The Hot Stone

Another day at work. The unfortunate thing about this trip is that I spend all day at work and there really isn't time for site seeing. Most of the things we see revolve around eating because we go out for both lunch and dinner. I am not complaining though, I am being paid to be here and that is awesome. I am still figuring out how to upload pictures to this site so sorry they aren't in order.

This morning we all headed into work and while everyone was gone I snapped a picture of the cubicles that everyone works in. It really is very similar to what we have back in SF. I think they probably ordered the exact same furniture here.

As I mentioned before, the offices are in a larger building and we only occupy one floor out of 7. When we went to lunch I noticed a small grove of trees near the building. It found it interesting that a big group of Indian workers would go and sit under the trees to eat their lunch. It isn't an area set up for people to eat or anything.

Today was one of the days were I had a presentation. Me and one of the other supervisors had to lead a 2 hour forum on making the transition from being an artist to supervising other artists. I think it went pretty well. One of the things you fear most about a meeting like this is that you run out of things to say and there is uncomfortable silence. We had lots to say and the group seemed interested and asked lots of questions. I feel like it was a success.

After the meeting we headed out for lunch. Today we split up and there was a guys lunch and a girls lunch. We went to a fairly unique place that was called something like the Hot Stone. Now the interesting thing about this place is that you cook your own meat. What they do is bring out this really hot stone, it was something like 800 degrees, with a slab of raw meat on it. You cut off little bite size pieces a couple at a time and actually cook them on the stone. If your pieces weren't too big it would only take a minute or so to cook. It was kind of like when you order fajitas and they bring them out sizzling in the skillet but MUCH hotter. So hot in fact, that it really made you start to sweat when there were 8 of them at the table. By the time I was done eating I was dying for the waiter to come take them away because I was really sweating. It was already about 80 degrees inside the restaurant and the stone didn't help. I found the food quite good overall.

After we left we walked past an older area on the street where there were lots of places to eat. I snapped the picture of the lady in the kitchen when I was walking past. You would see lots of unusual things like whole, plucked chickens hanging up ready to be cooked. Looking at most of these places didn't really give you a sense of confidence in their sanitary practices but the locals didn't seem to care because they were very busy.

Back to work for another afternoon of meetings. They have a great cappuccino machine which I became very friendly with after all of these big lunches.

On the way home it started to rain. The clouds got very dark and a thunderstorm moved in. This is pretty common, I guess it happens just about everyday. The storm only lasted a couple of hours and it moved right along. Traveling on the highway to and from work I have noticed many flatbed type of trucks. They are work trucks that are probably heading to a construction site somewhere. What I found interesting about them is most of the time they had several workers just sitting in the back. Even when they were cruising at 70 mph, they would sometimes have 5 or 6 people just hanging out in the back. No seat belt or any kind of safety feature to be found. Often they were crammed in between tools or stuff that they needed to carry to and from where they were working. When it rained these guys would just grin and bear it. In this picture this resourceful fellow brought his umbrella but I bet it was hard to hold onto when they truck hit the highway. Safety doesn't seem to be a big concern.

We wrapped up the day by going to a big group dinner hosted by the managers of the company here in Singapore. The place was in the Grand Hyatt which is one of the nicest hotels I have seen around here. It was an excellent restaurant called the Straits Kitchen. It was a pretty upscale type of place but everything was buffet style. Usually upscale and buffet don't go together in the same sentence but I am learning that many things here in Singapore don't seem to make sense. The food was outstanding. The idea of this place was to combine all of the different types of Asian cuisine that you find here into one spot. They had Indian and lots of Chinese food. I am not quite sure what everything was but it was delicious. They didn't have anything too far out of the norm there. There were lots of chicken and fish dishes but I didn't seem any mysterious fish parts or anything like that. I did try some durian ice cream which was interesting. Durian is a fruit that smells really bad, kind of like it is spoiled. It doesn't really taste much better than it smells so I really just took a taste and moved on. The locals here love it though.