples.

Our flight to Da Nang was delayed for several hours, so we didn't arrive there until around 10 PM. That wasn't a problem since I, savvy traveler that I am, had made us hostel reservations online before we arrived. We grabbed a taxi and headed to Hoi An and a much anticipated bed (I know, it was only 10 PM, but we were really tired). The problems started once we arrived at our hostel. After being greeted by the desk clerk, he informed us that the hostel was full. Undeterred, I whipped our my paperwork showing that we had made a reservation. The clerk acknowledged this, but that didn't change the fact that the hostel was completely full. At this point, things could have gotten really bad - we were in a new city, which was completely dead at getting on 11 PM now, and didn't have anywhere to stay. Also, December/January are high tourist season in Asia, so I was guessing that most places were pretty packed. But, we got lucky, because this hostel had incredibly amazing staff! The clerk called up the owner of the hostel, who came right away, found us a room at another hotel, paid for it, and got us a taxi there! Like I said, incredibly lucky. We slept in after our late night and then moved to the original hostel the next day. Our room had a super awesome balcony - here I am enjoying some quality porch times.

Later that day, we explored the Old Town. We first visited a large temple. Unfortunately, I can't remember if it was Buddhist or Taoist. Here's the front of the temple:

Inside, as is the case with all temples, the air was smoky with incense. This smoke came not only from typical incense sticks, but from huge incense coils that were hung from the ceiling. They must have taken days to burn. Each one had a special prayer attached to it by a visitor to the temple.

We actually visited several temples in Hoi An. All of them had special boat shrines, which is probably because Hoi An is on the coast and used to be a major trading city - the sailors must have given offerings to these shrines to ensure safe passage.

After the temple, we visited an old house that had been lived in by a merchant family for, I think, about six or seven generations. The house itself was not that remarkable, but what was remarkable was a set of watermarks on the kitchen wall. Apparently, the river that flows through the city floods every couple years, with water coming incredibly high up into the city and all the buildings. How high, you ask? Well, here's a picture of me (for scale) standing by the watermarks (in white above the painting):

The house even had a hatch in the ceiling so that all the furniture from the ground floor could be hoisted up to the second floor when the waters started rising!

Another interesting visit that day was to the Arts and Culture Center, where we watched a traditional Vietnamese song and dance program. The instruments they played were really cool and included all sorts complex looking lap harps and other string instruments. The dances, however, were...a bit too interpretive for my tastes. Then, they played a strange sort of bingo game where the performers would sing a song and shout out random words in the middle of it. These words corresponded to large wooden paddles, one of which was given to each audience member. The owner of the selected paddle won a prize. Not a very challenging game, really.

The next day, we headed out of town to see some temple ruins. The temples are collectively called My Son, and were built by the indigenous Cham people between the 4th and 14th centuries. Oddly enough, the Cham people originally hail from Indonesia, and the temples were Hindu. It seemed really strange to be seeing statues of gods and goddesses such as Vishnu and Kali in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle! There were several groups of temples, and each group was composed of multiple individual buildings, such as this one:

The Hindu influence was evidenced not only by the statues, but by the various inscriptions written in Sanskrit.

A lot of the temples were destroyed by American bombing during the war. Our tour guide kept repeating this fact, and as the only Americans in the entire tour group, Chris and I felt pretty bad about it. In an attempt to make us feel better, some friendly Australian ladies informed us that the Ozzies don't always agree with their government's actions either. However, some of the temples are being restored to their original state by teams of archeologists. Here's one that they were currently working on.

Technically, the American bombs weren't the original destroyers of the temples. The area was discovered by a French solider in the late 1800s, and teams of French archeologists soon arrived to study the temples. They took many of the statues and smaller artifacts back to France with them. Today, some of the statues are still missing their heads - which are now in museums or in the homes of private collectors. More recently, many of these artifacts have been returned to Vietnam and now reside in a museum about the Cham civilization in Da Nang (more on that later).

On our way back to Hoi An, we got to take a boat ride! Leaving our crowded bus behind, we cruised down the river and enjoyed some lunch. It was very relaxing, but it got quite hot in the sun after awhile. Unfortunately, our boat was not as cool as this boat that we spotted upon our arrival back in Hoi An:

We noticed that all the boats, from super basic wooden boats to fancy alternative energy powered boats like the one above, had strangely elongated eyes painted on them. Here's a more traditional example:

This is also found on many traditional Malay boats - I know I've seen it before in Singapore, and even knew the reason for it at some point, but now I can't remember. Probably something to do with helping guide the boat and navigate on the right course?

On our final day in Hoi An, we took some time to see some more of the surrounding countryside. We chanced upon an enormous cemetery, which, judging by the dates, was for victims of the war. The monument at the front was painted with inspiring proletariat imagery.

We spent a good portion of that day wandering around on the beach. All the local fisherman had these little round-bottomed boats that looked like turtle shells.

After some relaxation on the beach (see above), it was time to head up to Da Nang and catch our flight back to Ho Chi Minh City. Before going to the airport, we visited the Cham Museum. This museum contained many stonework artifacts that were carved by the indigenous Cham people. I previously stated that the Cham people came from Indonesia originally (which was what our tour guide told us), but according to wikipedia, they probably came from Borneo. They settled in central Vietnam and Cambodia, and had many conflicts over the centuries with both the Khmer tribes in Cambodia and the Vietnamese peoples in the north. By the middle of the 1700s, the tribes were scattered all over Cambodia and Vietnam and the Cham kingdom ceased to exist. Also, remember how I said they were Hindu? Well, they were Hindu, until the 17th century. Then, the current emperor and most of the Cham people converted to Islam. Today, the distribution is about 80% Islam and 20% Hindu. Today, the Cham people mostly live in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. According to our guide, you can tell them apart because of their curly hair.

Anyways, back to the museum. The carvings were very intricate and incredibly well preserved. I guess this is due to the fact that many of the carvings had belonged to private collectors and were only recently donated to the museum.

The second picture is a lion. I can't remember, or maybe never knew, what the first one was supposed to be. It was sort of a shame to see these carving in the sterile museum setting, and we tried to imagine just how much more breathtaking they would have been were they in their proper place out in the jungle ruins that we had seen the day before. But, we also realized that the statues were so well preserved today precisely because they had been taken out of the jungle.

After the museum and a surprise dinner (surprise because no one at the restaurant spoke English; we tried to order a simple noodle soup, but instead got some fried noodles with seafood), it was time to get to the airport for our flight. No delays this time luckily. We spent the night back in HCM City, and flew back to Singapore in the morning.

All in all, Vietnam was super interesting. It was an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly chaotic, country. Chris and I both wished that we had more time there to journey further north to Hanoi. But, that always leaves room to go back again...

Aaaaand, now I'm finally caught up on my blog. Yay!

Singapore in the News!

2010-01-18T13:24:00.000+08:00

My parents tipped me off to an article about Singapore in this month's National Geographic. More specifically, the article is about Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister and current "minister mentor" of Singapore. After reading the article, I think that that it does quite a good job of representing the current growing pains of Singapore, and the constant push and pull between government control and freedom of expression here. The article poses an interesting question: how does a country weigh the pros of government censorship and social control (low poverty, clean streets, safety, efficiency) against the natural cons?

Also, apparently Singaporeans have the least sex of anywhere in the world. Just a fun fact.

Picasa Link

2010-01-17T20:01:00.002+08:00

Check out more Vietnam pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/l.l.baranowski/Vietnam?authkey=Gv1sRgCITX0JC00YTW7QE&feat=directlink

Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon

2010-01-15T21:57:00.001+08:00

As promised, here's the first of my two entries about my recent trip to Vietnam with Chris. We started our journey by flying from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City, which is still called Saigon by most locals. Saigon is intense. I don't think I've ever seen a more crowded and chaotic city than Saigon. Here's a picture of some light traffic on a regular day in Saigon:

Pretty much the first thing that we realized is that crossing the street was going to be a challenge, to say the least. There are no crosswalks in Vietnam. To cross a busy street, you simply starts walking, slowly and at a steady pace, into the flow of traffic. The general idea is that the motorbikes will dodge around the pedestrian, and you won't get hit unless you suddenly change course or speed. However, this approach requires nerves of steel! Unfortunately, the few cars that are on the road didn't seem to pay much attention to pedestrians, so there were still plenty of opportunities to get hit. We survived, but came away from the experience with a much greater appreciation for crosswalks!

We arrived in Saigon on New Year's Eve, and it seemed like the whole city was out and about to celebrate. Huge fairs and carnivals had been set up in all the city parks and many major streets had been blocked off. At most of the carnivals, there were all sorts of food and drink vendors, as well as entertainment such as singers or dancers. We enjoyed wandering around the city, sampling some cheap Vietnamese beer, and trying to figure out what was going on with the various entertainers. We were so tired from traveling that we didn't even make it to midnight, but then again New Year's has never been all that exciting anyways.

The next day, we woke up bright and early to take a bus tour to see some sights outside of the city. We had several moments of panic when I thought that I had lost the receipt for the tour, and when our bus/tour guide didn't show up until almost 45 minutes after they said they would arrive. But, we eventually made it on the bus, so all was well in the end. Also, I was an idiot and found the receipt in my wallet shortly thereafter. Our first destination for the day was the Cao Dai Temple complex, about 2 hours away. Cao Dai is a Vietnamese religion that was founded in the 1920s. Cao Dai is basically a catch-all religion - they worship everyone from traditional religious figures like Jesus, Buddha, and Brahma, to modern "saints" like Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Victor Hugo. The goal of the religion is to break free of the cycle of reincarnation, to die once and for all. I'm reading more about it on wikipedia right now, and apparently they also believe that there are 72 inhabited planets in the universe, with number one being the closest to Heaven, and number 72 being the closes to Hell. Earth is number 68. Here's a picture of the main temple:

Here's the inside of the temple, where we saw a daily service. This mainly consisted of a lot of chanting and some bell ringing:

In the inside of the temple, they have statues of three of the most important figures in Cao Dai: Buddha, Jesus, and Brahma:

And here are several of the modern day saints - Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-Sen, and Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, a Vietnamese poet from the 15th century:

I think the most amazing part of all this was that this religion has over 2 million followers in Vietnam. I guess it's sort of like the Scientology of Asia. The other big question we had was where the money to build the temple came from. They didn't charge admission for visitors, and the figure for the temple construction was quite astronomical (can't remember the exact number our guide told us) - sort of a mystery as to where they got all the funding for the construction/maintenance.

Our next stop on the tour was the Cu Chi Tunnels. These tunnels were used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War as hiding places for guerilla attacks on South Vietnamese and American troops. Although there were VC tunnel networks all over Vietnam, the Cu Chi ones were particularly significant because they were used as a base to capture Saigon at the very end of the war. Our tunnel tour started with our tourguide showing us all the different booby traps that were built by the VC and used to injure and demoralize American soldiers. Here's an example - a "fish trap" that would catch the foot and leg of any soldier unluky enough to step on it:

Next, we saw how the VC guerillas entered the tunnels and camouflaged the entrances. Here's a soldier entering the tunnels:

The tunnels were incredibly small - the only way to travel through them was to crawl on your stomach. In spite of this, people lived in the tunnels for days at a time. We got to walk through one tunnel, which had been specially enlarged for tourists:

Yay, we made it out! Some random Chinese guy wanted to take our picture, so I made him take one with my camera too.

Then, we had a snack of tapioca root and tea, which was a typical meal that the tunnel dwellers might have eaten. Mmm, just look at how much I am enjoying it:

Finally, we watched an 1970s propaganda video about the Cu Chi region. At this point, we were beginning to realize that the perspectives on the Vietnam War were very different here than the ones that we had been taught in the US. The video portrayed the people of the Cu Chi region as hardworking, simple peasants, who were eager to do their part to contribute to the stuggle against the invading Americans. However, this probably was true to the thinking of many of the local residents - they were just minding their own business until the Americans showed up and started bombing and killing. So, I guess I can see where they were justified in their resistance.

We headed back to Saigon for the night and enjoyed some more wandering around the city before turning in. Many of the New Year's fairs were still set up, so we enjoyed some more local beer and some amazingly delicious pho (beef noodle soup), before heading to bed.

The next day, we checked out several sights in downtown Saigon. Our first stop was the War Remnants Museum, which used to be named the Museum of American War Crimes. This former name was indicative of the sentiments of the museum. It was pretty gruesome - especially the Agent Orange display. The various exhibits in the museum really drove home the atrocities committed by American troops during the war, and the lasting impact that they've had on Vietnam and it's citizens. Again, a very different perspective than we were taught at home. I know that I'd heard about some of the subjects before, such as Agent Orange and the My Lai massacre, but they definitely weren't emphasized nearly as much as they were here. One interesting exhibit showed the course of the war through photographs taken for newspapers and magazines around the world. I thought this was interesting because it showed the role that the media played in the war, especially in the shaping of the public's opinion of it.

After some lunch and a refreshing coconut, we headed to a Taoist temple.

The temple had lots and lots of various shrines, but, unfortunately, no signs or explanations. However, it was quite peaceful and had a nice garden where we relaxed in the shade for awhile:

Finally, we visited the Reunification Palace, which was the site of the South Vietnamese government. Architecturally, the palace was really strange looking and not at all what I expected it to look like:

Much of the palace has been left as it was when the South surrendered in April 1975. Most of the upper floors of the palace were various state rooms and meeting rooms. The basement was more interesting, as it housed all the military command rooms which still contained lots of old technology and maps. On the roof was an American helicopter:

Apparently, they used to let visitors out to the helicopter, so that they could have a "last helicopter out of Saigon" photo-op, but not anymore.

After that, we hurried back to our hostel and to the airport to catch our flight to Da Nang, a city in central Vietnam. Flying domestically in Vietnam was...interesting. When we arrived at the airport, we were told that our flight departure was delayed two hours, from 6 PM until 8 PM. Later, I checked my email and had been sent an email telling me that the flight was delayed until 11 PM (which it wasn't). While we were sitting waiting to board, I noticed that our boarding passes (which were actually just receipts) listed our flight time as 3 PM, so I had a bit of a momentary panic. But, we eventually made it on the plane and to Da Nang - but I'll save that for the next post.

More Singapore Tourism

2010-01-10T19:17:00.001+08:00

Chris arrived in Singapore last week, and we had a little over a day to spend in Singapore, so we had time to see a couple fun tourist sites before we headed off to Vietnam.

First, we visited the Haw Par Villa, originally called the Tiger Balm Gardens. The inventors of Tiger Balm were two brothers, Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par. Although not originally from Singapore, the Aw brothers eventually settled here and in 1935 purchased the land on which the villa was constructed. The gardens took two years to construct, and cost around two million (US) dollars to build! According to wikipedia, the park "contains over 1,000 statues and 150 giant dioramas depicting scenes from Chinese folklore, legends, history, and illustrating various aspects of Confucianism". Many of the statues in the park are supposed to teach children about traditional Chinese values and morals, especially the Ten Courts of Hell portion of the gardens.

The gardens have gone through several iterations over the years - for awhile in the early 90s, the gardens were converted into an amusement park with rides - but today they are in the process of being restored to their original state.

Here I am getting ready to enter the Ten Circles of Hell:

The Ten Circles of Hell showed the different punishments that would befall various types of sinners in the afterlife. The statues were incredibly gruesome, like this one!

Our favorite punishment was the one for prostitutes, who were to be drowned in a "filthy blood pond".

The rest of the statues depicted all sorts of different legends, myths, and stories. Some had explanations posted, but for most, we were left to puzzle out what the stories behind the statues could have been. For example, this lady with a crab head:

This rabbit vs. rat war was also one of the more confusing ones:

Also on display was a "tiger car" owned by one of the Aw brothers at the height of their fortune. The horn, of course, made a roaring noise!

Later that day, we visited the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, in Chinatown. As the name would suggest, the temple contains a piece of a tooth from the Sakyamuni Buddha (this is the Buddha that most people just know of as "Buddha", but I guess there actually lots of Buddhas). This temple is crazy! The tooth relic is contained in a stupa (altar) made of solid gold, apparently weighing 420 kg. There are also a total of 10,000 small Buddha statues around the temple. Although the relic is from the Sakyamuni, or Supreme, Buddha, the temple is actually dedicated to the Maitreya Buddha, who is known as the "Future Buddha". We weren't really sure of how this future Buddha thing worked, but we did enjoy imaginging a robotic future Buddha. Here is the main shrine, with the Maitreya Buddha in the middle:

In the next couple posts, I'll be writing about our trip to Vietnam - but this may take while because, between Chris and I, we took several hundred pictures, so I need to sort through all those first! But, it was a really awesome trip, and hopefully I can get all the pictures up on Picasa, and post a link here to see all of them.

Borneo

2009-12-29T19:41:00.000+08:00

As promised, here's a continuation of the last entry about my parent's visit. After we spent some time in Singapore, my parents and I headed to the city of Kota Kinabalu, on the north coast of Borneo. Because Borneo sounds super exotic and you may not know where it is (I probably didn't until I moved here), here's a map:

As you can see, the north coast belongs to Malaysia, and the rest belongs to Indonesia, except for that tiny sliver that is Brunei. (Brunei was actually supposed to join the federation of states that merged to form Malaysia in the early 1960s, but pulled out at the last minute.) Here's another map showing Borneo in the context of Southeast Asia (ignore the random German writing on Borneo):

As you can see, it's not too far from Singapore. So, after a quick two hour flight, we landed in Kota Kinabalu. We did a bit of exploring around the downtown (consisting of a couple blocks - it's not that big of a city) and the harborfront. Here there was an enormous "wet" market with stalls selling everything from fruit and freshly butchered meat to local handicrafts. However, the food section of the market smelled terrible! So, we wandered the handicrafts portion instead. Here are some statues we found on the waterfront:

And some boats that were in such disrepair that they looked like they belonged to a scrappy pirate gang:

The next day, we learned about the various cultures of the Bornean natives, with a visit to a resurrected tribal village that had once been inhabited by headhunters! The man who rebuilt the village is descended from this tribe, and all the tribal artifacts (including 42 skulls) have been passed down through the generations and have ended up in his possession. Here are some of the skulls:

We also got to do all sorts of fun activities that the villagers would have done in their daily life. We saw how the natives made rice wine - and we even got to sample some. It didn't actually taste like much, although if you drunk enough of it, I imagine it would have done the job. We also got to try shooting blowguns! Here is my dad showing off his expert skillz.

Later that day, we went to a wildlife park, where we saw proboscis monkeys and orantugans. The proboscis monkeys were actually sort of disappointing - their noses were not nearly as large as I had hoped. But, they did have some babies, which are always super cute. The orangutans were more interesting. The park helps to rehabilitate injured orangutans (I guess they are injured due to poaching? I was not sure about this), so the ones that were in the zoo were the ones that were too injured to be released back into the wild. Here's one with a mangled hand - he seemed to be managing ok.

Also, we saw a bird of paradise! Most people only think of these as those poky, bright orange, flowers, but the original birds of paradise were actual birds. These birds used to be incredibly common in Borneo, but were hunted to near extinction because of the desire for their beautiful tail feathers.

The next day, we headed out to a group of small islands off the coast to do some scuba diving. I recently learned how to dive about a year ago, so I was eager to go! Unfortunately, the visibility was quite bad, the maximum visibility was only about 5m. However, I did see a huge moray eel and lots of flourescently colored nudibranchs. My parents saw a turtle, so I was quite jealous. One of the coolest parts of the trip was when we stopped for lunch on one of the small islands. The island was inhabited by water monitors! They were huge - some were over 5 feet long! The lizards were almost completely tame, because they were used to getting food from the tourists, that they were just lounging around in the sun and begging food scraps. Like very large, very spiky, house cats.

On our final full day in Borneo, we took a bus several hours to go hiking around Mount Kinabalu. This is one of the tallest mountains in Southeast Asia, and is very popular with climbers because it's quite easy to climb - pretty much like a two day hike uphill. Not having time to climb all the way up, we contented ourselves with some jungle hiking around the mountain. There were a lot of very pretty plants and flowers that we saw, like these beautiful red flowers.

We realized while we were hiking that we were "hiking the jungles of Borneo", and that that sounded totally badass (it sounds extra cool if you say it in that movie-preview-announcer-deep-male voice. Really. Try it, right now.). Here I am in the jungles of Borneo:

On our last day, we managed to have time to make it to the Sabah State Museum before we had to be at the airport to catch our flight. A unique feature of this museum was that it had recreations of the many different types of houses that the various tribes of Borneo used to live in. Here's a picture of a few, surrounding a picturesque (but completely mosquito infested) lake:

Also, it had silly animal statues, and I'm a total sucker for hokey dioramas, like this fake water buffalo standing in a rice paddy:

That afternoon, we headed back to Singapore and I said goodbye to my parents, who were off to Tokyo for a couple days before returning home.

Overall, I thought Borneo was a really interesting place, for both the culture and the unique jungles. I enjoyed being in a more rural setting, away from the huge city of Singapore. However, I think that Kota Kinabalu is begining to experience a tourism boom, and will probably grow much larger in the coming years, especially as they promote themselves as an "ecotourism" site.

It's interesting to note that in my two visits of Malaysia, I'm always surprised at how developed it is. It always seems much cleaner and safer than I expect. Overall, I think it's a good place to travel to get exposed to Southeast Asia (I'm assuming Singapore doesn't really count), without encountering too many issues. People are quite nice and helpful, and I rarely felt like they were trying to scam me. So, all in all, a good trip.

Also, Merry (late) Christmas to everyone! I enjoyed a delicious German lunch at a local brewpub with some friends, before heading home to skype with various friends and family. Now, I'm just about to head out to meet Chris at the airport here in Singapore, and we'll be continuing on to Vietnam in a couple days. Hope everyone has a very happy New Year!

Playing tourist in Singapore

2009-12-26T22:48:00.000+08:00

Last week, for the first time since I've been in Singapore, I got to play full-time tourist, as my parents were in town to visit me! It was lots of fun and I found out a lot more about Singapore - often the places we visited were locations I had frequented before but had not realized the historical significance/cultural value behind them.

My parents arrived late Monday night and I met up with them on Tuesday morning. After a failed attempt to visit a crocodile farm, we settled for a visit to Arab Street and the Malay Heritage Center. Arab Street is one of my favorite places in Singapore, for it's chill vibe, good food, and funky shops. The Malay Heritage Center was somewhat interesting, but I would have liked for it to focus more on the historical areas of Malay influence in Singapore - the present-day exhibits were much less interesting. For dinner, I introduced my parents to the very common Singaporean dinner location: the mall food-court. Like an indoor, air conditioned, hawker center, but more crowded. The extreme crowds made it a bit difficult to navigate, but a friendly Singaporean family ended up sharing their table with us - everyone here is so much nicer to me when I'm with my family (more on this later)!

The next day, my dad had to fly to Jakarata for business, so my mom and I headed to Chinatown. We visited a really cool Taoist temple - the first in Singapore, built in 1826. Here's a picture of the inside of the Yueh Hai Ching Temple (Temple of the Calm Sea):

The temple was built by the Teochew community of Singapore (one of the main Chinese groups during those times) to thank the gods for safe passages over the ocean, as the Teochew were historically sailors and fishermen. Besides the main shrine, there were lots of other shrines that I'm sure had very interesting stories behind them, such as this one (especially the guy on the right):

The next day, my mom and I headed to Little India, another very interesting neighborhood in Singapore. I like Little India because it provides a glimpse of what Singapore was like in the past - like this spice mill in a sundry goods shop:

The whole shop smelled delicious and barrels of ground spices were stacked along the walls:

We also checked out a Hindu temple, the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple. Like most Hindu temples, this one was gaudily decorated and had a tall tower, called a gopuram, which is similar to a church tower in that it is designed to help pilgrims find their way to the temple. Taking a break, we ate some kulfi, which is the Indian version of ice cream. It's slightly thicker than normal ice cream and flavored with all sorts of nuts. Seriously, if you ever get a chance to try it, do so! It was madly delicious. Finally, we rounded out our Little India explorations with a trip to Mustafa's department store, a 24-hour madhouse full of all sorts of cheap merchandise.

The next day, we decided to explore the British influence in Singapore by visiting the civic district and the waterfront. (Apparently, this is also the point at which I stopped taking pictures for several days - sorry!) The massive, stately government buildings look quite out of place against the lush, tropical background of Singapore. We also visited the Philatelic Museum, which, for a museum about stamps, was pretty great! Surprising, I know.

On our last day in Singapore, my parents and I went to the National Museum. I had never been there before and it was probably the most extensive and through museum I've ever been to. The exhibits in the Singapore history gallery were accompanied by an audio/visual "companion" that gave you audio snippets about historical events in Singapore's past. After listening to these general snippets, you could choose to read more about specific artifacts, listen to discussions by various historians, or hear first-hand accounts of the (more recent) events in question. I think our visit took about 3 hours - but we could have spent all day there!

That night, we went to the Night Safari at the Singapore Zoo. This is a special nighttime exhibit that features nocturnal animals. It was really cool! The prize for most adorably cute animal goes to the Lesser Mouse Deer. Here's a picture (not mine):

Seriously, how retardedly cute is that?!? (For a scale reference, their max height is about 18 inches, their mature weight is under 5 lbs.) The award for most bad-ass animal goes to the Malayan Flying Fox, which was a large bat about one foot long. Part of the Night Safari contained a walk-in bat cage, which was a very very large cage that you could walk through and be up close and personal with the bats. It was so cool being only feet away from these huge bats! Observe (again, not my picture - my camera sucks at night shots):

The next day, we woke up super early to get to the airport to catch our flight to Borneo - but I'll save that for another blog entry.

Overall, seeing Singapore from a completely tourist perspective was interesting. Seeing all the things that surprised my parents made me realize all the little differences that I've adapted to in the past four months. I think that what made the biggest impression upon me was how polite other people were to us - no pushing to get on the bus, offering their seats on the train, helping with locating various places. I don't really know why this is - my only theory is that Asians are always kind of confused when a single woman is travelling alone, so maybe when I had my family with me, we seemed more like tourists. Anyways, I enjoyed it while it lasted!

So, that about sums up the Singapore visit. Next time: our trip to Borneo and my awesome German Christmas lunch.

Travel Plans!

2009-12-14T20:26:00.000+08:00

It's finally time for a holiday! I am excited to take a few weeks off from work and spend some time with my visitors. My parents will be arriving in Singapore soon (as in, a few hours) and we'll be spending some time here and then heading to Kota Kinabalu, in Borneo (the Malaysia part). I'm pretty excited to go to Borneo; it will be nice to get out of the city and be able to do some trekking and exploring. Hopefully we will see monkeys - orangutans and proboscis monkeys!

Then, Chris is coming to visit me! We'll be heading off to Vietnam, to check out Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and the central coast. I'm really excited to see all the interesting history there - ancient monuments from early tribes, remnants of French colonialism, and of course all the Vietnam War artifacts.

So, it may be a couple weeks before I update again, since I'll be in and out of Singapore. But, I promise awesome pictures and travel stories when I do get around to updating!

Chinese Garden

2009-12-06T20:59:00.000+08:00

I had a very nice visit to the Chinese Gardens by my apartment today. They were very peaceful and beautiful. Here are a couple pictures.

In the gardens, there was a Turtle and Tortoise museum. Apparently, it is the world's largest collection of tortoises and turtles in the world, at 3,456 - what they don't tell you is that most of these are tortoise and turtle figurines, not real ones. Only about 1000 of them are actually alive. But, 1000 turtles and tortoises is still a lot! After seeing the museum, I feel quite bad that I paid them my $5 and supported them, because the turtle conditions looked pretty horrible - small, filthy cages with lots of turtles crowded together. However, it was pretty interesting to see the huge variety of species. Most of the land tortoises were pretty cute. Like this little guy:

A lot of the aquatic turtles were kind of gross and scary looking. These snake-necked turtles were especially creepy:

And then...there were the pig-nosed turtles. Here's a picture of one:

Doesn't look too scary, right? WRONG. Each pig-nosed turtle was in it's own tank, and there was a long wall full of these tanks. As I walked down the wall, all the turtles started struggling against the walls of their cages and snapping their mouths. Now, I'm sure this was a completely normal turtle response, because they assumed I was going to feed them, but it was scary! The walls of their cages were not all that high, and these were pretty big turtles - at least a foot long. For a few tense minutes, I was convinced that the turtles had coordinated an insurrection and that they were all going to break out and devour me alive. Luckily, they calmed down, and I was only left with this guy to worry about:

I made it out of there unscathed, but I don't think I'll be going to any more turtle museums in the future!

"One white can cover up three ugliness”

2009-11-26T11:26:00.001+08:00

Here's an interesting article I came across today about Asian's (especially Asian women's) obsession with light skin. (Side note - yay, I finally figured out how to put in those nifty little links!) I hadn't really realized the extent of this obsession until I came to Singapore. Although it's most often overcast here, a lot of the women always use umbrellas when they walk outside, so as to avoid the sun. Also, whenever I go lap swimming at the pool on campus, I'm the only woman in the pool, which I think is because all the others are staying inside away from sun. I recently needed to buy some face lotion, and it took me quite some time to find one that didn't include claims of skin whitening.

A lot of the obsession is historical - if you had white skin, then you were rich enough to not work outside in the fields all day long. But did Westerners ever have this same obsession? I haven't heard of it in any recent history, at least. Now we have the reverse: people striving for the "perfect tan", which will prove that they have the time/money to laze around all day long tanning. Anyways, I'll stick to my sort-of-tan that I've gotten in spite of going through several tubes of sunscreen in the three months that I've been here.

Research Sucesses

2009-11-25T15:24:00.001+08:00

So recently I actually made some pretty significant progress in my research and solved a couple of the major problems that had been hindering my progress. This was very exciting! Even though now I have lots and lots of work to do because I feel like I'm a bit behind after taking so long to resolve these issues, it's really good to have something new to work on.

First off: I solved my problem with my iron oxide compound. Previously, I was having difficulties getting the synthesis product completely clean, and this was really annoying. I now have devised a several day, multi-step process for washing away various impurities to get a clean product. Complicated and time consuming, yes, but it works. Here's a TEM picture!

And a close up:

(The scale bar is really small, but that dark black bar in the second picture represents 5 nm. So, each little particle is about 10 nm across!)

See those nice lines across each particle in the second picture? Those are actually the planes of iron and oxygen atoms, nicely arranged in the configuration I want. These are responsible for creating the x-ray diffraction pattern below, which proves to me that this is actually the compound that I want:

Sorry it's kinda fuzzy, but basically here I'm proving to myself that I actually have about 95% magnetite, which is the iron oxide phase that I want. The issue here is that these particles are pretty thermodynamically unstable, mostly because they are so small that they have all sorts of surface energy issues (small particles have a larger surface area/volume ratio than normal size particles, and this causes all sorts of stability problems because of strains within them). So, they tend to transform into goethite (another iron oxide phase) if you add any small amount of heat. You can see here that I have about 5% goethite in my sample, which is an OK level.

The other exciting research development is that I made some very nice, titanium dioxide coated, silicon dioxide spheres. The coating procedure is really complicated, and uses a very air sensitive compound. If the chemical is exposed to air for more than about 10 seconds at a time, it will oxidize and ruin the synthesis. So, throughout the whole process, I am required to work with ninja-like quickness. But, I now have these great-looking spheres:

The inner spheres are made of silicon dioxide, and the darker ring on the outside of each is titanium dioxide. The little bits outside the spheres are rogue clumps of titanium dioxide that form when I expose the compound to air during the synthesis. Guess my ninja skills are not perfect yet!

So now I just have to do the in-between part: coat the iron oxide with silicon dioxide. Then, I'll just put more titanium dioxide on top of that, similar to the previous picture. However, no one has actually done the silicon dioxide coating on iron oxide, so that part is up to me to figure out. Should be fun!

Toy Museum and Dragonboats

2009-11-22T22:27:00.001+08:00

OK, I apologize for my lack of posts lately. I've been either (1) super busy at work, or (2) sick and not doing anything exciting. But, I was feeling better this weekend, and had the time to do several exciting things.

On Saturday, I visited the Museum of Shanghai Toys. Anyone who has travelled with me knows that I love completely random museums. I think the best example of this was a combination internet cafe/indigenious burial jar museum that I made Claire and Rebecca visit with me on La Isla de Ometepe, in Nicaragua. And it turned out to be a really cool museum! Anyways, this museum seemed to fit the bill, so I decided to check it out. It was actually really neat. It was started quite recently by a Singaporean who is just enthused about toys, and wanted to showcase his collection and use them to illustrate cultural movements and historical events throughout the 20th century in China. A lot of the toys were pretty funny and creepy looking. This toy, made out of celluloid from the early 20th century, gets the prize for weirdest/most inexplicable toy:

The museum traced the modernization of China and the various social movements that influenced toys during the last century. At the beginning of the 20th century, China was still closed to nearly all Western goods and influences, so the toy market was not very developed and most toys were very crude and made out of paper or straw. However, when more Western goods, including toys, started appearing in Chinese markets, this created a push for the Chinese to modernize their own toy industry. Another interesting example is that, before around the 1920s or 30s in China, it was not believed that toys could be at all educational. Again, due to Western forces, the Chinese then realized that educational toys such as puzzles and mazes could be used to help children learn various skills, and this sector of the toy industry exploded. One funny example of the Chinese toy market imitating the Western market was a collection of knock-off Disney toys, such as these creepy Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs masks.

However, the best toys were ones from the second half of the century. Toys were one of the many ways used to indoctrinate Chinese children with Communist ideology during the Cultural Revolution, so there was a large exhibit on this. Here is one toy that is entitled "Child Soldier":

There was also a list of some of the other toy names, which included "Ten thousand tonnes hydraulic machinery", "White Hair Women", "Female Mine Workers", "Sales Girl", "Defeating Paper Tigers", "Oil Refinery Pagoda", "Little Civilian Soldier", and, my favorite, "Offer Congratulations Truck". I can just imagine little Chinese kids running around: "Hey guys, let's play Oil Refinery Pagoda!" "No, I want to play Female Mine Workers!".

Another large collection focused on Space Race themed toys. I really liked the different renditions of what toy designers thought spaceships would look like in the future. Here is one good one, the Universe Boat:

Something interesting that can be seen here - a lot of the "people" figurines in these toys were actually very Western looking, with blonde hair and big blue eyes. There was a series of posters for Chinese children, which, I think, were supposed to illustrate lessons such as going to school, being polite, obeying your parents, etc, but all the children in these posters were white, even though the writing was in Chinese. I actually still see this today in Singapore - often when cartoons are used in advertisements, public service announcements, etc, the cartoon people are obviously white. I saw one at the grocery store the other day that tells people not to shoplift, and features a cartoon of a freckled, red-haired man getting caught shoplifting. (Those darn gingers! Always causing trouble!) I find this really strange, since these images don't represent the large majority of the target audience.

Anyways, here is one last picture from the toy museum. It is the saddest panda ever!

Today, I met up with some friends to watch Dragonboat races in the Singapore River. Dragonboats are traditional Chinese boats that are very long and skinny and have decorative dragon heads and tails. They used to be used mostly for folk or religious rituals, but today Dragonboat racing has evolved as a serious sport. This weekend's event was huge! Races ran all day Saturday and Sunday, from about 9 AM to 5 PM. There were all sorts of teams - high school/college, serious adult teams, company teams, and expat teams from various countries. One of the cool parts about Dragonboating is that, instead of caller (such as in crew) to keep time and tell the paddlers when to stroke, there is a drummer who beats out time. The drums are huge and the drummers are normally teeny tiny girls, so it's pretty funny to watch. We had fun hanging out on the riverside and watching the various races go by.

Also, if you read my last blog post, I talked about the various government campaigns here in Singapore, and specifically the most recent kindness campaign. In the train station on the way home, we ran into a relic of the previous kindness campaign: Singha the Friendly Lion. He reminds you to let train passengers out first before you board.

In other news:

Research success! I'll probably post some pictures and an explanation sometime this week when I'm bored at work.

In order to fully complete my transformation into a cranky old lady, I've taken up knitting. It's really fun, and has the ability to completely mesmerize me for multiple hours at a time.

I finally finished Infinite Jest! Maybe I'll write about it here, if I can ever get my head around it.

NYT Article about Singapore

2009-11-16T11:07:00.000+08:00

Here's an article about Singapore from Sunday's edition of the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/asia/16iht-spore.html?hpw

It discusses Singapore's many 'campaigns', the most recent of which is the Singapore Kindness Movement. I was especially amused by this quote near the end of the article:

"...here in Singapore the law is very strong. They tell people to be kind, they must be kind. Cannot be rude.”

This quote embodies what I think is a quite typical Singaporean attitude - when the government tells you to do something, there's not really any point in resisting, because they'll just fine for it until you give in eventually.

Chinese Class

2009-11-09T11:01:00.001+08:00

The books we use in my Chinese class are pretty hilarious sometimes. Lately, the books have instructed me with such useful phrases as:

"Excuse me, do you know how many children I have?"
"I would like to introduce you to my lover."
"Here are two Americans, one of them is my friend, the other is not my friend."
"I like capable people."
"We all know that he has lots of money."
"Your girlfriends are certainly numerous."

The book also contains sample conversations that depict everyday occurrences, such as commissioning paintings, debating the relative merits of watches vs. clocks, and buying tape recorders. One entire conversation is devoted to discussing a shady figure named Mr. Zhang, who is rumored to have a very attractive girlfriend. Really, quite a lot of emphasis is put on the supposed girlfriend's high level of attractiveness. In a surprise twist at the end of the conversation, the reticent Mr. Zhang reveals that he doesn't even have a girlfriend and that his more talkative friend Mr. Li has been spreading these rumors to their mutual friends. Now that's what I call drama.

We recently learned country and city names. According to the book, the names for most Asian countries have "historical or literary meaning". Some of these I was familiar with, such as the "Land of the Rising Sun" for Japan. However, I was unaware that North Korea is historically referred to as the "Land of Morning Freshness". The book then goes on to discuss the names of Western countries, which are apparently chosen to represent a pleasant or flattering quality of the country in question. Here are a few:

USA: The Beautiful Country
England: The Brave Country
Germany: The Virtuous Country

However, I am learning some useful Chinese, and these phrases are great for amusing my Chinese speaking friends and colleagues. Actually, this book is not the worst language book I've ever had. That prize goes to one of the Danish books I had early on in the Rotary sponsored language courses that all the exchange students attended. This book was originally meant for Middle Eastern adults who had immigrated to Denmark. Our favorite phrase from this book was "What is your caseworker's name?", and we proceeded to repeat this phrase ad nauseam until it drove our language teachers crazy. Last summer, I visited one of my old friends who was also an exchange student and in the same language class - she had forgotten most of the Danish she had learned, but this phrase was still very clear in her mind!

Halloween, Singapore Style

2009-11-01T21:18:00.001+08:00

Happy Halloween, everyone! Last night I headed out with some friends to celebrate Halloween at Clarke Quay, a popular party spot that is right on the banks of the Singapore River. The area is full of clubs, bars, and restaurants, but on Halloween the whole area was pretty much packed with people. I decided on a very Singaporean costume: the durian, king of fruits:

I think that only one person was able to guess my costume over the course of the night, but most people were pretty amused once I explained it to them. Even if they didn't realize what my costume was, there were still plenty of people who wanted to take pictures with me. Seriously, my friends and I couldn't walk 10 feet without someone stopping and asking to take a picture with us. I think that part of this was that most Singaporeans don't get very dressed up for Halloween - a lot of people were there just as spectators. Also, Asians just seem to really like taking pictures. (Especially pictures with blond people. Anytime I go anywhere touristy in Singapore, I end up having to take pictures with a bunch of random people. It reminds me of how, as a kid at Disneyland, there were tons of Asian people who wanted to take pictures of my brother and me.) There were a couple people with good costumes, my favorite being a girl dressed up as a Rubiks Cube. At one point in the night, one of my Singaporean friend and I somehow wandered into a party for a bunch of Singaporean TV/radio personalities and local celebrities. I didn't realize this until later, when my friend told me so, and then I understood why she had been so excited (I was excited because there was free food and drinks).

Today, I went to an exhibit on the Philippines at the Asian Civilizations Museum. The Philippines is somewhat different from the rest of Southeast Asia because of the strong Spanish influences, especially in terms of religion - 80% of the population is Roman Catholic. The exhibit traced the history of the Philippines from its precolonial roots, through the eras of Spanish and American rule, up to the People's Power movement in the 1980s. What I thought was most interesting was seeing how the Spanish priests mixed indigenous religions with Catholicism to make Christianity more palatable to the natives. The exhibit had an extensive display of religious icons, most of which were made by Chinese artisans. This added another cultural influence into the mixture: the icons showed a mix of Christian and indigenous religious symbols, rendered in a Chinese style. Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed. However, I did stumble onto a display of Hindu "small gods" on my way out:

Apparently, the Hindu gods most people are familiar with, such as Shiva, Ganesha, Kali, etc, are known as the "large gods". These are the gods that have big statues in the temples and lots of legends about them. However, there are also all sorts of minor gods called the "small gods" that are in charge of daily life kind of stuff. People would normally have these kinds of statues in their homes and would set up small alters on which to place offerings.

Speaking of Hindu temples, last night, before heading out for Halloween, my friends and I went to a really cool restaurant called Annalakshmi. The restaurant is run by a Hindu temple called the Temple of Fine Arts. The Temple of Fine Arts puts on all sorts of music and dance performances, as well as running this restaurant. The catch is that for all of their performances, as well as the meals at the restaurant, there are no set prices, you just pay what you think it was worth. The food was really good and all the people working at the restaurant are volunteers who genuinely want to be there. An interesting concept, and a really nice place overall.

Now I am off to make a spectacularly delicious sandwich. If I had to pick one food item from home that I miss the most, it would be delicious sandwiches. The lunchmeat situation here is quite dire - the Singaporean grocery stores only have various kinds of weird looking meat called things like "chicken ham" and "beef ham". The cheese situation is just as bad: most stores only sell the rubbery pre-sliced "processed American cheese food" stuff. So, today, I went to Carrefour (French Walmart, but much classier because it's French) and bought some delicious roasted turkey and gouda cheese. Mmm I am so excited for this!

Update: That sandwich was AWESOME!

Tourist Fun! And, work.

2009-10-28T21:18:00.000+08:00

On Monday night, my friend Holly was briefly in town, so we decided to do some tourist things that I haven't gotten a chance to do yet. Holly also has a Fulbright fellowship, to teach English in Macau. Macau has a pretty strong Portuguese influence, since it was a Portuguese possession until 1999. It's also know as the "Las Vegas of China", so all in all sounds like a pretty interesting place.

Our first stop was the Merlion Fountain at the Esplanade. The Esplanade is a new concert hall that is right down on the bay. The Esplanade is of course modeled after Singapore's favorite fruit, the durian:

The merlion is, just like it sounds, an animal with the head of a lion and the body/tail of a fish. There are actually many merlion statues around Singapore, since it is the official symbol of the Singapore Tourism Board. Apparently, the fish part represents Singapore's ancient name of Temasek, meaning "sea town" in Javanese, from back when Singapore was just a tiny fishing village. The lion head represents new Singapore, as the Malaysia name, Singapura, means "Lion City". We went to see the original statue:

According to wikipedia, although the statue is made of concrete, the skin is made from porcelain plates and the eyes are made from small red teacups. To our great disappointment, when we arrived at the statue, all we could see was scaffolding set up around it - they were in the process of restoring it and we couldn't see anything! Luckily, there was a smaller replica statue just next to it, so we at least got to look at that one. From reading wikipedia just now, it turns out the that Merlion was struck by lightening in February of this year. Maybe that was what the construction was all about? Eight months seems like a long time for repairs though...

After that, we headed to the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel. The Singapore Sling was invented there in sometime before 1910, and a lot of people still go there to order an original Singapore Sling. The Raffles Hotel is super classy and gives you the feeling that you are still back in the British Colonial era. Here is the front of the hotel:

The inside is full of beautiful little tropical courtyards and patios and really makes me wish that I was some turn of the century British expat, lounging around in a hammock drinking a Singapore Sling while waiting for my dashing British explorer husband to come back from a tiger hunting expedition.

Here we are with our drinks:

And here is the informational handout they had about the drink:


	SINGAPORE SLING
	The Singapore Sling was created at Raffles Hotel at the turn-of-the-century by Hainanese-Chinese bartender, Mr. Ngiam Tong Boon.
	In the Hotel's museum, visitors may view the safe in which Mr. Ngiam locked away his precious recipe books, as well as the Sling recipe hastily jotted on a bar-chit in 1936 by a visitor to the Hotel who asked the waiter for it.
	Originally, the Singapore Sling was meant as a woman's drink, hence the attractive pink colour. Today, it is very definately a drink enjoyed by all, without which any visit to Raffles Hotel is incomplete.
	Recipe 30ml Gin 15 ml Cherry Brandy 120 ml Pineapple Juice 15 ml Lime Juice 7.5 ml Cointreau 7.5 ml Dom Benedictine 10 ml Grenadine A Dash of Angostura Bitters Garnish with a slice of Pineapple and Cherry

Also, the Long Bar is one of those bars that gives you peanuts and lets you throw the shells on the floor. I love bars that do that.

Another exciting thing that happened on Monday was that I finally met the professor I am working for, Dr. Tim White. He is an Australian who was working here for some time and then moved back to Australia this summer, right before I arrived. This is actually OK since I mostly work with the grad students anyways, but it was good to finally meet him. He seemed happy with the progress that I have made, and had a couple good suggestions for solving the problems that we are still having. That said, I really hope those suggestions work because I'm getting really frustrated with a very simple problem that I am having. Basically, I'm making this iron oxide compound, but to make it I need to use a chemical called oleic acid (which is exactly how the name makes it sound - really oily). However, once I've done the reaction, I need to wash the oleic acid away so that I can have a clean product. As it turns out, this is really hard to do. So, I've spent the last month just making samples of this stuff and trying different washing techniques and solvents to try to get the sample absolutely clean, but none of them have been entirely successful yet. I've got one new method that I'm trying this week, and I'm pretty optimistic about this one. The frustration is actually good, it's been motivating me to work really hard so that I can finally get this done and move on to something more exciting.

Now I am off to work on completing my Halloween costume. I'll put pictures up when I'm finished, but I'm pretty confident that it's going to be awesome!

Malaysia!

2009-10-21T22:48:00.001+08:00

This weekend, I headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with some friends. I felt justified taking Monday off because it was technically a public holiday, Deepavali, the Hindu festival of lights. So, Saturday morning we caught the bus and headed off to KL.

The bus ride is quoted as taking 5 hours, but it took more like 6.5. The border crossings add significant time - one at the Singapore border to leave Singapore, then the bus drives over a short bridge and you have to repeat the same process to enter Malaysia. But, the ride was quite scenic and also included a lot of sleeping. For most of the drive up into Malaysia, the highway was surrounded by neat, straight rows of pineapple plantations:

The first stop after dropping our stuff off at the hostel were the Batu Caves, which are about 10 km north of KL. We took the public bus, which is always an adventure. I love taking public buses in new countries - the routes they take are typically less direct than trains or taxis, so you see a lot more of the neighborhoods, as well as all different types of people. Similar to the buses in Nicaragua, these buses had "bus wranglers" who would call out the bus destinations at the station and then sell the tickets once the bus had started on its route. This is actually a very workable solution for countries without fancy buses with automatic ticket machines, and the bus wranglers tend to be really helpful in figuring out which bus to take and where to get off. Anyways, the Batu Caves are a Hindu religious site that contain shrines and temples. Here is the main cave:

The statue here is 140 ft tall, and is of Lord Murugan, a Hindu deity especially popular with the Tamil population of Southern India (a lot of the Indians here and in Malaysia are Tamils). This is the tallest statue of Lord Murugan in the world! To get to the main cave, you have to climb up 272 steps:

The main hazard here is not the steps themselves by the obnoxious monkeys - they were everywhere! They were very used to people and very brave; visitors are advised to hold onto their bags tightly or the monkeys will run up and steal them, in the hopes that they contain food. Inside the caves, statues and shrines were nestled into every nook and cranny. They were hard to make out in the dark, but a lot of them were really weird and made me wish I knew what the legends behind them were. There were also two more temples inside the caves:

That night, we did some shopping at Petaling Street, which is actually a market spread over several streets in Chinatown. The stalls were full of convincing and not-so-convincing knockoffs of popular brands. Our favorite store was a combination Christmas/Chinese New Year store. Here is my friend Nathalie with the Christmas display:

I have to say, eating Chinese food in Malaysia to the sound of Christmas carols was a bit surreal.

The next day, we woke up bright and early to obtain tickets to visit the Petronas Twin Towers. At 1483 feet, the Petronas Towers were the tallest building in the world from 1998 until 2004, when they were beaten by Dubai. However, they are still the world's tallest twin tower building. The skybridge, at 558 feet, is open for visitors and free if you arrive early enough to get a ticket for the day. We queued for about an hour (I really enjoy using queue as a verb. It sounds so much better than "stand in line".) and got our tickets for later in the day. We then headed outside to take some pictures with the towers. Here they are:

Because of the extreme height of the towers, it was quite difficult to take pictures with a person in the foreground and the towers in the background. As a result of this, people were putting themselves in all kinds of funny positions on the ground in order to get the right angle. I noticed one guy off to the side quietly taking pictures of all the people in these funny poses. He noticed me and, after making a shushing motion, came over to show them to me. They were really funny! He said he didn't care about the towers, he just liked taking pictures of the people; I also thought the pictures of the people were way more interesting. After some lunch, we returned to the towers at our scheduled time. First, we watched a really hokey 3D movie about Petronas, the national petroleum company of Malaysia. This movie looked like it was made in the early 80s - odd considering that the towers weren't built until 1998. It was pretty funny though. Then, we took the elevator up to the skybridge. Look at all the floors!

The elevator was really speedy, it ascended at 5 or 6 m/s. Here I am on the skybridge:

Since it was the weekend of Deepavali, malls and stores had festive Deepavali displays set up. These displays consisted mostly of rice paintings called kolam. Kolam are a sort of artistic prayer - they invite the goddess Lakshmi into the house or building to bless the inhabitants. Here is my favorite one that I saw:

The next day, we again woke up early to catch the bus to Malacca Town, another Malaysian city that is on the way back to Singapore from KL. Malacca was originally a Portuguese colony, and was settled later by the Dutch and the British. There are a lot of historical buildings and influences left from these different colonising groups, and Malacca was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 (this was actually quite unfortunate, since it meant that the place was crawling with tourists). We took the local bus to the Dutch square, which contained a Dutch church, the Stadthuys (city hall), and, of course, a windmill.

After poking our head into the Dutch church, we headed to Bukit St. Paul, or St. Paul's Hill. On top of the hill were the ruins of a church that was originally built by the Portuguese, and was later used as a fortress and lighthouse by the British. The church contained one of my favorite things to look at when I'm travelling - old gravestones! (Seriously, I don't know where this interest came from. I blame my parents for taking us to the old cemeteries in Boston while there on a trip; my brother and I proceeded to laugh at the names of the dead people (our favorite was Dorcus) and had a grand old time, and from there my obsession was born.)

We then climbed down the other side of the hill to visit the remains of the A Famosa fortress, built by the Portuguese in the early 1500s. Originally, the fortress formed a 3 meter thick wall around the entire settlement, but here is all that is left of it now:

Finally, we visited the Istana, or the royal palace, of the Sultan of Malacca. Here is a picture of his grand meeting hall:

I love museums with really hokey dioramas like these. Another exhibit I really liked is this one, which depicts some legend of an epic duel. It shows the earliest known example of Matrix-style fighting:

Unfortunately, we didn't have much time to look around here, since we had to get back to the bus station to catch our bus to Singapore. In our mad dash through town looking for a taxi, we went by this museum:

I originally thought this was a body modification museum, but after a quick google search by Chris it turns out that it portrays the "differing concepts of beauty as practiced by different cultures". The description is pretty admirable because they write two paragraphs about the museum, and use this quote in literally every sentence.

Overall, Malaysia, and especially KL, was a lot less sketchy than I expected. It felt like being in the more shady parts of Singapore, which are really not very shady overall. At no point did I feel worried about getting my bags snatched on the street or getting robbed by a taxi driver. Another thing that surprised me was the large number of white tourists in KL. I guess it's a more popular European travel destination, but I don't think I know any Americans who have traveled there. Finally, especially in light of the large numbers of tourists, I was surprised at how few Malaysians (outside of the service industries) spoke English. Especially in Malacca, we had to ask around quite a bit to find someone who spoke some English and could help us out with figuring out directions, etc. Overall, I really enjoyed Malaysia, and wished that I had more time to hit some of the smaller towns, including Malacca again...maybe a return trip sometime in the future?

Activities as of Late

2009-10-14T22:21:00.000+08:00

This weekend, I felt the need for an outdoorsy activity, so I headed to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve for a hike. Bukit Timah is the highest point in all of Singapore, at a whopping 537 feet above sea level! In Malaysian, Bukit Timah means "tin-bearing hill" - no one is quite sure where this name comes from since it has never been known to produce any tin. Historically, the hill is important because it was the location of the last stand by the British troops against the invading Japanese army during WWII. Today, it's a nature reserve and one of the only places in Singapore where the original jungle landscape has been preserved.

In going on my hike, I inadvertently made a friend. I must have looked confused as I was getting off the bus to go the nature reserve, because an older woman who was also getting off at that stop asked me if I was heading to the nature reserve. She was also heading off for a hike, so I walked with her to the reserve. There were monkeys everywhere! All over the visitor's center and the road leading up to it. They were very bold and not at all afraid of the humans. My new friend, Nery, was going on the 10 km hike around the hill (rather than the paved path that went straight up and down), and she invited me along. This trail looked considerably less crowded, and that sounded good to me, so we set off. It was quite warm and there were a LOT of steps to get up and down all the small ravines and hills. My hiking companion Nery knew all the step counts and would happily report that "this section is only 175 steps up, we did 200 back there", setting quite a fast pace, while I huffed and puffed along behind. (This was similar but not quite as shaming as the time Rebecca, Claire and I were thoroughly beaten on a hike up a mountain by a nine year old Nicaraguan girl named Bianca.) Nery was a native Singaporean, so it was interesting to talk to her about the changes that she has seen occur in Singapore over her life.

One thing I was very disappointed about was that we didn't see any monkeys in the woods. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of them in their natural habitat, which would have been much more interesting than just seeing them hanging around at the visitor's center hoping for some food from the hikers. Because of this, I have no pictures of the super cute monkeys. Maybe next time. Anyways, here is a nice picture of the jungle:

And one more:

What else have I been up to? Sleeping. A lot. The heat here is really killer - 85 or 90 F each day with really high humidity. It's really the humidity that kills. The heat isn't all that bad; I don't go outside and feel hot, but after about 5 or 10 minutes of walking I realize that I'm drenched in sweat. It's also really hard to get used to the heat, because all the buildings, trains, and buses are super over-airconditioned. Like, 70 F or below. It's ridiculous - I have to bring jackets to school and on the train because it's that cold.

I'm also taking a Mandarin Chinese class. Because the intro Chinese class at NTU is only for undergrads (and being Singaporeans, they are really picky about rules), I'm taking a class through the NUS (National University of Singapore) extension service. It just started last week, but so far I really like it. Mandarin is really hard because of the tones and the character system of writing. There are four possible tones for each syllable, and the same syllable with different tones can have completely different meanings. The characters are pretty hard to remember how to write correctly, so I spend a lot of my downtime at work just copying down characters over and over again, much to the amusement of the Chinese guys that sit next to me in my office. Finally, it's also pretty difficult to pronounce since there are lots of sounds not found in English. And I thought Danish pronunciation was hard! (I joke to my Danish family that I have finally found a language that is harder to pronounce than Danish. And of course I picked that one to learn.) But, it's good for the language part of my brain to get a work out again. Also, I have the benefit of getting ridiculously excited whenever I see a character or two that I recognize when I'm out and about in Singapore.

Today, I have finally perfected my omelet making skills by making the most beautiful spinach and mushroom omelet. Seriously, no holes, no toppings falling out, and cooked to prefection. I was so proud I almost took a picture.

I think that's everything I have been doing lately.

Some good books

2009-10-10T18:44:00.001+08:00

Lately, I've been reading a lot both at work and at home. All of the books I've read recently have been really quality, so I thought I would share me thoughts on them here. I'm really happy to have the time to read copiously again; I hated not having the time to do so while at Mudd. I also have a lot of downtime at the lab while I wait for mixtures to stir, solutions to centrifuge and ovens to heat up, so I get to read a lot and call it "work".

The first book I want to mention is Origins, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. This book was recommended to me by Chris, who is secretly trying to turn me into a space nerd (OK, maybe not so secretly). Anyways, deGrasse Tyson is a well-known astrophysicist, and an accomplished writer. His writing, while very informative, is also entertaining and accessible. And, the guy is just cool. Look at him:

What a hip dude. Origins deals with the origins of our universe and how it has evolved over time to become what it is today. I have to admit that I've always been slightly put off by all things space, mostly because I don't understand the jargon and because it all seems so large and impossible to understand that I don't even want to try. But deGrasse Tyson is really incredible in that he explains concepts in clear, plain language, and in ways that make space seem super exciting! One aspect of the book that I particularly enjoyed was that deGrasse Tyson always explained how scientists had obtained the data that they were using to back up their theories. I also liked that the history of astrophysics was traced from ancient times until today, which made it easier to understand where the current theories and research came from. For me, the coolest section of the book was about how different elements are made. Individual elements are generated by fusion in the cores of stars, with stars of more energy generating heavier elements. The heaviest element that can be made in current stars is iron; all the heavier elements come from super-massive stars that lived right after the Big Bang. So, for anyone who wants to learn more about astrophysics, but is intimidated or worried that it will be boring, I strongly recommend this book!

The next interesting book I read lately is called Life on Air, by David Attenborough. You probably know Attenborough as the narrator of the (completely awesome) nature documentary series Planet Earth. (If you've never heard of Planet Earth, please come out of the cave that you have been living in. Seriously, even my grandmother has seen it. She also reads my blog sometimes. Hi, Grandmother!) In his memoirs, Attenborough tells of his work with the BBC starting in the 1950s, when the BBC was still in it's infancy. Attenborough stumbled into TV by accident, and had originally studied natural sciences and geology. It was this background that led him to start producing nature documentaries for the BBC, initially while on animal collection expeditions with the London Zoo. Since these early programs were wildly successful with the British public, they were continued and expanded throughout the years. Although hearing about the evolution of the BBC is interesting, the parts of the book that really shine are Attenborough's accounts of the many overseas expeditions he went on. Attenborough and his team were always having zany adventures and getting themselves into scrapes. Many of the destinations are chosen solely for their remoteness and lack of any Western influence, or because of a specific and rare wildlife species that had never before been captured on film. Also, the book had lots of great pictures! Like this one:

Awwww! Another part of the book that I really enjoyed was when Attenborough talked about his experiences with the cargo cults of South Asia. You may have read about these before: I've seen them mentioned in both Collapse, by Jared Diamond, and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Fenyman!, by Richard Fenyman (also both excellant books). Bascially, the cargo cults were established by native island cultures in the Pacific after the arrival of Westerners. The natives saw the Westerners receiving shipments of cargo from ships and airplanes, and since their cultures were not equipped to produce any of these advanced products, they concluded that the cargo must come from the gods. The cargo cults were started to curry favor with the gods so that the natives would also receive these kinds of shipments. They were often very intricate in their imitations of the methods Westerners used to receive the goods, doing things such as contstructing fake airplane runways and radio systems of our locally available materials. Overall, I found the book very humerous and well-written, and I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at nature programming that the book provided.

Right now, I've just started reading Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. This book is quite an undertaking, at about 1000 pages plus 100 pages more of footnotes. I haven't read a lot by DFW before beginning this book, but what I have read I've been incredibly impressed with. This summer, I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of short stories and essays, which I found hilarious. The other piece I have read by him is actually a graduation speech that he gave several years ago. It's now published in a very small book called (I think) This is Water. This speech absolutely knocked me off my feet. If you haven't read it, do so! I think it should be required reading for everyone, as it presents a very important message about the importance of being /aware/ in everyday life.

I just bought one more book last weekend. I don't normally buy books, because I read them too quickly. But, this one is another 1000 pager, so I figured the investment was justified. The book is question is 2666, by Roberto Bolano (that's actually the n-with-a-tilde-over-it but I can't figure out how to make that on blogspot). Bolano is one of my new favorite authors. This summer I read The Savage Dectectives, which is about a group of poets in Mexico City in the 1970s who embark on a search for the poet famed for founding their esoteric poetical subgenre. Of course, it's the journey that is the story, not the end result. All in all, this book was amazing - sort of if Jack Kerouac and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a baby. 2666 takes place on the Texas/Mexico border and is set in more modern times. It was just released in English last year, so I'm pretty excited for it. Also, having this one waiting will keep me more on track with Infinite Jest.

What about you guys out there? Any good books as of late?

Indonesia!

2009-10-06T23:00:00.000+08:00

I'll get to the title subject in a little bit, but first I'll start with my Friday night.

On Friday night, I headed to Lau Pa Sat, a market and open-air eating area that is famous for it's satay vendors that open up each night. In case you don't know, satay consists of thin strips of meat grilled on skewers, which are eaten with a really tasty spicy peanut sauce. If you're in Singapore, Lau Pa Sat is the place to eat satay, and when my friends heard that I had not gone yet, we decided a trip was necessary. The architecture of this market is really cool. Although the structure has been moved several times, it's pretty much looks the same as it did in 1894 when it was built. Here's a picture (not mine):

According to the website where I found this picture, Lau Pa Sat is "largest Victorian filagree cast-iron structure in Southeast Asia". The satay vendors actually set up shop on a street behind the main structure. This is a busy city street during the day but is closed off at 7 or so each night so that the vendors can set up their carts and tables and start cooking delicious satay!

Late Saturday night, I received a fratntic text message from my friend Natasha. She had had a school break the following week, and she was lamenting that she had done nothing exciting in her week off and now her break was coming to an end. Natasha wanted to do something exciting with her last day of freedom, so she proposed a trip to Batam on Sunday. I was game, so we agreed to meet up the next morning to catch the ferry.

Batam is one of two Indonesian islands that are very close to Singapore (the other is Bintan). Batam is about 20 km south of Singapore; about a 45 minute ferry ride. It's not very touristy and lots of the island are still pretty undeveloped. However, we figured it sounded good enough for a day trip.

On our way there, we saw huge numbers of cargo ships floating out at sea. These ships are cargo ships without cargo, a very visible symbol of the economic recession. There are huge fleets anchored here and off the coat of Malaysia, just biding their time until shipping picks up again. I only know this because there was a very interesting article about it in the New York Times (I think it was the Times) about it a couple weeks ago.
The ferry docked at a port called Sekupang. Here's a picture as the ferry is pulling in:

I paid $10 US for a visa (this was so silly, I had to convert my Singapore dollars to US dollars, so that I could bring them to Indonesia with me to pay this fee), which they printed out on a really cool machine and stuck in my passport. We grabbed a taxi and headed to a place called "Waterfront", where we were hopeful we could find a beach to hang out on. (Funny story, this same taxi driver ended up being our taxi driver all day, he gave us his phone number and told us to call him anytime we wanted to go anywhere. We figured we were being scammed, but when we asked around it turned out he was actually giving us better rates than other taxis would have. Guess we got lucky there.) The Waterfront was in fact a beach park, albeit a very crowded one.

I'm pretty sure I was the only white person in at least a 10 mile radius, so we got some stares. The park was pretty old and rundown, but there was a large park in which some kind of event was taking place involving a stage and a speaker. Maybe a concert? A company picnic? A church service? We had no idea. We also found a very strange statue. Here is my friend Natasha with said statue:

After walking around here awhile and baking in the absurdly strong tropical sun, we called our friendly taxi guy and drove to Nagoya, which is pretty much the commerce center of the island.

After eating some lunch of cooked chicken and nasi (rice flavored with coconut milk), we ended up just walking around Nagoya looking at the shops and general scenery. This lunch was chosen over a huge variety of American fast food options, including KFC, A&W, Pizza Hut and the ubiquitous McDonald's. The McDonald's I expected, but I was pretty surprised that A&W had made it all the way to this podunk Indonesia island! Everywhere we walked people kept yelling at us. Initially, I ignored them, assuming they were just yelling to be annoying. However, once I listened, it turned out they were yelling for two reasons. One, they kept asking if we wanted a taxi, because they didn't expect us to be voluntarily walking. Two, they really wanted us to take pictures of them! Everywhere we went, people would yell and pose and wave and then thank us profusely once we took their picture.Here is one such group:

It was really interesting that the men on the street, for the most part, were quite polite and would either ask us about a taxi, or yell "Welcome to Indonesia!". Not normally what gets yelled at me on streets of other countries I've travelled to. The houses, while rundown, were really interesting looking. They were all painted in bright (albeit faded) colors - reds, pinks, greens, yellows, and blues. A lot of them had really pretty iron grillwork on the windows and balconies.

At the end of the day, we headed back to the ferry terminal to catch the last boat back to Singapore. We tried to buy some duty-free alcohol on the way back (it's super expensive here) but apparently duty-free doesn't apply to day-trippers. All in all, a pretty good day for only making the plans a couple hours beforehand.

Just now, I ate some grass jelly from one of my flatmates Susan. Grass jelly looks like dark brown/black Jello and according to Susan tastes either "like nothing at all, or like herbs". To eat it, you put some honey and maybe a little vinegar on it and then mix it up and eat it. Yep, pretty much just tastes like honey on Jello.

Pretty Science Pictures

2009-10-02T14:50:00.000+08:00

I did some more TEM work with my samples yesterday to see how I had been progressing with my lab work. This week I got an "OK, you are making progress" from my labmates who were helping me with the microscope, rather than the "wow, you managed to mess up every sample you made" that I got last week (well, they said it more tactfully than this). So, I'm pretty happy with that. I always really like TEM pictures, even if the samples themselves aren't that great, so I thought I would post a couple here.

The first sample I've been working on making are magnetic iron oxide nanocrystals. Iron oxide forms several phases and crystal arrangements, but it's important that I get 100% of the phase that I am looking for, Fe3O4. On top of that, the crystals all need to be basically the same size. That size is very small: about 10 nm across. Finally, they also need to be monodisperse, which means that they're not all stuck together in one big clump but are each existing as their own separate little crystal. Here's a picture of one of my samples from last week:

Terrible! All different crystal sizes and they're all stuck together in that big dark clump in the middle. Now, here is a much better one from this week:

So much nicer! The particles are mostly homogeneous and really nicely spread out at the bottom. And they're tiny (in the 5 to 10 nm range)! Some of them are still stuck together but I should be able to fix that next week. Still a problem though: my sample isn't a pure phase yet. I want 100% Fe3O4 but instead I'm getting a mixture of Fe3O4 and FeOOH. This is quite frustrating, because we can't really figure out how to get rid of the impurities yet.

The really neat thing about high resolution TEM is that you can actually zoom in far enough to see the crystal planes in the particles. In this closeup, each of the little crosshatch lines you can see is a crystal plane.

Neat! This is a good way to quickly check if you sample is crystalline or not. Another TEM capability is that is useful for this is selected area electron diffraction (SAED), which produces a pattern of either dots or rings that tell you about the degree of crystallinity of the sample as well as it's crystal structure.

The other main part of my project involves coating silica nanospheres with titania. This process is made much more difficult by the fact that the titanium chemical that I use in the synthesis is air and water sensitive. If I expose my reaction to air or water, titania condenses out of the solution very quickly. Although I want to end up with titania in the end, I only want it to coat the silica spheres, and not end up all over the place in my sample. Well, this is what happened to my sample last week:

See all the random stuff around the spheres? That's rogue titania, which I do not want. You can see that the spheres are also coated in titania - they look darker in the center because of the silica in the middle, and you can kind of see a ring around the edge which is the coating layer. This can been seen a lot better in one of my pictures from this week:

Here, the edges are a little rough, but you can see the coating layer on the edges pretty well. And much less random titania particles floating around in there.

Overall, nice to finally make some progress and feel like I'm starting to get the hang of things around here.

One month!

2009-09-30T23:04:00.000+08:00

I realized yesterday that it had been exactly one month since I had set foot in Singapore. I decided to write a blog entry to commemorate this. I was however thwarted by some internet difficulties so that entry was pushed back until today. So, one month and one day. It certainly feels like it has gone by very quickly, which I think is a good thing. I like my research a lot and it feels like I'm making some progress (I have TEM time again tomorrow, so I'm being optimistic here). I'm still enjoying exploring the city and meeting people here. I start my Chinese class next Monday, so hopefully these will help me get past just making weird sounds at my computer when I'm using the CDs I have. And I should be hearing back soon about the project that I'm hoping to get started with Lien AID (the NGO that does water sanitation projects). So, all in all, pretty happy with the way things are going.

Not that there aren't things that I don't like about Singapore. I can decisively say that I would not want to live here past my 9 months that I have planned. While some areas of Singapore have a "personality" the majority of it seems to be quite planned and ends up feeling sterile. I really dislike the mall culture that they have here in which the mall is basically the center of each town or area, contains everything from the bank to the grocery store, and is where everyone goes to hang out in their free time, but then again I've always sort of disliked malls. The crowds definitely still get to me, although not as much as they did at first. One interesting ideological clash that I noticed the other weekend was that people here don't seem to be very independent and won't go out and do things on their own. Last Saturday, as astute readers will remember, I headed out by myself for some museum visiting and a trip to Little India. When I later told my Singaporean friends about this and that I had gone and done it by myself, they seemed amazed. They couldn't understand why I would want to just go and do something by myself. I realize that most people in the US also don't understand this, but the ideological clash seemed a bit more extreme here - my desire to just hang out with myself was unfathomable to them.

Anyways, I finally remembered to take my camera to school, so here are some pictures! First, the materials science building where I work:

And the nice view you get when you turn around:

This makes me laugh every morning as I walk down the stairs to my desk:

It's written on the airducts that run down the side of the building. It is, however, erroneous, because I work on the bottom floor and I totally fall into the RAD category.

Also, here's a picture of the condo that I live in, taken from my window.

There are always a sorts of reckless children running around the pool and I have to exercise restraint no to yell at them to WALK PLEASE in my best lifeguard voice. And finally, here is my room:

One more con about Singapore: things are always made WAY more complicated than they need to be. Case in point: my internet (this is connected to the story of my work pass, which is in a similar vein). It's late and I'm tired, so I'll save that story for another post.

Second update this week - go me!

2009-09-27T22:33:00.001+08:00

Thursday at work I finally got a time slot to use the TEM (transmission electron microscope), so it was time to look at all the samples I had made and see how they were going. None of them were, in fact, just as I wanted. Some were too big (here, too big means 300 nanometers across instead of the 100 I was going for), the wrong shape (this indicates a different crystal structure, meaning that I didn't get the phase I wanted), and some contained entirely the wrong compound (due to having to work with a very air sensitive chemical that partially oxidizes everytime I open the bottle for more than 1 second). But, there was still a lot to learn from my failures. So, this week I'll be making the same samples over again, but this time with more of an idea what not to do. I guess that counts as progress. Friday I had a stellar day in which I technically was running a reaction all day for 8 hours, but this reaction involved about 15 minutes of set-up time and 5 minutes to remove it from the oven at the end of the day, which was great because it left me with tons of free time and I got to still feel like I was working. I went to a program at the International Student Center about Hari Raya Aidilfitri, which is the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan; it actually occurred last weekend. They told us a little about the history of the holiday and made us sing a song in Malaysian about it and then taught us how to weave these little pouches that are used to cook rice in to make these compressed rice blobs that are a traditional food Hari Raya food. Thanks to wikipedia, I now know that these are called ketupat and are traditionally made of banana leaves. Here are some unopened ones.

However, everyone soon gave up the weaving to enjoy the large amounts of free food (including the rice blobs).

On Saturday, I first visited the Peranakan Museum. Peranakan is the name for the descendents of Chinese immigrants that settled in Malaysia and Singapore many hundreds of years ago, and whose historical culture is a mix of Chinese and Malay traditions. The museum was built in a traditional Peranakan house from the early 20th century:

The museum mostly consisted of artifacts that represented the Peranakan lifestyle during the 19th and 20th centuries. The museum highlighted various aspects of the Peranakan culture such as their wedding rituals, mourning rituals, religious beliefs, food, etc. The wedding rituals were very elaborate and traditional weddings lasted for 12 days. Throughout these 12 days there are many ritual exchanges of gifts between the bride's family and the bridegroom's family, meant to represent the ways in which the bridge and groom will support or provide for each other. For example, the groom's family gives the bride some lengths of cloth to symbolize that the groom will provide for her, and the bride gives the groom a new set of clothes that she has made to show that she is talented in sewing. The jewelry worn for traditional Peranakan weddings is crazy! Here is a picture of one typical set:

The hat looking thing on the top is actually just a bunch of hairpins that the bride would wear all over her head. I think it must have been heavy! The special exhibit in the museum was about traditional Peranakan jewelry - they have very distinct styles and types. The most popular is a traditional brooch, sometimes worn in sets of three. There were a lot of interesting examples showing the evolution of the style through the ages. Another interesting thing was that silver jewerly was only used for mourning and was not worn at other times. They didn't allow pictures. I'm always sad when museums don't allow me to take pictures. Here are some household deities that would be kept in a house on the family alter to generally protect the family and give them good luck. Sometimes they were for a specific purpose, like the god of memory that was often kept by students.

After the museum, I headed to Little India to check out the Deepavali market. Deepavali is the Hindu festival of light. I think the legend behind it involves some hero/god who saved the world from an evil dark king. I'll get back to you on that one. Anyways, all of Little India was really pretty and lit up and they had a big bazaar selling things like lights, incense, flower garlands, clothes, shoes, and cookies. It was pretty interesting to wander around in, but it was super crowded, so I went and ate some delicious Indian food somewhere less crowded.

Today, I woke up bright and early to go hiking with my friend Brian. We went to a place called Mac Richie Reservoir, which is about in the middle of Singapore. This is some of the only undisturbed/forested land on the whole island. Part of the trail that we hiked was actually a suspension bridge way up in the treetops. Here I am on the bridge:

It was a really nice view and it was actually not too hot this morning, so it was a very enjoyable hike. At the end, we saw monkeys! We were almost all the way back, and I heard some weird noises in the forest and saw a man standing around and looking like he was watching something, so I asked him and he pointed them out to us. From my research that I did just now, I think they were Long-Tailed Macaques. Here they are:

I realize it's pretty hard to see, but if you look about in the middle of the picture, you can probably find it's tail. Anyways, they monkeyed around (hehe) in the treetops for awhile and then one started to shimmy down the tree on the right side of the picture. It stopped on a branch a few feet above the ground and then we could see that it had a baby on it's back! It was super cute! I got really excited and didn't manage to get a picture of it.

Aaaand, I even have a bonus picture. Here is the condo that I live in. It's quite tall, and yellow.

Various Exciting Things

2009-09-22T21:41:00.001+08:00

OK, so I realized that my lack of updates since I've been in Singapore puts me dangerously close to being on the list of people who start blogs and they're really interesting and then they give up 2 months later and never write anything again. And those people annoy me, so I've resolved not to be one of them. I think my trouble in updating my blog comes in several forms: being really busy with school, being really tired all the time because of this ridiculous tropical climate, and not doing huge amounts of touristy things because of the aforementioned business with school. But,over the past few weeks I've done a lot of fun stuff, so here are some various exciting things that I've done.

I went to the Botanic Gardens in Singapore, which are really famous here and are the first place that people tell you to go when they learn you are a foreigner. Most of the gardens were just very nice and tropical, but they had a few specialty gardens, the most exciting of which were the Orchid Garden and the Ginger Garden. Orchids are really a big deal here and the gardeners at the Botanic Gardens spend a lot of money and time trying to create new hybrids with special qualities. As a result, the orchids are really beautiful but really expensive (so don't touch!). Here is the national orchid of Singapore, the Vanda Miss Joaquim, so named because it was discovered by Miss Agnes Joaquim in her backyard in 1893.

They also had a lot of orchids that were named after famous visitors and politicians to the Orchid Gardens. Some were really random, and were named after people like the President of the Czech Republic in 1996 or something like that. Here is the Nelson Mandela orchid:

Another interesting garden was the Ginger Garden. Apparently, ginger just looks like little sticks in the ground when it's growing (which is why I didn't feel compelled to take pictures). I also learned that many plants are members of the ginger family, such as the banana tree.

Last weekend, I visited the Istana (meaning "palace" in Malay), the traditional home of the president. The Istana is only open on public holidays and Sunday was Hari Raya Puasa, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. The grounds themselves were very pretty (even though they were mostly a golf course) and parts of the actual palace was opened up but no pictures were allowed. Inside it was quite ornate. In one room, there was a display of official state gifts that had been given to Singapore from other countries. Compared to all the other gifts, the ones from the U.S. looked pretty cheap! Here is a picture of a statue of Queen Victoria that was a gift to Singapore:

Here's a sign that appears to be telling us not to pinch the fish. My friend Clayton illustrates.

I talked about all the things that are outlawed and the ridiculous fines that go along with these offenses in one of my earlier entries. In order to make the illegality of these offenses clear, there are lots of warning signs around Singapore. Often, these signs don't contain text, only pictures (when you have four official languages, even short bits of text are cumbersome). However, the pictures are sometimes quite confusing. One example are the signs in the buses meant to illustrate "no spitting". For several weeks after I got here, I thought that the person on the sign was throwing up, and assumed that throwing up on the bus was outlawed. I got really concerned every time I got on the bus that I would all of a sudden become ill and throw up and be slapped with a ridiculous fine, until I figured out that the person was actually spitting instead.

A couple weeks ago, I went to the Asian Civilizations Museum, which is a museum that has exhibits about countries and cultures from all around Asia. The museum had a good exhibit on the history of Singapore, which apparently involved a lot of opium smoking (and paraphernalia like these pipes):

Most of the museum, especially the portion on South Asia, made me feel like a total retard because it was about contries and cultures that I had never even heard of. Very educational. My favorite part of the museum was an exhibit on how the museum's collection came to be. It talked about the adventurers and explorers employed by the museum in 19th and early 20th centuries to journey off on expeditions and live with native cultures and collect specimens. Of course all the explorers were hearty British chaps with pith helmets; I like to imagine them using phrases like "Tally-ho" and "Bob's your uncle". There were a lot of old-timey preseved animals, like these crocodiles (alligators? I can never keep the two straight):

This is the only good picture I got because the guard came and told me I couldn't use flash, and my camera sucks without the flash. What was really interesting was reading about the different explorers' methods for befriending and integrating themselves into the native cultures and the different way that they portrayed these cultures in their writings and reports. In general, I thought this kind of meta-exhibit was a really neat idea because it's not something one normally thinks about when viewing objects in a museum.

The museum was located in downtown Singapore, so here's a bonus picture from the area. The low buildings in this picture used to be used as warehouses and staging areas for goods about to be shipped. They are called "godowns"; the origin of this word is debated. Now, they mostly house trendy restaurants/bars/clubs and this area, Clarke Quay (pronounced "key" if you don't want to sound like a dumb American), is one of the trendy areas popular with tourists.

I think that's about it for now. I'm putting my camera in my backpack in the hope that I will be motivated to take more pictures of my condo, my neighborhood, school, etc. We'll see how that goes.

The Durian Challenge!

2009-09-16T23:00:00.000+08:00

Last week, my American friend Clayton and I decided to undertake "The Durian Challenge!". The challenge here was to eat some durian, referred to in Singapore as "the king of fruits". First, some background on the durian.

Here is what the durian looks like:

It's a tropical fruit that is in season in Singapore from about June to August. When it's in season, people go crazy! They sell it in all the markets and grocery stores, most often already removed from the spiny outer part. I don't understand why, but wherever they are selling it, there is always a guy who stands there and yells out to people about how great his durian is and that they should buy it over all others. This makes sense in the big fruit markets, but I don't understand why they also do it in the grocery stores. Just now I attempted to google 'durian caller' but got no useful results, so I guess the mystery will stay unsolved for now.

Durian is SMELLY. When I first got to Singapore, I would be walking around and suddenly smell this horrible stench and wonder what had died and rotted to produce such a horrible smell. I soon learned that this was the durian I was smelling. The smell is so bad that durians are banned from buses and trains (see: my last post) as well as most hotels.

Since people in Singapore LOVE durians, when they meet someone who is not from Singapore, they will of course ask them if they have tried durian. Clayton and I, tired of hearing this question, decided to finally try it. We bought some durian at the marketplace:

You can see that is has some slimy looking flesh around a really big seed. With all the windows open and the fan on in my apartment, we got ready to try. Here is Clayton looking excited for his first bite.

It was pretty horrible. The taste is similar to the smell but not as strong. The basic taste is like that of a banana or other fruit that has gone bad, but it also has some weird undernotes. The texture is really strange also - slimy and mushy but also sort of fibrous and stringy. We decided that the texture was most like a half-way cooked sweet potato. The taste we are still at a loss for an analogy - it's just that horribly unique. If you want a laugh, check out the section of the wikipedia entry for durian where they include quotes from people trying to describe the taste.

People in Singapore swear that you have to try the durian five times before you will like it. Clayton tried to go for a second round, but didn't even make it through that. So, the five times strategy is probably out. But, now we can at least say that we tried it, and it is definitely the weirdest food I have ever eaten.

Some Background on Singapore

2009-09-14T12:11:00.000+08:00

Before I get to all the exciting entries about myself and what I have been up to, I decided that I should give some background on Singapore. I know that I myself didn't know a whole lot about Singapore before I applied for the Fulbright; for most people Singapore is a place they hear about occasionally in the news as being a business/finance hub somewhere in Asia. Or, maybe they have heard about all the crazy laws here (more on that later!). Anyways, I have encountered a lot of confusion by people in the U.S. when I told them I was moving to Singapore. I have just realized that I have a habit of picking quite unknown countries to live in, I am forever fielding questions about Denmark as well!

First of all, the name Singapore roughly means "lion-city" in Malay. This leads to the presence of lion states and fountains all over the city. Singapore is SMALL - the whole country has an area of about 700 square kms (270 square miles) and this has increased some since the 1960s due to land reclamation projects. This is just slightly smaller than New York City. There are about 4.7 million people living here, giving a population density of 17,000 people per square mile. This is the third highest population density in the world - only Macau and Monaco are higher. Here is a zoomed out map showing Singapore.

Singapore was originally settled by the British for use as an East Asian trading post, was brutally occupied by the Japanese in WWII, and declared independence from Britain in 1963. Directly after declaring independence, Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia but declared itself to be it's own state only two years later in 1965. At that point in time, Singapore was essentially a third world country - there was mass unemployment, housing shortages, a lack of sanitation, and no natural resources to speak of. The main leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew (who acted as Prime Minister from 1965-1990), tackled all these problems with a series of aggressive reforms that transformed Singapore into the first world country that it is today (OK, they actually got downgraded from first world country status recently due to freedom of speech issues, but for all intents and purposes they are definitely a first world country). Since 2004, Lee Kuan Yew's son has been the Prime Minister. The state still has a very strong hand in the running of the country. Especially glaring is the total state control over the media - the "breaking news" each morning is typically the advent of some new state program to help old people, single mothers, children, etc.

Singapore also has a very interesting cultural and ethnic makeup. The country is mainly Chinese (75%) with some Malaysians (14%), Indians (9%), and others (2%). This ethnic diversity also leads to religious diversity - the main religions here are Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism and Hinduism. This is neat because there is always some sort of religious or cultural festival/holiday going on at any given time! Because of all the different groups, Singapore has four official languages - English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil (a southern Indian language). In schools, everyone is required to learn English, as well as one of the three other official languages. In my experience, most people will use Mandarin, or Malay, or Tamil, when speaking to people of their own ethnic group, but of course have to use English when speaking to others. Singapore also has it's own brand of English slang called "Singlish". This is mostly shortenings of words or phrases, like saying "can" as an affirmative instead of "Yes, I can do that". They also use the word "lah" a lot, in a similar manner as Americans use "right" or Canadians use "aye", and tack it on to the ends of statements or questions. In terms of language, I have not had any trouble being understood, but I sometimes have had trouble understanding people because of the Singlish words and cadences they use.

Singapore also has a lot of very strict laws, which sometimes make international headlines. Probably the most well known are the drug laws, which gives a mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking, where drug trafficking is defined as being in possession of any types of drugs in any amount, even without demonstrating a desire to distribute said drugs. More minor offenses often carry lengthy prison terms, or caning sentences (yes, this is literally where they beat you with a cane). There is also a ridiculous number of things that can incur huge fines, such as jaywalking, littering, spitting, not flushing a public toilet after use, walking around naked in your own house, and bringing a durian (a horrible smelling fruit) on buses or trains.

In my own experience here, the national pastimes of Singapore appear to be eating and shopping. Eating is most often done in outdoor "hawker" centers that have tons of stalls with different kinds of food. Prepared food is really cheap here - at the hawker centers you can get a good dinner for maximum $4 US. There are shopping malls everywhere, and they appear to be packed anytime of the day or night.

All in all, Singapore is a really small, really crowded, and really hot and sweaty country. This is made worth it, in part, but the interesting cultural mixes and the diversity they bring to Singapore in terms of languages, religions, and food. I'm really not enjoying having to deal with all the crowds everywhere, but it certainly is interesting.

New Science!

2009-09-07T10:50:00.000+08:00

My Fulbright grant here in Singapore really consists of two projects: a materials science research project at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ad a water sanitation project with a Singapore-based NGO called Lien Institute for the Environment. I'll get to the second project later, but right now I'm at NTU and waiting on some lab equipment, so I thought I would write about the first project.

The main material that I will be working with is titanium dioxide, TiO2, often called titania. Titania has a lot of uses, most often as a white pigment in everything from paint to skim milk and makeup. This widespread use is great, because it means that titania is pretty cheap. The reason I'm investigating titania is because it also functions as a photocatalyst. The means that when UV light strikes titania, it causes changes in the material that create free radicals. These free radicals are super reactive and really want to oxidize any organic materials they come into contact with. Since sunlight contains a small UV component, this reaction is pretty easy to activate. The material can even be reused for subsequent reactions later. Here is a sort of vague schematic showing this process:

Often, these organic materials are pollutants in the water or air (as shown above), or bacteria, either airborne or on surfaces. For this reason, titania is being incorporated into a lot of building materials such as roofs and external paneling (to treat local air pollution), or internal paneling or tiles (in, say, a hospital, to reduce surface bacteria concentrations). Here's a cool picture showing a comparison between ordinary tiles (the super dirty ones) and titania coated tiles (very clean!).

My project uses titania for it's ability to break down organic pollutants in water. This sounds pretty simple: you throw the titania in the water, put it in sunlight, and the titania cleans it all up. But afterwards, how do you separate the titania from the clean water so that you can use it again? This is where my project comes in. I'm going to be synthesizing magnetic titania "core-shell" pebbles. Titania by itself is not magnetic, but what you can do it make an M&M like structure where you have a magnetic material in the core, and the titania around it as the shell. The cool thing about this is that once you've got the water all cleaned up, you simply turn on a magnetic field to separate out the titania for reuse. Easy! The magnetic core is typically iron oxide. So, in order to do this, I first have to make tiny iron oxide spheres, then coat them with titania. Because science is never simple, we have one more problem. The direct contact between the iron oxide and the titania seems to reduce the photocatalytic activity (how well it works to break down the pollutants) of the titania. So, we have to add in a "buffer" layer of silicon dixoide between the iron oxide and the titania. This adds another step to my process: make the iron oxide spheres, coat them with silica, then coat them with titania.

Just making these pebbles is not too hard - it takes time but ultimately it's not all that challenging. Now here's where the fun starts. Materials can be divided into two classes: crystalline and amorphous. Crystalline materials have a very regular, predictable structure in which each atom goes in a certain position. Amorphous ones don't. They're just all jumbled up every which way. Here is a good comparison.Normally the way to check for crystallinity is to use x-ray diffraction, which I've talked about before. But in the case of titania, there is often a pretty significant amorphous content that doesn't show up on the x-ray diffraction spectrum. There are other ways to figure out the amorphous content, but I won't go into them right now because they're pretty complicated of course, I have to do them for this project). But what previous studies have found is that the amorphous content of the titania is possibly related to the photocatalytic activity of the material. So, part of my project will be trying to pin down this correlation. This first requires me to set a standard method for determining the amorphous content of the material (I probably get to use a synchrotron - a huge circular particle accelerator. So cool!). Then, I'll look at the photocatalytic activity and see how that corresponds to the amorphous content and what can be modified in the material synthesis to change the amorphous fraction of the material.

This is probably more than enough work for nine months. Better go get started.

Update: I just tried to go get my materials to start this and they are locked up in this guy Hou Ran's cabinet and Hou Ran isn't going to back until Wednesday and no one has the keys. My postdoc just told me to go sightseeing. Hahaha Singapore is so inefficient like this.

Another Short One

2009-09-02T09:35:00.000+08:00

Hello there,

So I've moved in to my flat and am currently borrowing my flatmate's wireless, so I'll be quick. Longer posts will have to wait for about 1 week until I have my own internet. Flatmates are all really nice, things at school went well even though I had to fill out massive amounts of paperwork, and tomorrow I should be having my first meeting about research. Also, I have an address now! See the side bar. Because you all know how much I love getting mail.

Singapore!

2009-08-29T14:32:00.000+08:00

So, I made it. I'm too jet lagged to write anything coherent, so I will stick to a couple stray observations. It's freakishly clean here. I'm getting stared at quite a bit. Prepared food is really cheap but grocery store food is not. It is ungodly hot here and I nearly thought I was going to die of dehydration on a 20 minute walk this morning. I am very obviously confused and foreign looking, and everyone is very nice to me as a result.

Official Fulbright Disclaimer

2009-08-27T01:24:00.000+08:00

Fulbright says I have to say this:

This is not an official Department of State website or blog, and the views and information presented are my own and do not represent the Fulbright Program of the U.S. Department of State.

So now you know.

US Travels

2009-08-24T14:02:00.000+08:00

I spent the past week-ish traveling around the US. First stop: Salt Lake City to visit two of my favorite people, Chris and Max.

A super exciting part of the visit that we had been planning for awhile was a trip down to Southern Utah. Bright and early on Friday morning, we left Salt Lake and drove for about four hours to the area around Goblin Valley state park. We hiked in a canyon that contained what is called the "Great Gallery", which is a rock panel with lots of incredible petroglyphs that were drawn by various civilizations over the years. The whole hike was really amazing, and it was fascinating seeing all the different form and varieties of rock, and to think about the geological processes that went into shaping what we were seeing. Here are some really cool rocks:
Our lunch spot was especially cool - the rock face curved in over us and created a sheltered sandy beach. It was incredible to stare upward and feel like the rocks were going to come crashing down upon me. Here are some of the petroglyphs that were our reward at the end of the hike:
There was a log book where visitors could write their thoughts and impressions about their journey to see the petroglyphs. It was really interested to read what different people took away from their visit - a lot wondered about the people who had drawn the images, some thought about the passage of time and geology, and one man named Cecil from San Francisco wrote that he thought the image of the dark man with the dog was attractive and wished that he could meet him. It was getting late, so we hiked out of the canyon to go make camp. Here is Chris, surveying the territory that we conquered.
The next morning, we hiked in another canyon. This one was a "slot canyon", with very narrow walls. See how narrow they are!
Around lunchtime, we started the drive back to Salt Lake. When we arrived back at the guys' apartment, we were so exhausted that three hour naps were in order. The rest of that night was spent eating ice cream (made by midgets!) and drinking beer on the porch. On Sunday, we ate some delicious breakfast at a really cool and hip old-timey themed diner. Normally, I strongly dislike old-timey themed diners. Case in point: that stupid 1950s themed diner in Claremont Village. That place was terrible and I hated it: cliched decor, icky food, etc. However, this place had really neat and eccentric decor and atmosphere in general. I had some banana pancakes that were delicious. I also like banana pancakes because it is a really fun phrase to say, especially if you say it with gusto. Seriously, get all excited and say "banana pancakes" and I guarantee you will be having fun. Next, we went to the botanic gardens for a nice walk. The most exciting part of this was when I got to ride a giant lizard!
It was a really nice day (quite cool for Salt Lake), so we played some frisbee golf in the afternoon. I enjoy playing frisbee golf. However, I am also truly horrible at it. We created a new course, so Max and Chris would set the pars for the holes and end up with a score at par or maybe one above for each hole. I, on other hand, would end up with a score at least twice par each time. My finest moment was when I was about to hit the hole, tossed my frisbee too hard, and it rolled down an enormous hill all the way back to the starting point. I took a 10 on this hole and called it good. We concluded my visit on Sunday night with a visit to a really delicious local brew pub called Squatters. The selection of beers was quite overwhelming but I always like hearing about all the different kinds and the crazy things that people do to try to differentiate their beer from the pack.

Monday morning I headed back to Seattle, where I met my parents and we headed over to the Olympic Peninsula for a week of camping. We were camping near a town called La Push. This is near the town of Forks. Not being retarded 13 year old girls, my family and I were initially very confused with all the references to vampires when we stopped in the town for some food. We the realized that Forks is where that dumb book series Twilight is set (here I am assuming that the union of the set of people who read my blog and the set of people who read Twilight would be zero). So, the town was overrun with vampire obsessed 13 year olds. A much cooler town than Forks was the town of Beaver, WA.
Camping was fun, we mostly hiked and walked on the beach. The Olympic Peninsula is very beautiful and contains a lot of mostly undisturbed beaches because they are on reservation land. The other great part about being on reservations: huge firework stands! In Washington, fireworks are mostly only legal on the Indian reservations, so they are a great place to stock up. On the way home, we stopped in the small town of Pouslbo to do some sea kayaking. The neat thing about Poulsbo is that it has a strong Norwegian influence, so they have a lot of Scandanavian products in the stores there. We went to a mini-mart featuring imports and I bought some rye bread and curry pickled herring (my favorite flavor). Mmmm mmm!

Since I have been home I have been doing some freaking out about moving to Singapore, followed by a bout of extreme laziness this weekend. I finally got in list-making mode and have my plan all set out and will get to work on it bright and early tomorrow.

The Last Two Weeks

2009-08-13T10:22:00.000+08:00

So, backing up about two weeks...

I went to a bicycle race with my friend Jens. It was called Danmark Rundt, and was basically like the Tour de France, except only in Denmark. One of the legs ended in Aarhus, right by the beach, so we went down there to watch it. What I learned: bicycle races look pretty much the same in person as they do on TV. The riders whiz past and it's kind of blurry and people wave stupid things around in the air. But, kind of fun anyways.

That weekend I went to the Occupation Museum in downtown Aarhus. This museum basically looked like a bunch of old people in the town cleaned out their garages, pooled the stuff they found, wrote a couple captions, and opened a museum. Personally, I tend to like these kinds of museums, especially when they include the original old people, which this one did. However, the old man who was on duty the day I visited was either senile or hard of hearing, because, after buying my ticket and chatting with him in my heavily accented Danish, he complained to me about all the noisy American tourists that had been visiting the museum that day. The museum had a lot of artifacts from the German occupation of Denmark during WWII. The Danish government was allowed to remain power during the first two years of the occupation, making Denmark a bit different than most German occupied countires. However, the situation later deteriorated, and the Germans took power, leading to the rise of the Danish resistance in the last few years of the war. Here is a picture of some of the illegal magazines they distributed to counteract the German propaganda:
My favorite piece of propaganda from the Germans was an anti-Russian article in a Danish newspaper, with a headline that read "The Russians Eat Each Other and Burn Women and Children". Here is another really cool artifact from the Danish Resistance:
There are four pigs on the top sheet. If you fold it up correctly, you get a picture of Hitler's face, with text that says "The Fifth Pig!". There was also a big display on the bombing of my dorm, which was used as the Nazi headquarters in Aarhus. When the Nazis moved into the dorm, the local resistance realized that they had files on a lot of the resistance members, which the Nazis planned to use to arrest them. The resistance decided that the files needed to be destroyed, so they told the British to bomb the dorm. This mission was very successful and the Nazis were not able to arrest any of the resistance members. Another interesting aspect of Denmark during WWII was that the Danish people saved almost all of the Danish Jews - they saved over 99% of the country's 8000 Jews by smuggling them to Sweden. The channel between Denmark and Sweden is very narrow, only about a 45 minute journey by boat. Since Sweden was neutral during WWII, they pledged to accept any Jews who found their way there. When the Danish government got word that the Germans were planning to round up the Danish Jews and send them to concentration camps, they alerted the Jewish community and the Danes who lived along the coast close to Sweden. Danish fishermen, merchants, and even people who just owned a personal boat helped to smuggle the Jews across to Sweden every night. I've actually visited a couple places on the coast where the Jews met up with the boat owners; this occured mostly in churches.

The next couple days were pretty busy with finished up work and packing all my stuff up. My data from all my research turned out to be not quite as bad as I thought, so I was at least able to identify some data trends and write up lengthy reports. This made me feel slightly better, as the entire summer of research had not been a total fail. Then I went to the Natural History Museum on the Aarhus University campus. They mainly had exhibits about animals that live in Denmark. Here are some hedgehogs, or "pindsvin" as they as called in Denmark.
Aww, they are so cute. If you go outside at night during the summer in Denmark, you can sometimes find them in hedges (haha, how apt) or fields. They are quite docile and stupid, so you can actually pick them up! Now, for something less cute. THIS MONKEY WILL KILL YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP.

Last Thursday, I packed up my room and moved out of my dorm in Aarhus. I took the train over to Copenhagen and stayed the night with my host parents, Peter and Mona. It was so great to get to see them again this summer and it was really sad to leave because I don't know when I will make it back to Denmark to see them again. On Friday, I headed up to Roskilde (another town on the island of Sjaelland, about 45 minutes from Copenhagen). Roskilde is located on the water, in a fjord. In the 1960s, 5 sunken viking ships were found in the waters of the fjord. Researchs temperarily dammed the fjord, drained the water, and excavated the ships. Over the course of the next 20 years, they reconstructed the ships and preserved the wood. Then, they built a great museum to show them off! What is even cooler is that the museum includes a big boat building workshop, where the researchers have built exact replicas of all five ships. Last summer, the largest ship was finally finished, and the researched sailed it from Roskilde to Dublin and back to recreate a viking voyage. Here are some of the reconstructed boat ruins:
And here is the reconstructed boat that sailed to Ireland and back last summer:
That afternoon, I headed back to Copenhagen to meet up with my other host family from when I was an exchange student (I lived with two families throughout the year - this is completely normal and is just the way the exchange program worked). I was worried about this being awkward, because I was not quite as fond of them and haven't kept in touch very well over the past four years. But, it turned out fine and it was nice to chat with the for a few hours. They drove me to the airport and I flew off to Amsterdam.

When I arrived in Amsterdam, I was pretty touristed out and didn't feel like doing a lot. I wandered around a big flea market, ate ice cream, and people watched. There were tons of tourists there but not a whole lot of Americans. Apparently, I look incredibly Dutch, because many Dutch people approached me and spoke to me in Dutch, and then acted very confused when I did not understand.

Sunday I headed home to Yakima. Since then, I have been hanging out with my family and my cats, and doing all the random little things that I have to do when I go home, but which pile up because I'm home so rarely, like going to the dentist (OK, I actually love going to the dentist - they just get my teeth so clean). My head is still slightly confused about languages - this was not helped by a visit to my Danish friend in Yakima yesterday. There are couple Danish words/phrases that I find really useful but without English conversational equivalents, so I keep almost using the Danish ones. I am also having the ridiculous dreams in which people speak in Danish and then I get angry with them for tricking me because they do not, in fact, speak Danish in real life. Also, an exciting new haircut! This brings me to new heights of hair laziness - instead of spending 2 minutes to fix my hair in the morning, I now spend 1 minute. It's great.

On the schedule for next week: a visit to Salt Lake City to visit my good friends Max and Chris, and a trip to Vancouver Island, Canada, to go camping with my family.

Exciting Post...on the Way

2009-08-07T02:47:00.000+08:00

So, I was going to write up a super exciting post about all the things I did last week, but I got caught up in packing and everything and didn't get a chance to do it before I left Aarhus. Unfortunately, travelling cheaply sometimes means travelling very slowly. Case in point: I left Aarhus today for Copenhagen, I fly to Amsterdam tomorrow night, and then finally fly home on Sunday morning. But what that means for all of you completely awesome people who read my blog is that I will promise to post a super long entry when I get home.

Super Fun/Dorky Weekend Times

2009-07-29T03:16:00.000+08:00

Last Friday, I decided to skip work on Friday afternoon (everyone is on vacation anyways) and play tourist in Aarhus. The first place I went was the Aarhus Viking Museum. Nothing in the museum itself was very exciting, but the location of the museum was. The museum is located in the basement of a Nordea bank on the "Big Square" in Aarhus downtown. Why? Because this was the site of the original city of Aros in the 800s, which would one day become modern Aarhus. There was a skeleton in the floor that had not been moved from it's original location, and a lot of artifacts that had been found in the area. The city of Aros was about 9 feet under the level of the present day city. As I left the museum, it started to rain, so I ducked into the Aarhus Domkirke, or Cathedral. It was a pretty standard Danish cathedral - a lot of people buried in the floor and in the walls. However, there were a lot of really neat frescos, like this one of St. Clement, the guy on the right with the anchor. He is the patron saint of sailors and churches that are near the ocean.

The next day, I went with my friend Ulla to the Viking Moot at Moesgaard Beach, just south of Aarhus. It was crazy! There were people there from all over Europe: Iceland, Germany, England, Romania, Poland, etc. There was a big viking battle between two teams. These two teams were composed of smaller bands that practice and fight together all time. Here is one team getting pysched up for the battle:
The battle began when one team tried to steal the other's land. Here is the battle in full swing (also, lots of blond people):
After the battle was finished, there was a demonstration of special Viking horses. We know that these are Viking horses because the Vikings were the only ones to ever bring horses to Iceland, and this species of horse is now only found in Iceland. Today there are many regulations about bringing animals into the country, because the Icelandic people are worried that the horses could be wiped out by a foreign disease. These horses (they are small - more like ponies) have one more gait than regular horses. This gait is very fast but very smooth for the rider. The riders were showing off the smoothness of this gait by zipping around the field on their horses while drinking full cups of beer and not spilling a drop. Here are some of the ponies:
Finally, Ulla and I ate some authentic Viking lunch: flatbread and lamb roasted over a fire. It was really good! The whole time, I kept realizing how totally nerdy this festival was, but completely not caring because it was also really fun. This is also really funny because Rebecca and Claire, while in India, saw a TV special about this festival. Claire told me about it while in London, and then laughed at me for being a dork when I said that I really wanted to go.

On Sunday, I headed to Den Gamle By, or "The Old Town". This is a living history museum in Aarhus, that has old (1700s and 1800s) houses from all over Denmark. The houses have been moved there to create a sample 1800s Danish village, complete with all kinds of shops and tradesmen. Here is what a typical Danish house from that era looks like.
Also, here is a street scene with a Danish (read: not very tall) skyscraper. Ooh, juxtaposition.
One of my favorite shops was the chemist's shop. There was a special poison cabinet with a cool skull motif carved into it, and a bunch of preserved animals meant to give the shop an "exotic" air. There was a huge snake, a baby alligator, and a "sea monkey" that was a strange, stitched together, hybrid of a monkey and a fish. Another neat shop was the tobacco shop. Tobacco was actually grown in Denmark, especially during war-times when it couldn't be imported. There was a tobacco drying shed that looked pretty much like the ones we saw in Nicaragua, except smaller and with 100% less scary guards with machine guns. Once the tobacco leaves were dried, they used a special machine to roll them into a long rope. This was then cut into whatever length you wanted when you bought tobacco. There was another exhibit about tobacco through the ages, and there was even an authentic "gentleman's smoking lounge"!
How classy! There was also an old graveyard, which I thought was cool.
They also showed all the gravestone maker's tools and had some information about the methods used to make them. There was a ton more stuff at this village, and it was really fun to wander around for the day. I learned a lot more about Danish history and the way life was like in the1800s. It was interesting because the 1800s in Denmark is really different than the context in which I normally thing about the 1800s, with my American West mindset.

And finally, they are making some additions to the museum soon. Please read about building number 2.
OK, let me get this straight. They are going to take elderly people suffering from dementia, who I'm sure are already very confused about various things, AND MAKE THEM THINK IT'S 1974??? Seriously? W. T. F.

NUTZ!

2009-07-23T02:41:00.000+08:00

Today I bought a jar of the hilariously named "NUTZ" peanut butter. The label has a massive amount of American iconography crammed onto it. Observe:
You've got a football player, some sort of governmental monument, an old-timey car, a hockey player, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Also, the ingredients list makes sure to assert that the peanuts are "American". When I saw this jar in the store, I knew I had to buy it.

But the act of buying this peanut butter brings up a larger point. Four years ago, it took quite a bit of hunting to find even one variety of peanut butter, let alone to have a choice of creamy vs. crunchy or brand. Now, all the grocery stores carry peanut butter, and there is quite a bit of selection - I've even seen Jiff in a couple stores! This realization got me thinking about other ways in which Denmark has changed in the past four years since I've been here last.

Some of the ways in which Denmark has changed have been good. More peanut butter selection, and a wider selection of food in the stores in general. I've even been able to find tortillas and semi-decent salsa, something that was very hard to locate before. I once made Mexican food for my host family, and we ended up using store-bought crepes/pancakes in place of tortillas. Things also seem to be open later (maybe staying open until 7 or 8 instead of 5), and - gasp! - some stores are even open on Sundays. There have always been a lot of American movies and TV here, but the time lag seems to be much shorter now. Instead of movies coming out here a couple months later than when they do in the US, they come out maybe two weeks later.

But there have also been a lot of bad changes, namely, a lot more violence. It seems like every time I read the newspaper here they are reporting a shooting or stabbing. Luckily, not many people seem to die from these encounters (as my host dad put it, "they're not too good at aiming yet"). Much of this violence stems from conflicts between gang members (which are called "rockers" in Danish). The two main gangs here are motorcycle gangs; one is Hell's Angels, and the other is called AK81. They engage in all sorts of nefarious activities such as selling drugs. stealing cars, and robbing stores and homes. Another problem with the rockers is that they tend to own large fighting dogs, such as pit bulls. Lately, one of these dogs got loose and killed a little boy, and there has been a lot of debate about whether those types of dogs should be outlawed or not.

There are also a lot of immigrant gangs that are contributing to the violence. As in all of Europe, immigration is a hot issue here in Denmark right now. The two countries that have the most immigrants in Denmark are Turkey and Somalia (this is entirely unscientific data, it's just what I have been told). There are also a decent number of immigrants from other Middle Eastern countries, and from Eastern Europe (case in point: I had a friend from Yugoslavia who who turned out to be a pop star there). Many Danes see the increase in violence and crime as a result of these immigrants. Because of this, Denmark has some of the tightest immigration laws in the EU. Recently, Denmark has elections for the EU Parliament. One of the candidates who won a seat belongs to a very conservative party that basically wants to outlaw any more immigration to Denmark, and to send many of the immigrants currently living here back to their home countries. The students in my dorm were all very distressed that this viewpoint has become popular enough win this candidate a seat on the Parliament.

As much as I like all the good changes (they make life much easier when it's Sunday and I realize I have no food to eat), it does make me sad that sheltered little Denmark is being exposed to all these problems.

Copenhagen Weekend

2009-07-22T03:24:00.000+08:00

Last week was fairly uneventful, work wise. I started analyzing all my data, which tends to result in me sitting in front of a computer all day long. I am not too big a fan of this, which is probably the cause of my recent case of the lazies, in which I want nothing more than to lay in bed all day reading and eating cereal. Seriously, I never get the lazies this bad! How do I cure myself?!? Tips, anyone?

On Thursday, I hung out with a Dutch girl, Isa, that I met through couchsurfing. She was living in Denmark with her Danish boyfriend and working for Vestas, a wind power company. We had coffee and just hung out. She was really interesting to talk to, and we spent a lot of time talking about the differences between Holland and Denmark. Although the two countries would seem to be quite similar, it turns out they are more different than one would expect. It was also fun to spend some time with another foreigner and poke fun at the silly things Danish people do, such as: eating massive amounts of potatoes, not allowing stores to be open on Sundays, and taking absurdly long summer vacations. Seriously, half the stores in town are closed right now for what is called "industry holiday", a three week long vacation in the end of July.

On Friday afternoon, I headed over to Copenhagen to visit my host family. Earlier in the day, I received a text message from my host mom Mona, asking if I liked sushi. I love sushi, so of course I replied yes, and it turned out that we would be eating sushi for dinner that night. My host dad, Peter, has recently fallen in love with sushi, since it is quite new to Denmark. However, none of Peter or Mona's children like sushi, so they were excited to spoil me with some. But then I started to worry...what if this sushi was super market sushi?!? As much as I love real sushi, I am completely grossed out by super market sushi. I think it is the idea of raw food just sitting around all day in those not-very-cold-open-refrigerator cases. One of the most effective methods that Claire uses to gross me out is buying super market sushi and eating it with gusto. However, my fears were assuaged when Mona picked me up at the train station and we picked up some take-out sushi at a very respectable looking restaurant. I helped Peter conquer his fear of wasabi by showing him how to mix it with the soy sauce, and we had a great dinner.

The next day, the weather was pretty rainy, so we all had a nice day inside. The whole family stopped by to say hi. My host brothers Lasse and Jakob stopped by earlier in the day to say hi, and then my host sister Line and her boyfriend, as well as my host grandma, came for lunch. We had a great Danish lunch with rye bread and tons of types of herring and other meats. And, lots of beer, of course. I was especially glad to meet Line finally, as she was an exchange student in Brazil while I was one in Denmark, so I had actually never met her before. After lunch, the rain finally cleared up and I went for a long walk on the beach and ended up wandering into a really cool nature area with marshes that I had never seen before. The rest of the day consisted of watching Tour de France coverage (Peter is really into cycling) and making more delicious food. We had salmon for dinner. Salmon wrapped in bacon, that is. This is a very common Danish thing to do - have a completely normal and rational meat choice for dinner, but then swaddle the whole thing in bacon. Normally, I am not a fan of mixing meats, but this was so darn tasty that it made me reconsider my meat-segregation stance a bit.

On Sunday morning, I caught the train up to Copenhagen to meet one of my professors from Harvey Mudd, Dr. Nancy Lape, as well as another Mudd student who were there for a conference. I met them at their hotel and we headed to the downtown. We took a short walking tour of the main square and the walking street. Then, I introduced them to some delicious Danish pasteries at a cafe on the town hall square. We then went to the Statens Museum for Kunst (State Art Museum), which I actually had never been to before. It was full of cheery Danish art, such as this piece.
This museum really ran the gamut, from traditional Danish art from the 1700s, to really crazy and shocking modern art. What was neat is that I saw a lot of the same Danish artists that I saw in the Aarhus art museum, and I enjoyed seeing these other works by artists that I recognized. Next, we headed to Nyhavn, which Nancy and Kristina (the student) wanted to see. I guarantee you, if you have seen one tourist picture of Copenhagen, you have seen Nyhavn:
Until around the early1990s, Nyhavn used to be the sketchy sailor's quarters, full of seedy bars and tattoo shops. Now, it is still full of bars and tattoo shops, but they have cleaned up and become trendy. So trendy, in fact, that most Danish people don't even go there - it's mostly full of tourists. Because it's frequented mainly by tourists, most things are more expensive there than other places in the city. But, Harvey Mudd College paid for lunch, so I didn't really care...thanks HMC! It was pretty warm and a halfway sunny day, so it was quite nice to sit on the docks and eat lunch and ice cream. Finally, I said goodbye and made my way out to Kastrup, where I was having dinner with one of the Rotary members, Kenneth, and his family from the club that sponsored my exchange. We had a nice barbeque dinner (Danish people always make really good BBQ, they call it "grill food"). Their son was about to leave for Brazil on exchange, so it was fun to talk to him and it reminded me about how excited I was right before I left for my exchange.

Finally, it was time to make my way home. Kenneth's house was right on the metro line, which is new and runs really quickly and often, but does not interface with the rest of Copenhagen's transportation very well. To catch my train to Aarhus, I had to take the metro to another Copenhagen station, then get on a commuter train back to the main train station, where my train to Aarhus left from. However, it turns out that the commuter trains were running off schedule. Nowhere had there been warning or information about this, so I completely didn't plan for the new schedule. I ended up on a train that arrived at the main station just in time to see my train to Aarhus pulling away. Missing the train by 30 seconds was way more heartbreaking than missing it by, say, 5 minutes. With an hour to kill until the next train, I bought a beer at 7-11 and headed out to the town hall square. It was quite pretty at dusk. Here is the town hall:
And the gates to Tivoli, the famous amusement park:
Here is H.C. Anderson. Danish people are crazy about him. This statue very popular with tourists, and the tradition is to climb up and sit on his knee to get your picture taken. I tried to climb up on his lap once, but it's harder than it looks. I did not succeed, and ended up falling down on the ground.
Finally, here is my favorite Carlsberg advert, "Probably the Best Beer in Town". In this picture, you can also see the large thermometer on the left side of the building. There are two figures on top - one on a bicycle and one with an umbrella, which are supposed to show if the weather is going to be nice or rainy. More often than not, both figures are peeking out, which indicates that Danish people have no idea what the weather is going to do on any given day. Also, the thermometer only goes up to 20C.

Jazz, a Castle, and Danish foods

2009-07-15T03:26:00.001+08:00

Saturday was the first day of the Aarhus Jazz Festival. Summer is Jazz Festival Season, and Aarhus is not immune. I went to the opening concert, which was actually big band music, with a couple Danish people I met on the website couchsurfing.com. This is a meet-up website for travelers all over the world. Basically, if you travel to a city and want somewhere to stay, or just to meet up with some locals to have a less touristy experience, you can use couchsurfing to get in touch with someone in that city. You then agree to reciprocate by showing other travelers around when/if you have the time once you're back in your hometown. The website is very non-sketchy, because it uses lots of references and checks to make sure people are legit. Anyways, I joined to see if I could find a couple more people in Aarhus to hang out with over the summer. I ended up hanging out with a guy Brian and a girl Mya, and spending the afternoon wandering around downtown Aarhus, listening to jazz, eating and drinking beer. They were lots of fun, and Brian had lived in Greenland for a couple years, so he had lots of interesting stories about that.

Greenland is very barren and very beautiful. However, their society has a lot of problems, especially the native Greenlandic peoples, because of unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism (much like the problems on many Native American reservations). Many native Greenlandic people come to Denmark in search of jobs but often have a lot of difficulties. In fact, a lot of the homeless people in Denmark (who really only exist in Copenhagen) are native Greenlandic. Just a couple weeks ago, Denmark and Greenland signed an accord that granted Greenland more responsibilities of self-government (it is technically part of the Kingdom of Denmark and was only granted home rule in 1979) over areas such as judicial affairs, policing and natural resources. Denmark, however, still has control of areas such as finance, foreign affairs, and defence. It will be interesting to see if economic/social situations improve in Greenland as a result of this increased autonomy. I happen to own a purse made out of a baby seal from Greenland. It's a pretty good story.

On Sunday, I went to Rosenholm Castle, about 20 km outside of Aarhus. This castle has been owned by one family, the Rosencrantz family, since 1559. Family members still lived in the castle full-time until 1960.
The rooms in the castle were decorated with furniture and artifacts from all the eras in which the family had lived in the castle. One really interesting artifact was a "juice tapestry". Apparently, in olden times, most rich people could not afford regular tapestries, in spite of being rich. Tapestries were only for the super-rich. Tthe regular rich instead bought juice tapestries, which were large pieces of canvas showing scenes that were painted with plant juices. However, since these were not as nice as ordinary tapestries, they were not taken care of very well. As a result, this juice tapestry is the only one in OK condition in all of Denmark today. Here is a small gatehouse outside the castle that is said to be the "first university in Jutland" because it was used to school the family's children.
There was also a museum of household objects from the early 20th century and a lot of rooms set up to look like an early 1900s Danish farm home. I especially liked the blue kitchen:

The Rosencrantz family was very influential in Danish history, and may even be the reason that Hamlet is set in Denmark. You may notice that many of the names in Hamelt are Greek, such as Laertes, Polonius, and Ophelia. Apparently, Shakespeare originally intended to set the play in Greece. The family legend says that a son of the Rosencrantz family was studying in England with another Danish friend, Guildenstern. These guys happened to bump into Shakespeare at a pub and have some drinks with him. They were so chummy, in fact, that they convinced him that Denmark was a better setting for the play and persuaded him to include them as characters.

When I got back from the castle visit on Sunday, I headed into the kitchen to make some dinner. I ran into a couple guys who live on my floor, who started asking me if I had ever had "cord bread" before. I said no, and they told me that they had decided to make it that very night because they wanted to show me how. I was sort of confused about how we were making it, since all they told me was that it required a bonfire, but I went along with it. We made up some dough and headed outside to build a fire. Once we had some good embers, they showed me how to roll the dough out into a long snake (or cord) and then wrap it around a big stick. You then hold the bread over the fire (like roasting a marshmallow) to cook it. Apparently this is a very Danish thing to do at children's birthday parties and when camping. Unfortunately, our fire was not big enough, and it started raining before our bread was fully cooked. We ended up putting most of the dough in the oven, but it was still quite fun.

Just now I was eating my favorite Danish summertime desert. Literally translated, it is called "cold bowl" but I just call it "cookie milk". It is thick milk with some egg, vanilla, and lemon in it, to which you add these small, dry (sort of vanilla wafer like) cookies. It is super delicious and one of the guys I live with has promised to teach me how to make it so I can eat it when I get back to the US. This particular guy is moving to the US in a month to get his PhD at Duke, so he has been teaching himself how to cook traditional Danish foods that you can't buy in the US. This is great for the rest of us on the floor, because we get to eat all of his attempts!

As promised, some more science.

2009-07-12T01:21:00.000+08:00

So, a lot of what I have been doing for my research in the past five weeks (I only have four left - yikes!) has focused on synthesis, actually taking my raw materials and making samples under various conditions. I like being in the lab and doing hands on synthesis stuff, probably because I didn't get to play around in chem labs very much during my time at Mudd (I was too busy being forced to hit bridges with hammers and the like). But there comes a time when I finally have to figure out what exactly I have been making these past few weeks. This is where various characterization techniques come into play.

The most basic materials science characterization tool is powder x-ray diffraction (XRD). The most basic information that this gives you is if your sample is crystalline (the atoms have what is called long-range order, or repetition), or amorphous (the atoms are just all jumbled up). Basically, the way XRD works is that the machine shoots x-rays at your sample over a range of angles. The crystalline planes in your sample will reflect the x-rays only at certain angles depending on what planes are present in the crystal. A detector measures the reflected x-rays and produces a graph showing the intensity over a range of angles. If your sample is amorphous, there are no crystal planes to reflect the x-rays, so you get a scan with no peaks, like this one (intensity on the y-axis, angle, or 2-theta, on the x-axis).
If you have something crystalline, you get a scan with peaks, like this one. This is several scans of a materials I was working with last summer.

The one of the bottom is a reference scan that comes from a huge database of known crystalline structures. Once you perform XRD on your sample, you can use various matching techniques to compare your sample to reference scans to determine exactly what you have made. Once you know what you have made, you can use data about the relative peak intensities, the peak width, peak symmetry, etc, to determine the size and shapes of the crystals in your sample. You can also look at the "2-theta shift" to determine crystal sizes relative to each other. If you look at the top two scans here, you can see that they have the same peaks, but the second one is shifted slightly compared to this first one. This indicates that the crystal size in the second sample is slightly smaller than in the first one. In this case, this was because I had been substituting smaller atoms into the crystal, so I used this scan to prove that I was successful in this substitution.

If you want to get an actual look at your material, you can use electron microscopy, either scanning (SEM) or transmission (TEM). In an SEM, the machine shoots a high-energy beam of electrons at your sample. Normally, these high-energy electrons are generated by heating up a tungsten filiment to a very high temperature. These electrons can interact with your sample in a variety of ways. The first is elastic scattering, in which the electrons hit the atoms in the sample and then rebound with the same amount of energy, but in a different direction. There is also some inelastic scattering, where some of the electrons' energy is dissipated in the collision. This energy has to go some where, so electromagnetic radiation is also emitted in these collisions. Most SEMs only measure the elastic scattering. Here is a random SEM picture (I seem to have lost the ones I had from my research from last summer). You can see the individual crystals, which in this case are hexagonal prisms.
The scale bar on the bottom shows 10 micrometers. Often, a SEM will be coupled with an energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscope (EDX). EDX tells you what elements you have in your sample, and the relative percentages of each element. Again, a high-energy beam of electrons is shot at the sample. This energy is tranferred to the atoms in the samples, and causes the electrons in the sample to "jump" to a higher energy state. However, this high energy state is unstable, so the electron eventually falls back down, or decays, and releases energy in the form of x-rays. The energy of the x-ray differs for each element, so this data can be used to determine which elements are present. This technique is really useful when you have several phases in your sample, because it can help you figure out the relative amounts of the phases by looking at the atomic ratios.

TEM is very similar to SEM, except that instead of looking at eletrons that are reflected off the sample, you are looking at electrons that have passed through the sample. For this reason, the sample must be very very thin. Here is a TEM picture that was not taken by me, but is of a material I worked with last summer:Again, you can see the crystal structure as well as the size of the crystals. I did some TEM a couple weeks ago, and some of the particles I made were in the range of 5 nm! I was excited that I had managed to make something so tiny! Maybe when I remember I will post my TEM pictures of the stuff I made...

London!

2009-07-07T03:48:00.000+08:00

I just got back from a great weekend in London with my good friend Claire O'Hanlon. I arrived on Thursday night (well, Friday morning) from Aarhus. RyanAir was, of course, delayed about 45 minutes. Then, when I got to the Stansted airport, the customs line was huge! I was lucky I was a non-EU citizen, because the EU citizen line was at least three times as long! I waited in line for about an hour, and the customs official then proceeded to quiz me about why I was living in Denmark for the summer, what I was doing in London, exactly where I was staying, etc. It was as bad as getting into the US! I didn't expect this at all from the UK, since all other EU countries barely care if you have a passport, let alone what you're doing in their country. Finally, I made it through, but behind me the line was still just as long, if not longer. I caught a train into London, and arrived at my hostel around 2 AM. Claire, great friend that she is, stayed up to meet me! We had a beer and caught up, and then went to bed.

The next day, we started out our trip by visiting the Tower of London, which is a historic royal fortress and prison on the Thames. The tours there are lead by the Beefeaters of gin fame (just kidding, they have been around for a lot longer than the gin!):
We saw a ton of cool things - the Crown Jewels, lots of old armor and weaponry, and the insides of the various towers. The oldest, the White Tower, was built by William the Conqueror. The coolest was the Bloody Tower, which was used to hold prisoners. There was lots of graffiti carved into the walls by various historic prisoners. Here is the White Tower:
There is a flock of ravens that lives in the Tower of London. The legend is that, when these ravens leave the tower, the White Tower will fall. Here are a few of the ravens.
They were really fat - our theory is that they just feed the raves so much so that they physically unable to fly away!

After this, we ventured out into the East End to eat some lunch at a very delicious hamburger stand that was recommended to me by an (ex-Yakima) Londoner. This area was really interesting because it had a lot of Pakistani and Indian immigrants. Claire had just been in India, so we stopped into an Indian sweetshop and she picked out some delicious Indian desert. Then, we went to Saint James' Park to enjoy them. We saw a lot of birds there (it's a wildlife sanctuary) and one overly-friendly squirrel. That night, we went to comedy show called the News Revue. It was a satire of weekly news events from all over. It was very funny, but unfortunately, Claire and I didn't know enough about British politics to get all the jokes.

The next day we started off with the British museum. We saw the Rosetta Stone - it was a lot bigger than I always pictured it!
There was way too much to see all in one day, but one of the cooler things we saw was one of the Easter Island statues.
Interestingly enough, it is thought to be these statues that caused the collapse of their civilization. In his book, Collapse, Jared Diamond (also author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) discusses what causes societies to succeed or fail, and Easter Island is one of the societies that he focuses on. Apparently what happened is that the various groups on the island spent all their time competing to see who could erect the largest statues. However, these statues were very time and resource intensive, so the islanders over-used the natural resources on the island, eventually rendering it unable to sustain life. This was a really interesting book, I would recommend both of Diamond's books.

After the British museum, we headed to the Cabinet War Rooms. These were the rooms used by the Prime Minister and the heads of the military during WWII. When the war ended in 1945, the people working there simply turned the lights off, locked up, and left, leaving everything completely as it was. They were reopened in the 80s, and restored to be a museum. This was the room where Churchill met with all the generals (sorry for the flash there):
It was also really neat to see all the maps and charts they used to follow the war:

After this museum, we headed home to cook some dinner. We celebrated the 4th hanging out with some Australian girls that we met in our hostel and drinking Brahma, Claire's and my favorite Brazilian beer (which we having been trying to find in the US for 2 years, to no avail). We ended up going out that night with the Australian girls and an Italian guy, also from our hostel. There was a huge gay pride festival going on in Soho, so we headed there for some great people watching. I have never seen so many drag queens in one place!

The next day, we started out at the Imperial War Museum. This museum chronicled all the wars of the 20th century. They had cool interactive exhibits that showed what it was like to be in the trenches in WWI or in the Blitz during WWII. They had a whole apartment set up to look like one during WWII in London. My favorite was this home bomb shelter, that doubled as a dining room table during the day:

After the Imperial War Museum, Claire and I headed to the nerdiest attraction of our list, the Royal Observatory, site of the Prime Meridian! Here I am, standing in two hemispheres at once!
We learned all about timekeeping and navigation. The observatory is up on a hill in Greenwich. There is a big ball on the roof that is dropped at 1 PM everyday. This was so that ships in the harbor could set their clocks to Greenwich Meridian Time without going all the way up to the observatory:
Finally, we pondered the eternal question, "When IS it time for the navy?"
After this, it was time for me to head to the airport. Claire and I said a sad goodbye, since we don't know when we will see each other next. However, my move to Chicago in a year bodes well for future Thanksgiving spent with the O'Hanlon clan in Pittsburgh. I made it back to Denmark fine - RyanAir was actually early, and customs consisted of nothing more than a passport stamp. Overall, it was a great weekend and it was great to see Claire again!

Weekend, a bit later

2009-07-02T02:28:00.000+08:00

This weekend, I went to check out the local Aarhus art museum, called Aros. This museum was very interesting, because it had a huge range of art - from very classical portraits from the 19th century, to sculptures, modern performance pieces, and installation art. One really cool thing I though the museum did well was to take advantage of having this wide range of art and juxtapose modern art with older works, like here:
These sculptures were supposed to imitate a playground. The whole room was packed full of them, and you had to follow a twisty path to get through the room.
I think the craziest piece of art was this one:
These are jars filled with preserved horse parts. It was part of an art exhibit from the 70s by a Danish artist who ritually slaughtered and preserved the horse. Somehow, it was intended as an artistic protest against the Vietnam War. It was quite gruesome.
One of my favorite exhibits was a collection of collages and other works made out of day-to-day objects that people had discarded. The objects were combined in interesting ways to make statements about our endless cycle of buying new objects and then discarding them as soon as there is the smallest thing wrong with there. I thought this box was neat.
Finally, the museum is pretty famous for this sculpture called "Big Boy":
Seriously, this thing is huge, like 20 feet tall. I think I actually have seen some works by the same artist, last winter at the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh with Claire. What's amazing is how detailed these sculptures are - each pore and hair is there; they are in fact rather creepy because they are so well-done and life like.

I also went to the beach on Saturday - the weather was great the whole weekend! There aren't really many sand beaches in Denmark (most are quite rocky), so they typically build artificial sand beaches. The one is Aarhus is really nice and is located by the forest I go running in. Here is a picture of some crazy people swimming in the super cold water (I refused to go farther in than one toe):
I also went for a nice walk along the stream that runs through the center of Aarhus; people here just call it "the stream" (which is one of the shortest words in Danish - one letter. It's the a-with-a-circle-over-it. The only other one letter word is the word for island, which is just the o-with-a-slash letter). The stream one of my favorite places in Aarhus. It's a great spot for people watching because lots of people come out and enjoy the summer evenings there. You can see teenage punks, families with little kids, elderly couples, and everything in between sitting on the docks next to each other.

Tomorrow night I leave for London, where I will be reunited with my one true love, Claire O'Hanlon! YAY!

Supercritical Fluids

2009-06-29T23:49:00.000+08:00

Last week, worked picked up nicely and I got a lot of good stuff done, so I thought I would write a bit more about my science.

I talked a bit last about how I am working with supercritical fluids and what they are. I don't think I talked too much about why they are so useful though. First, they have the properties of both a liquid and a gas: they can dissolve solids like a liquid, but can also diffuse through solids like a gas. Additionally, the most commonly used SC fluids are water, ethanol, and carbon dioxide, which are a lot less harmful than the organic solvents used in lots of typical liquid reactions. Finally, synthesis performed with SC fluids are very "tunable" in that very small changes in pressure or temperature change the density of the fluid a lot, which can really affect the products of your synthesis. This is mainly because the solubility of the materials in the SC fluid depends on the density of the fluid. If the SC fluid is more dense, the material will be more soluble and thus will have a better chance of interacting (undergoing a chemical reaction) with any other chemicals you put in there. Obviously, if you increase the pressure on the system, the density is going to go up. Temperature is a bit trickier, but if you increase the temperature the solubility will generally increase (this is not true right by the critical point, but it's pretty true everywhere else). There are also other synthesis properties you can vary, but I'll talk about those a bit more later.

Some of the more interesting uses of SC fluids are decaffination of coffee beans, extraction of chemicals from hops for beer production, dyeing, and biodiesel prodution. Of course, there is also nanoparticle formation, which is what I am investigating (it's also used a lot in the pharmaceutical industry). SC fluid synthesis is very good at creating very small particles in a very narrow size range. This is because of the way crystals grow. The starting step of crystal growth is called "nucleation", which is the very first bond that is formed between the atoms. After nucleation, more and more bonds and atoms are added to this first growth site, to form a larger crystal. In this case, in order for crystals to form, the SC solution needs to be what is called "supersaturated" with the crystal material. This means that the amount of material dissolved in the solution is more than the solubility limit. Most of the time, this is accomplished by suddenly dropping the pressure or temperature to reduce the solubility limit. By supersaturating the solution at the same time as nucleation occurs, we can cause a whole bunch of nucleation events to occur in a very short period of time. This uses up all of the crystal material, so not much crystal growth occurs, only a lot of nucleation. This results in teeny-tiny crystals that are all about the same size.

My PtBi particles are made by dissolving Pt and Bi compounds in a solvent (water or ethanol), then reacting them at about 320C and 250 bars (about 250 atmospheres; you're feeling 1 atm right now, unless you're reading this while scuba diving or something equally ridiculous). However, there are a lot of things I can vary to create different compounds and different size particles. First of all, I can vary the solvents that I use, which will change the solubility of the Pt and Bi compounds and how well they react with each other. I can of course change the temperature and pressure, but they don't seem to react too well below or above 320C. The Pt and Bi compounds I'm using aren't super soluble in water in the first place, so it also helps to keep the pressure up high. Another thing I can vary is the residence time of the chemicals in the reactor, by controlling the flow rate of the solutions into the reactor. This basically changes how long they are held at that high temperature, which could change the crystal growth rates or even the reaction products.

So, now that you're convinced that I at least know what I'm doing, am I actually doing it? Well, I've had some luck making at least some sort of PtBi compounds, but I'm not sure that I've got the straight 1:1 Pt:Bi ratio I'm looking for. I also know, for sure, that I have some unreacted Pt in there. Multiphase compounds are super annoying; getting your reaction product to be "phase pure" is like the holy grail of materials science. Lately I've been playing around with some of the more subtle variables, like flow rate and solvent ratios, so we'll see what I get out of that.

Coming up next time: characterization! Just how do I figure out what I have made? Stay tuned for the answer...

Wikipedia fun fact: supercritical fluids exist in nature also. Two examples are undersea volcanoes, which are very hot but also under a lot of pressure, and the atmosphere of Venus, which is again very hot but at very high pressures.

Danish Graduation

2009-06-28T05:12:00.000+08:00

This weekend has been the graduation weekend for all of the gymnasiums (high school equivalent) here in Denmark. How do I know this? Because, the Danish gymnasium students have an AWESOME tradition to celebrate their graduation. First of all, they wear sailor hats, like these girls here:
(I don't actually know these girls, I found them on the internet to illustrate my point). Once they have their sailor hats on, each class rents a truck with an open back. Gymnasium is three years long, and it's like elementary school in the U.S., you stay with a class of 25-30 people for most of your subjects (except for stuff like music and art) for all three years. So they rent this truck, hire someone to drive it, and then the entire class piles in the back and drives around the city. They drive around to the house of each person in the class, where their parents give them beer, liquor, and cake. Since there are 25ish people in the class, this takes all day. They get super drunk and sing songs and are generally rowdy, and everyone they drive by honks and waves and yells congratulations to them. Here are a couple of the trucks I saw today:
When I was here before, I was only in the second year of gymnasium. I was super disappointed by this, because it meant that I didn't get to drive around in a truck while wearing a sailor hat and getting drunk!

All in all, I think it's a pretty great way to celebrate a graduation. I have to say that I didn't really enjoy my recent college graduation very much. The entire weekend was incredibly stressful and rushed - I felt like there were so many things I had to go to and do (in addition to trying to pack everything up) that I didn't get to slow down and enjoy anything. It was so frantic running around trying to see all of the people I wanted to see, and then there was the added element of everyone's families being there that made it even crazier. I would have much preferred gathering all my friends up in a truck and just having a really great and ridiculous day together.

Fixed!

2009-06-25T04:05:00.000+08:00

So I think what happened was that blogger.com and Picasa (google photo app) were doing some weird fraternizing thing the other day, and I made them stop. Apparently I have to let them have their sordid little affair in order to preserve my pictures. Sigh. I am truly, as Tim said, "blog-challenged".

Sadface

2009-06-25T03:45:00.000+08:00

I don't know what happened to all my pictures in previous posts. I think I deleted something I should not have...oops. :(

More Danish Experiences

2009-06-25T03:04:00.000+08:00

On Sunday, I headed south of the city to go to Moesgaard Museum. This is a Danish history museum located on an old manorial estate. Their claim to fame is this bog mummy that was found in the area in 1952:
The body was found in a bog by some peat cutters. The body was in fact so well preserved that many in the village believed that it was the body of a local drunk who had vanished about 20 years earlier. Bogs mummies are very well preserved due to a combination of conditions: very acidic water, cold temperatures, anerobic conditions, as well as the sugars found in the sphagum moss present in bogs. What was really interesting was all the precautions that the curators had to take after the mummy was removed from the bog to keep him from disintegrating. Once the mummy was no longer in the special bog conditions, it had to undergo many treatments to preserve it. Scientists removed many of the organs to determine characteristics about the mummy, such as age, health, and cause of death (ritual sacrifice, most likely). They were even able to remove his stomach to determine his last meal!

Another cool exhibit the museum had was on rune stones. Some of them were the typical rune stones that are used to mark graves or ceremonial sites:
Another one I thought was really cool was this one of Loki, the trickster from Norse mythology.
You can tell that this is Loki because his mouth is sewn shut. Apparently, the trouble started when Loki thought it would be funny to cut Sif's, Thor's wife's, hair off. Thor was very angry, so Loki promised to go and ask the dwarves to make a golden wig for Sif. Loki, trickster that he was, pitted two dwarf clans against each other to make the golden wig and other gifts for the gods. However, when Loki returned to Thor with the gifts, Thor was unimpressed, as none of them were as great as Mjolnir, Thor's hammer. So, Thor helped the dwarves catch Loki, with the provision that the dwarves could have Loki's head. However, when the dwarves were about to chop off Loki's head, he reminded them that they could only have his head, not his neck, as decapitation would require. So, they had to content themselves with sewing his mouth shut.

Another really cool aspect of the rune exhibit was that it made the point that runic was a working language for some time, not just something that was used on gravestones and monuments. There was a wide variety of objects with runic inscriptions. Many were used to mark ownership, or to send messages to others. Here are a couple translations:
And here are some modern-day objects translated into runic.

The museum was set on a large patch of forest. In a field, there were examples of burial sites from around Denmark. Most of them were made with large stones. Because they took so much effort to make, they were often reused once the previous body had decayed. Most often, they also contained offerings or objects to be used in the afterlife, such as food, jewelry, or weapons.
What you can't see in this picture is that the field was also filled with sheep - they were swarming me! I also took advantage of the great weather (around 75F, which sadly enough, feels hot to me now) to walk in the very pretty Danish woods.

Tuesday, yesterday, was a holiday in Denmark. It was Sankt Hans Aften, or Saint Hans Eve. This occurs ever year on June 23rd, the summer solstice. This is a pagan holiday that celebrates the arrival of summer. Bonfires are lit on the beach, because the pagans believed that they would keep away evil spirits that roamed free during the summer. In Denmark, a witch is typically made out of straw and old clothes. The witch is placed on top of the bonfire and burned. This burning sends the witch back to Blocksbjerg, a mountain in Germany were witches were thought to have gathered (this is only one of the many ways that Danish love to diss the Germans; another example being that the literal translation of the word mullet in Danish is "german-hair").

I was invited over to the house of Ulla and Joergen, who are friends of another Ulla I know, a Danish woman who lives in Yakima. We ate a delicious dinner with their daughter Susanne, her husband, and their two granddaughters. One of the granddaughters is heading over the the U.S. soon to spend the summer in Yakima; unfortunately, she leaves at the same time as I head back there. They were all very nice and interesting to talk to - funnily enough, they also mentioned that Danish people are cold and unfriendly initially as compared to Americans. Susanne lived in Greenland for some years, and it was really cool to hear about her experiences there!
Ulla and Joergen live right by the beach, so after dinner we headed down to watch the fires. They told me that they swim there every day, even in the winter! Here was one of the bonfires, complete with a witch:
Then, it was time to light the bonfires. The Danish people also sang songs while the fires were being lit.
One really cool thing, which I think is true of Danish holidays in general, is that everyone participates. There were all sorts of different people there: families with small children, elderly couples, groups of teenagers. It's not considered "uncool" to celebrate a traditional holiday such as this one; there were plenty of drunk teenagers at the beach singing along (the students were extra rowdy because they had just finished school - they also wear sailor hats when they graduate, making it extra hilarious).

Finally, one bonus picture, of the owls that live in the forest where I go running:

Lauryn

The Two Sides of Danish People

2009-06-21T03:23:00.000+08:00

Danish people, in general, tend to have dichotomous personalities.

Normally, Danes are very cold and take a long time to warm up to people. Danish people even acknowledge that this is true about their culture. I find this occurs much more in the males than in the females. For example, I sit in an office with 5 male grad students, not one of whom will talk to me. Fortunately, the two female grad students I do lab work with are a bit nicer and chattier. But if you enter a store or a restaurant, the employees will not greet you, and ask if you need anything. If someone runs into you on the street, they will not say "excuse me" or "sorry", just push right past you. This can make it quite hard to be a foreigner here, when you're used to people being a bit more outgoing. The other day I was really down about this because not a lot of people in my lab talk to me, so it makes work quite boring. I was really grumpy and kicking myself for not moving to a country with nicer, friendlier, inhabitants. Then, Friday Bar happened.

Friday Bar is what high school and university students do on Friday afternoons. Its basically a low key party at your school building with beer and snacks. At 4 PM on Friday, my coworker/friend Kirsten stops by my office to tell me that they are drinking beer in her office. We sit around for awhile drinking beer in the office, and then go to the Physics Friday Bar, because the Chemistry Friday Bar was closed this week. This is when the other side of the Danish personality came out.

The other side of the Danish personality is wonderful! Once you get a beer or two into a Dane, and they open up to you, they are fun and welcoming people. They love to hear about how things are different in the U.S., and are always interested in what Americans think about Denmark (I told them that we think that Scandinavians are crazy people who drink lots of beer and run around naked, and affirmed that my description pretty much summed it up). Danish people even have a special word to describe this kind of activity/situation: hyggeligt. The best translation for this is "cozy", but that is not altogether correct. It best means when Danish people open up and are friendly and you're just sitting around chatting and drinking beer and maybe eating some good food. So, Friday Bar with my labmates was great fun! We drank beer, ate pizza, and talked about all sorts of topics. I met some more of the chemistry students, as well as a couple Chinese postdocs (they exist in every lab, all over the world) who were impressed that I am going to Singapore. And I found out that a couple guys in my lab scuba dive, and were considering going in DK, so maybe I will get some diving in. Finally, at midnight, I gave up and went home, but they were still partying; I have no idea what time they made it home.

So, although sometimes hard to deal with, Danes are good people in the end. Although this kind of culture without pleasantries is somewhat uncomfortable for me, having grown up in one that requires all sorts of false sentiment to be considered "polite", I have to wonder if it's better to just do away with all of them. It would certainly stream-line things, and the Danes seem to do just fine without them. And really, isn't it more impolite to ask some stranger how their day is going, when you don't care at all about their day, than to lie to their face and pretend to care?

Amsterdam, take 2

2009-06-16T03:39:00.001+08:00

I spent the last three days in Amsterdam with my good friends Max and Chris. It was a lot of fun and I remembered my camera this time! The weather was a bit warmer, which was a welcome change from chilly Denmark.

I arrived on Thursday night and met up with Max and Chris at the central train station. From there, it was a short walk to where we were staying - with Max's aunt Jacqueline. She lives in the Red Light District. Yes, this sounds super sketch, but it was actually a quite nice neighborhood. Because of lots of delays, my flight had gotten in pretty late, so we walked around a bit and then went to bed.

The first activity on the schedule for Friday was the Van Gogh museum. Sorry, no pictures here, cameras weren't allowed in the museum. The exhibit was nicely arranged in chronological order, so you could see how much his style changed and evolved over time. We saw a few of the really famous paintings, like Sunflowers, and The Potato Eaters. One thing I thought was really interested was that they occasionally had paintings by other artists who had influenced Van Gogh mixed in. They placed them in a way so that you could see the similarities/influences between their work and Van Gogh's. There were also several exhibits about other artists. My favorite was one of old lithographs. They were very intricate and surreal. Finally, there was a section about how they analyze the paintings to verify their authenticity. They used Scanning Electron Microscopy and Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis (to determine what elements are present, and thus what types of pigment were used), which are two techniques I use very often! I got very nerdily excited about this. After the Van Gogh museum, we hit up a large flea market and did some quality wandering. We then had some delicious Thai food with Jacqueline, and finished off the night with beers in a small brew pub.

On Saturday, we returned to the flea market and looked at lots of old stuff. The selection of items there was incredible - everything from old books, random houseware crap, cameras, and wedding dresses! Then, we went to the science museum. It is the large blue, ship-like building in the background of this picture, where Max is not paying attention:
This museum was great! They had a lot of fun exhibits. One of the coolest was a huge Rube Goldberg machine, which is an over-engineered machine that uses lots of complicated steps to accomplish a simple task.
There was a very large and very creepy animatronic robot that talked to you as you walked by:
Finally, there was a large exhibit on puberty and the science of sex!
There was even a gallery of orgasm faces. Oh those crazy Dutch!

On Sunday, we headed up to North Amsterdam, which required taking a ferry. We were up there to go to an art walk, in a neighborhood where there was lots of galleries. These galleries were all supposed to be open, so you could go in and see the artists working and such. Unfortunately, only a few galleries were open. Damn lazy europeans, always closing things on Sundays. Anyways, we had a nice walk and got to see a different part of Amsterdam. Here's a picture from the ferry dock:
And my two favorite boys:

After eating dinner, it was time for me to head home. My flight got in slightly early to Copenhagen, so I sprinted through the whole airport to catch a train that would enable me to get home at 2:30 AM, rather than 4 AM. I caught this train, and was very excited, until the train got to Copenhagen's central station and we learned that the train would be delayed at least 1 hour because someone had jumped in front of a train at a station down the line. I finally arrived in Aarhus at 4:45 AM ish. I had planned to walk home, since there are no buses at that hour, but was so tired and cold that I ended up taking an expensive taxi home. Travel snafus aside, the weekend was great and completely worth it!

Also, a special shout out to Kat Perry, who is my number 1 fan!

Lauryn

Some Science!

2009-06-11T04:37:00.000+08:00

Note: this post is about the science that I am doing this summer. If you're more interested in my posts about travel, wait until Monday, when I will post about my awesome upcoming weekend with Max and Chris in Amsterdam.

My main project for this summer is entitled "Supercritical synthesis of PtBi nanoparticles for use as a fuel cell catalyst". Now I will explain what this means. It takes a minute, so hang in there.

Fuel cells work by converting chemical energy into electrical energy - that is, they react chemicals together to get electricity out. A fuel cell has 3 main parts, the anode, the electrolyte, and the cathode. In a standard hydrogen fuel cell (the most basic type), hydrogen is supplied to the anode where it is converted to 2 H+ ions and 2 electrons. These H+ ions can travel through the electrolyte, but the electrons cannot. They must travel through an external circuit, which generates the electric current. At the cathode, the H+ ions and the electrons are reunited, and combined with O2- ions (which come from the air) to form water. Here is a simple picture:
However, there are a lot of problems with this standard fuel cell. The first is the problem of using hydrogen as a fuel. It's hard to make, dangerous to store, and, since it's a gas, it takes up a lot of space. So, there has been a lot of research lately into running fuel cells on other fuels. Most of these research is focused on small organic molecules (SOMs) such as methanol, ethanol, formic acid, or ethylene glycol (antifreeze). There is a particular focus on ethanol, since it is less poisonous than the other SOMs, and can be produced from plant sources (but don't even get me started on how much I dislike corn ethanol...).

Additionally, the hydrogen doesn't just split into ions and electrons by itself. It needs a catalyst to do this. The most effective and commonly used catalyst is platinum. However, platinum is very expensive. In fact, it has become so expensive lately, that catalytic converter theft is dramatically on the rise due to the platinum that they contain. Anyways, when the conversion is made to using SOMs as fuel instead of hydrogen, platinum doesn't work so well as a catalyst anymore. Why? Because platinum becomes "poisoned" by carbon monoxide, an intermediate in the oxidation process that must take place at the anode. Basically what this means is that the CO sticks to the platinum atoms really well and won't leave or allow other atoms to bind to the platinum, so the reaction can go no further.

Scientists have found that by adding other metals, such as lead or bismuth, to the platinum, they can prevent this CO poisoning. In a very general sense, this is because the addition of other atoms increases the distance between the platinum atoms, which keeps the CO molecule from forming the "bridge" between two platinum atoms that it needs to stay stuck on them. So, this is really great. The PtPb and PtBi catalysts solve the CO problem, they're cheaper than pure Pt, and they work for lots of different SOM fuels.

Next problem? They take a really long time to make. In order for them to be a feasible solution and bring fuel cells to a mass market, all parts of the cell must be cheap, quick, and easy to manufacture. This is finally where I come in, in case you were lost in here somewhere. I'm working on a new way to make PtBi nanoparticles that could be used as a catalyst. Instead of taking a day or a week like the old methods, this method takes about 1 minute, max. It's also very reproducible, easy to scale up, and doesn't use any toxic reagents.

This synthesis method is called supercritical synthesis. If you look at a simple phase diagram, like this one for water:
you can see that, at high temperatures and pressures, there is something called the "critical point" in the upper right of the graph. Water at temperatures AND pressures higher than this critical point is called supercritical. This is true for any gas/liquid, but the most common species used for supercritical synthesis are water and carbon dioxide. I will be using supercritical water as a solvent to synthsize PtBi nanoparticles. There are all sorts of ways that I can set up the synthesis to hopefully effect the size and structures of these nanoparticles, but I will save that for another post.

In general, fuel cells are sort of depressing to work on (also did some work on them last summer). As you can see, every time one problem is solved, 10 more pop up. I realize this is true for most scientific challenges, but I think fuel cells are worse than most. I think the scientific community has pretty much realized that hydrogen fuel cells are a lost cause, but it's still holding out for the hope that they can be feasible when used with ethanol/methanol. In my opinion (a quite hypocritical one since this is my second summer working on fuel cells), we should be spending a lot less energy (hah, a pun!) on these and a lot more on battery technology. They're similar fields, but battery technologies are way behind where they should be, and I think that they're really holding us back in terms of electrifying a good deal of our transportation. We have the energy generation part down: wind, solar getting better every day, etc. Energy storage, people. That's what we're still missing.

Fun Fact!

2009-06-08T04:01:00.000+08:00

I forgot that I found out a fun fact from the Chemistry department technical manager the other day, which I confirmed through wikipedia. As I'm sure you know, Denmark was occupied by the Germans during WWII. Aarhus's University was used as a Nazi command center for the city. My dorm, Kolligiet 4, was the special Gestapo center. They also kept prisoners on the top floors to try to dissuade the Allies from bombing the building. Well, they did in fact bomb the buidling, and my dorm had to be compeltely rebuilt after WWII! Neat, huh? I would link to the wikipedia, but the info was only on the Danish wiki.

2009-06-08T02:43:00.000+08:00

Thursday was my first day at work. I took a very long tour of the chemistry building and was introduced to I think pretty much everyone who works in the entire building. I briefly met Bo, who I will be working for. But, he was all sorts of busy with a student giving a Ph.D. defense, a Norwegian colleague who was apparently wandering lost all over city, and a knee operation, so we put off getting me started until Friday/Monday. So, instead of working, I set out to downtown to find out what this "World Pictures Australia" event that I had been seeing ads for was about.

Turns out, this was an event where all of downtown Aarhus became Australia themed for a day. I think a lot of it had to do with promoting tourism to Australia, because they were many flight/travel companies there. There were exhibits on Australian wildlife...
The Jutland girls marching band...
And Danes playing beach volleyball.
This was made much more amusing by the fact that the Danish boys were really bad at volleyball. Also, it was pretty cold (50 F ish) and had been raining, so they were probably freezing. And there were dancing girls on pedestals (see: girl in red shorts). I enjoy the juxtaposition in this photograph - beach volleyball in front of the centuries old cathedral.

Friday was a public holiday: Constitution Day. I tried to go in to work to meet my boss, Bo, but the entire building was locked. Silly American girl, trying to go to work on a public holiday. Instead, I went to a new art exhibit in Aarhus called "Sculpture by the Sea". It consisted of many (over 50) sculptures set up along the coast. The exhibition was originally shown in Australia, but Frederik and Mary (the prince and princess) wanted to bring it to Denmark (note: Mary is from Australia. She is (was) a commoner. This was a huge deal to the Danes, that someone in the royal family would marry a commoner. But, the Danes love her now because she learned Danish really quickly and is very good at public relations). This was one of my favorite sculptures:
It was very delicate and intricate, and moved and turned with the wind. This was another cool moving sculpture:
And a whale-plane!
Since it was the day the exhibit opened, Frederik and Mary were there to introduce it. Of course, I wanted to see them! They are more popular than celebrities here. Unfortunately, the other speeches by the mayor, the art director, etc took so long that I had to leave to catch my bus and I did not get to see them. Very disappointing.

Then, I took the train to Solrod Strand to visit my host family for the weekend. My host mom, Mona, picked me up from the train station, and we went to visit my host grandmother Kirsten.
Saturday, I woke up early to eat breakfast with my host brother, Lasse, before he had to leave to go play in a floorball tournament. I took a walk down to the city center with Mona, and then walked around on the beach for awhile.Then, we went to a birthday party for some of Peter (host dad) and Mona's friends' (adult) children. It started at 1 PM and was described to me as a 'lunch'. When we arrived at 1, a beer was immediately placed in hand. We ate some delicious danish food (herring and rye bread - better than it sounds) and drank lots. Then, we had more food, Danish barbeque. Then, it was time for cake and coffee; it was maybe 4 PM at this point. It started to rain about now, so it was lucky that all Danish parties involve tents set up in the backyard, so we all took shelter in the tent. At this point, I remembered (how could I forget) that Danish parties go on forever, and I realized I was in for a very long day. At some point here, Peter showed up, because he had been in Poland for work. We hung out a bit more, then it was time to eat some delicious Danish sausage! Every good Danish party involves eating sausage. Then, we watched the Danish national football game against Sweden, which Denmark won! Peter, Mona, and I finally biked home around 10 PM, and I fell immediately asleep, being exhausted after 9 hours of partying. This morning, Lasse, and my other host brother, Jakob, came for brunch. I had forgotten how much I like my host brothers - they are incredibly friendly and open, as is my whole host family. Denmark was voting on several issues today, so Peter and Mona took me with them to witness the Danish democratic process. After that, I had to go to the train station and come home. It was such nice weather here that I went out for a long run. Aaaand, that about brings me up to now!

Now, in Danish House Names Part 2, one of my favorite house names, just down the street from Peter and Mona's house:Stormly!
With a tree on the roof and a very cute post box in red!

-Lauryn