My first day at work...

Today was my first day at work here in Singapore. After a little breakfast at the hotel, everyone from my company met in the hotel lobby to load into some vans they rented to drive us to the office. It is about a 30 minute ride from the hotel. It is always interesting to go for a ride here and see how the people live outside of the downtown area where our hotel is. There are lots of high rise apartment buildings were people live. Many of them are government owned buildings but they aren't like the government housing in the US. When we arrived that the office it was located in a large business park and our company occupied 1 floor of a larger building. It was very nice and modern. It had a lot of similarities to the offices we have in SF. All the furniture and stuff was new and exactly like the furniture I had in my office at home. After a few introductions the head guy gave a tour of the facility. We have a couple of different groups working here. There are around 100 people and 1/3 of them work for our video game company working on hand held games like for the PSP, 1/3 of them also work for our video game company but on normal video games and the other 1/3 work with ILM on our film work. You could tell most people were excited to see us, even a little nervous. We then had a thing called dailies where we entered a small theater and viewed the work that people were doing for one of the movies we are working on. Next we were each shown to an office that was set up for each of the 12 people that I am traveling with. After that we went to another meeting in a larger theater that involved all of the people in the company. We got to see a video with all the different things that people were working on. We had a few minutes on our own and then they took us all out to lunch. Oddly enough we went to an Italian restaurant. It was pretty good but something I ate didn't really agree with me all that well. I seem to have gotten a little bit of a stomach ache. Once we got back we headed directly into another smaller meeting to discuss some of the issues that ILM has working with a company so far away and we discussed ways to try on overcome them. Communication and the fact they are on an entirely different schedule seemed like the biggest issue but I won't bore you too much with the details of the meeting. After that I had some time to mingle a bit with some of the artists and I quickly discovered that they need some training in the areas that my department does. They asked me to teach a class on Tuesday which I agreed to (what was I gonna do say no;). I am a little nervous about it since I haven't prepared for it but I guess I will just wing it. Tomorrow me and another guy from ILM have to give a little talk on making the transition from being an artist to supervising people who were recently your peers. We have to fill 2 hours and I think we are both hoping there are lots of questions or it might be over pretty quickly. Anyway, after mingling with the people I noticed one guy using the software my department uses and he started to ask some questions. Everyone was starting to leave to go back to the hotel but I felt kind of bad leaving the guy so I stuck around for another hour trying to show him the correct way to use the software. He seemed to really appreciate it so it made me feel pretty good that I could help him out. All in all it was a pretty good day and everyone I have met here has been really nice. Everyone is going out to dinner tonight to a place that has a local specialty called 'peppered crab'. I am still feeling a little under the weather so I am going to stay in my hotel and hang out for a bit. TV kind of sucks here, they have ESPN but is the international version so it mostly has soccer or rugby on it. They did play the Red Sox game live on Sunday and for some reason they replayed last weeks Monday Night Football. Other than that you have CNN, National Geographic, and a couple of channels that seem filled with Seinfeld or Cheers. There is also a channel that plays the Amazing Race from a couple of years ago. Other than that it is all asian channels. I am thinking I might just jump into bed early and watch a DVD on my laptop. Jet Lag sucks.

I have added a picture of the receptionist area in our offices, a picture from lunch, and then 2 pictures I took from the area around the restaurant. The big plant is was really huge and you see this kind of lush vegetation everywhere. There is plenty of buildings and concrete but Singapore is still basically a big jungle and some of the people I have talked to said you see all kinds of snakes and lizards roaming freely if you get a little bit out of the city. I guess there used to be lots of monkeys but there aren't too many left.