Well well well,

Another adventure coming to a close and there is still so much to report on, but we’ll keep this brief. Singapore overall is a very interesting and fun city to visit! I certainly could live in a place with almost NO crime rate (a whopping 0.05%), clean and well maintained streets, and retail and hotel staff so eager to staff that they will sometimes tend to you in pairs and can be fired on the spot for not providing a ‘positive spending experience.’ But alas, I come home to Boston.

We spent the past Sunday in Indonesia, which was a lot of fun. I bought many interesting and cool items, as well as a few hand-made paintings (collecting local art from the places I visit is my new hobby). We were in a place named Bantam Island (Indonesia), which was cool. On the boat ride back from the Island, we found that people were rude. They were eager to get seats, so they filled up the boat faster than a Clydesdale can fill a dixie cup. But we managed to get seats after I used to towering hight advantage to scare people into offering us their seats. In Indonesia, no one is rally taller than 5’3″, and the person I was walking with was blond, so it was interesting to see people actually stop eating and turn their heads to see the “tall man and the blond.” Store owners gave me discounts for being tall (honest). It was fun…like the second coming of Christ. Someone saw me and offered to kill themselves in my honor, but I would have gotten messy, so I settled for a Coca-Cola.

Another interesting story is that someone from my group bought a Celine Dione album, but they found out it was a fake. So I listened to it. Sure enough, it sounded like James Brown singing “My Heart Will Go On.” So we chucked the CD. The same thing with the Elton John CD she bought, which sounded like Richard Simmons. That was funny, but considering she paid US $3.50, she couldn’t complain.

Back in Singapore, things were going along just wonderful, but their concept of tall is someone who is 5’2″, so I couldn’t fit into most things easily. So in Singapore, I discovered that humans can be very flexible out a sense of necessity. Work was a blast (the CFO of Lotus Corporation made us promise that we would never come to his facility in suit or any kind of formal dress). Perhaps one of the coolest things in Singapore are RISIS Orchids, which are orchids that are picked, frozen, and then strengthen with a clear coating before being dipped in 24k gold. They are quite cool. They also did that to real rabbits, but you can give someone a kinda real gold plated rabbit. They would get mad, and I am sure that gift would smell after a year or two.

Anyway, I am 45 mintues away from getting drunk in the airport business class lounge, so I have to scramble. I’ll see some of you (at least) when I return to the states on Friday. My next destination is Chicago for a 3 day mini vacation (people at IBM call them this strange term…’classes’) and then I am off to an audit in Toronto (which is better than Endicott by any stretch of the imagination…ha ha Rich).

See you all around!

–RC–

P.S. If you want to be on my “post-card” list, send me your address and I’ll be sure to send you a post card from the cool places I go, whenever those cool places arise. And if you were looking for something from a particular country that I visit and you want me to pick it up for you (we can work out paying me back later), also let me know that and I’ll do my best.