Greetings from Singapore

I made it through my first day of the trip. I am abosultely exhausted though! The flight here is nearly unbearable - 13.5 hours in economy seating is not very enjoyable, plus that was only one of my three flights! But I made it fine and now get to enjoy a week of some good food and visiting with my friend Matt (in between the work stuff at least).

It's nice getting here late Saturday so I can just go to sleep and then still have Sunday to recover a little. I met up with Matt - my friend who has been living here for the past year and a half teaching - early this afternoon and we went out to get some food right away. There are a lot of things about Singapore that I don't really care for, but I do enjoy the food a lot! I was excited because you can't really get anything like their vegetarian mock meats back at home. Now I'm not always a fan of the meat subsitute, but sometimes they're just plain good. Last time I was here I had to make Jonathan try several of them because I was a little concerned that it may actually be meat afterall and I just didn't know how to tell. He assured me that it was indeed fake though and kind of looked at me like I was crazy for maybe thinking otherwise.

I love the food courts here - you can get a crazy amount of food for ridiculously cheap (I think it may be the only cheap thing in Singapore actually). My lunch today consisted of some steamed rice, braised greens, and several various forms of mock meat and was about $4SGD. I don't exactly know what they're all supposed to be because there are no signs next to them, but they were all quite good.

We then walked about 2 miles, which in 85+ degree weather with 95% humidity is quite a challenge, to the Botanical Gardens and then spent a bunch of time walking around there. I didn't take any photos because when I'm hot and sweaty the last thing I feel like doing is taking my camera out and snapping a bunch of pictures. It was really nice there though - the park is huge and there are all kinds of paths to walk down, I think you could spend hours there easily. They have a large orchid garden there as well, but they charge you to go into that part so we skipped it.

That's about it for the trip so far. I can hardly keep my eyes open and it's barely even 8:30! I think I might try to get some sleep soon so hopefully I will be alert and ready for work tomorrow.