There is a saying that goes, “You don’t miss you water till your well runs dry”. True? I concur to a certain extent. Today is day 51. That means 51 days away from home, alas, how much I miss it.

I’m not sure about the rest of you but there were things we knew were at stake when we came here. We left behind our loved ones, our friends, our homes, our houses, our societies and clubs and other relationships. Being here for one year would mean these relationships could possibly be strained, some even severed, if we did not make an effort to guard them.

I wonder how many of us counted the cost, mitigated the risk factor and factored in what was at stake? Whatever it was, we must have deemed it worth it to put everything on hold for a year and come to this unknown place.

Who, at the end of this journey can say that it is all worth it? Only time will tell. I will blog more about this when I find time. I have a ton and one things to say.

Estee

Sometimes, it is not the dictionary, but specific acts/actions that can best define certain words.

As epitomized below, on the journey with Phebe this morning to work:-

Kindness: A bus driver getting out of his seat, unfastening the seat belt of a disabled man, pushing him towards the door, lowering the disabled ramp, and ensuring he got off safe before waving him off with a warm “You take care Sir, have a nice day.”

It’s the little acts of kindness that count. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
Kindness is not innate, it is an effort.

Fatigue: Kelly sitting in front of his laptop with his favourite online shopping page (ebay.com) with banners screaming out the words “BARGAIN”, yet there he is, nodding in front of the screen to the humdrum of the air-con, straining to keep awake. (He still has his work clothes on)

I woke up to the warm fingers of the sun as they carassed my face. The daily routine of washing up ensued and at eight forty I left the apartment for work.

"Morning" I greeted the guard as I walked pass him. "Hi!" he smiled and waved to me. That's something new. Usually he will greet me with "How ya doing". Perhaps he has grown used to me, and I am also used to seeing him every morning when I walk out the door.

The cool air of the morning brushed against me as I stepped out of the building. A mixture of cold and warm as the sun reached me with his soothing fingers again. Nice feeling. A little too bright however, and I reached for my shades. Just across a few streets my office stood out tall and proud in the background.

Taking the usual path I walked across the first road to a small park. I passed by the same homeless man whom I see everyday to and fro work. Sometimes he's sitting there staring into space; other times he's asleep with his hands folded over his chest. And I grew to pity him everytime I walk past him. The trees lining up the path, whom used to have a crown of lovely bright green leaves, suddenly became spotted with bits of brown, like a forty year old man starting to age with signs of grey hair. The air seems to get colder each day, and the temperature is practically freezing whenever it rains. Signs of fall coming.

I continued my walk down the path. Reaching Logan's Square, I gazed proudly at the Singapore Flag fluttering with grace on a street post, the sign SINGAPORE below it illuminated in the morning sun. Everyday without failed I sang national songs in my heart as I passed by the flag. Across the street is a spectacular fountain that will soon be frozen in a few months' time.

Few cars go by although it's a weekday morning. There's little cars here compared to Singapore. More homeless people in Logan's Square, many of them sleeping on benches.

And as I walked, I passed by a round and jolly man, another friend I have made along the streets. He sits there everyday, admiring the surroundings as time seems to stop still for him. He greets everybody who walks by with a cheerful "morning" and watches the world rush by. And since the first time I smiled at him on my way to work, I now waved to him everytime I walk by. He will grin back with a toothless smile.

The newspapers men loitered along the streets, waving the papers at cars who would stop and get a paper from him.

Beyond Logan's square lies a building with 3 statues of a man breaking away from the wall. Now that's what arts is. Very nicely sculptured. The first one shows the man mummified into the wall; the second shows the man breaking free from the wall; and the third shows the man freed from the wall with chest forward and both hands pulled behind in an yell of ecstacy and freedom.

This is followed by Drexel college of Medicine. Situated right beside a hospital, where I stare into the transparent class of the lobby everyday. A few doctors have rushed by me occasionally, dressed in an overall of blue with white coat. They give me a feeling different from Singapore doctors. More humble, an attribute which only serves to make me respect them more.

I continued walking, and after crossing a carpark I reached a funeral parlour. Someone has decided to depart today. The road was filled with black limousines (those that you have seen in the movies) with a small flag that reads "funeral" on each of them. There are also gentlemen dressed in black suit with black shades around the funeral parlour. Talk abt respect. And there's no sounds of mahjong tiles. Or incessant dialect chatters. Just soft whispers, and an air of tranquility around. College of medicine, followed by hospital, and then the funeral parlour. Hmm.

2 more streets and I would have reached my office. The last building standing in my way is the Philadelphia Convention Centre. The walls here reminded me of those used in ancient china for protecting cities, with the word Philadelphia written in Chinese (Fei Cheng).

And thus ends my daily routine of reaching the office. I have learnt to carry a brolly with me around to ward of Miss Rain.

And after typing for so long, I just have to get this off my chest at the risk of spoiling this piece of nice passage and most probably would get humtumed by my peers: HEY KELLY! HEY JARON! HEY NEERAJ! IT ONLY TOOK ME 25 MINUTES AS I STROLLED ALONG (VERY SLOWLY) TO MY OFFICE!

Sometimes, we all need a holiday. To chill, relax and have a good time. To pat ourselves on the back and say "Well done!". To let down our hair (girls) and to grow out our beards (guys). To surf the seas of surprise, to serenade in the sands of so-much-fun-land. To kick our stinky socks off and learn to laugh at ourselves, in all foolishness. To tiltillate in total timelessness. To drink booze like it's all we know how to.

Coming to BV is a learning journey, but if it's the only thing that we have come here for is to imbibe all the contacts we can make and nothing else, then we have los the essense of a wholistic experience.

My point? Work like you've never worked before and party like it's your last day alive. That, to me is the BV esperience.

CHEERS, bottoms up and one more tequilla pop please :)

Today marks day 44 in Phila-this-place-is-awesome-delphia.

I woke up to the silly alarm clock ringing hysterically into my ears. How much I hate alarm clocks, yet how much I love them. There is this tug of war love cum hate relationship I have with my alarm clock. I wonder how unproductive I would be without its existence. Yet I wonder how many wrinkles less I would have on my forehead with them around.

My bosses are away on a holiday to Canada, how awesome. Yet the office is buzzing with activity. Mark, out chief of information officer has brought his daughter, Katie along with him and she is seated in the conference room watching “the Iron Giant”. It seems to me here, “Katie” is the favourite name of choice. Jon, the president of ACI, where I work, has his daughter named Kate as well. And we have a colleague in the Programming department with a similar name.

Talking about cartoons, I am reminiscing the day when I WAS young. Cartoon network, Disney channel, Dexter and Didi, Nickelodeon, transformers, my little pony, care bear and smurf. Seems like eons ago. Now the only cartoons I indulge in is “Happy tree friends”, not very becoming, to say the least.

Aren’t we all growing up too fast? The irony of it all is I have always wanted to grow up. When I was 16, I wished to be 21 and now that I’m 21, I wish so hard that I could “grow down” to the time when I was sweet 16.How I wish I could remain child-like forever, without being childish. I would never want to grow up if that meant losing the “child” in me. You see, there is a fine line with being childish and child-like. Vague, but undeniably there.

The office is quiet, save for the sporadic shuffling of feet behind my desk. I have a ton of work to do for Liza, my superior. I appreciate the fact that she is so very organized and so far, she has been extremely understanding towards my plight that when I started working, I had abso-freaking-lutely no experience in this field whatsoever. She has been very patient with me. Likewise, Jon, the president of the company has been teaching me about this field during our weekly meetings together. I am very appreciative of the fact that he trust me with much of this confidential information and I’m eager to proof myself of value to the company.And also, I am enthused by the fact that we're the ULTIMATELY coolest company alive. Since we started work 6 weeks ago, we have had 2 parties, alcohol free flow. The people here know how to work and and have a good time as well. When they party, they PARTY! When it comes to work, everyone knows their place in this organization.

I feel truly blessed to be placed here at ACI. I love it here! The only bane is getting used to waking up in the morning, my ritualistic fistfight with my alarm clock.I miss home, very much still.

Mummy and Esther are in America now, as I blog. Esther just reached a couple of days back. She will be studying at University of Michigan and mummy will be with her for the first week to make sure things are nicely settled. It is great because Michigan and Philadelphia are in the same time zone, so we can talk as when we like. I am concerned for mummy and daddy because they have never been left unbothered by us daughters. How they will miss us.

The air is getting crisp here and the mornings are colder, a sign that autumn is fast approaching. Even the birds are starting to sing a different tune, a matter of perception, perhaps. I am looking forward to this change in season. This morning and Phebe and I were going to work, we were hit by bone chilling wind. The wonders of how one day can be warm yet the next chilly.

How the seasons creep up on you like a shadow in the night. There are some things we take for granted, these are truly the more delicate things in life. Tarry a while sometimes, to smell the flowers of watch a leaf fall from a tree, or even pick up a dandelion by the pavement side and watch the seeds disperse in the winds under your breath. How sometimes we are too caught up in the hustle and bustle of city life to appreciate the truly precious things mother earth has bestowed upon us.

The inexorability of happenstance hits me, like a silver bullet through the heart of dracula, some things are out of our control. But, truly, the best things in life are free.

Like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon, this transient and subtle metamorphosis can be likened to each one of us interns here. Slow yet steady, we will grow from the naïve young cubs that we now are into the matured interns that we all hope to become.

Like a true blue ACSians, I say, “The Best is Yet to Be”…

-eStee

Hi guys! I'm in the office now, taking a break from the mountain-load of stuff that piled on me. It has been 1.5 weeks since I started work. I can still remember my first step on my first official working day into the office (I met my colleagues on my 2nd day in Philly just to get orientated).

me: Hello everybody! Morning!
Tze: Hi Kaihong! You are placed on this project. Julie will talk to you more abt it after she get back...

Sob. And I was not even shown to my desk yet. Work's stressful, and yet fulfilling. There's so much things to learn here, and I have gotten used to the lifestyle here. Every moment is a treasured memory...apart from the terrible flight that I went through which still gives me nightmare. The mere thought of it makes The Exorcist seems like a comedy.

Ok back to work. Wanted to type more but have a project to rush. And I wrote this passage so that I can be the 2nd one to blog. haha. See ya guys, and like what Estee said to me when I arrived, 3 times in total, "WELCOME TO PHILLY!"

kaihong

“A small step for man but a giant leap for mankind.” How apt, I think to myself as I fight back the heaviness of my ever droopy eyelids. As if on auto pilot, I break up in to a chain of incessant yawns as I attempt to stretch my legs for the first time in, what – 24 hours. I had been to hell and back, and survived! The journey had begun, but it was not as I imagined.

For a year, I had imagined myself all dressed up prettily, hair bunched up in a pink scrungie, nose powdered and all, with a spring in my step (and like Reese Witherspoon, a nice cute miniature pincture leashed to my right hand would be bonus) and a fluffy soft boa-ed clutch bag, walking with fellow batch mates out of the airport. The air, I imagined, would be sprinkled with a light but distinct scent of old Irish hazelnut coffee – my favourite.

It was, to me horror, unlike anything I envisioned ---

It seemed like only yesterday that I touched down in Philadelphia, the land where love, supposedly flourishes. “The Land of Brotherly love”, it is better known as. In the twinkling of an eye, today marks day 42.

Yes, I have been here for 42 days, away from the comfort of home, and the solace of friends and family, alike. It is almost like being transported into a whole new portal, being sucked into a vortex through time, space and matter. This will be home for the next 1 year and my new friends here will be family. This one year, we will eat together, live together (hopefully, not in a too sty-like fashion), travel together, fight together and most importantly, tolerate each other’s crap. This is day 42 and I am glad to say that despite the hell-ish trip,

I LOVE IT HERE!!! (as u can see Phebe n I are having an ALOHA time here!)

My feet felt as though they had weights chained to them and the 5 of us from the first batch cent here ( Phebe, Neeraj, Eric, Peiling and I) trudged wearily down the baggage claim aisle, which, now abashedly as I admit, had me cursing relentlessly under my stale breath. “Damn these *$^*(&_&%% bags, I should have traveled lighter”.

You see, not like I would want to drag out the sepulture of my past and air it for all to see, but I’m not sure how many of you experienced this while packing for this trip, but my mother dearest had secretly stashed “barang barangs” into my bag when either when a) I was out with my freinds or b) I was sleeping or c) somehow she managed to distract me surreptitiously with her flawless skills while she slipped what she notioned as “necessities” into my MPV-sized luggage cases. (She had developed and perfected this "steath skill" after 20 over years of marriage to my father where she developed the art of siphoning money from daddy to buy her "I-could-rob-a-bank-and-get-this-much-dough"facial treatments without his knowledge -- A skill that all women should be genetically programmed with)

The good thing was this -- I didn’t know all these yet until I unpacked a few hours later to find my luggage exploding with packets of Milo, cotton wool, cotton bud, cotton pads, cotton whatevers, soap powder, towels, moisturizers and a decades supply of aspirin (which if I do a headcount now, eating 1, 3 times a day, would take me about 189.6666 days to complete) – you get my drift. That was why my bag seems like it was loaded with Sadaam’s WMD and caused me to be eyeballed by the layers of security people as we trickled like drops of water through a leaky faucet down the bottle neck-ed checkpoints.

The 5 of us were almost half-dead, hair tousled looking so “unglam” that if you looked up the dictionary under the word “hideous”, you’d probably find a caption of us beside it. Having been in flight and transit for a total for 24 hours, well, I’ll spare you the details on what we smelt like! That was one WHOLE day of sitting down, eating, sleeping and attempting to watch the extremely unpalatable in flight movies in a cramped up cabin with no leg room whatsoever, imagine that! To add insult to injury, the horizontally challenged flight attendant walking up and down the row had apparently doused herself with a lorry load of eu de toilette, whenever she waddled past, I would awake to the sent of being in a forest, drowning in the nectar of a thousand roses! To compound the matter, half the time I remember myself trying to pop my ears back from the pressure!

It was a horrible start to this journey I had been waiting to embark on for the last year or so. But, grateful still I had 4 other people who smelt like me and looked as “oompaloompa-ish” as I did amongst the huge African Americans lumbering around the airport.

And so here, I am in Philadelphia, 42 days later, recounting the “flight” ( I have inverted comma-ed this word because “flight” always reminds me of “flights of fancy” – something it was the flipside of) here. This is only the beginning of a long and arduous road ahead – pain, sorrow, laughter, hard work, Russell Peters, Little Britains etc all rolled up into one massive ball of FUN and LEARNING.

We have a whole year to look forward to and this is only the beginning. No one ever said it was going to be easy. Let’s make it together, come what may. We have come this far together. Being here alone is a dream come true for me, despite the aching pangs of missing home.

We have chosen the path less taken, this year all of us will go through heaven and hell as one, so live with it! : ) We have so much to learn from our attachments!

A little song by Donna Lewis dedicated to all of you –

At the beginning

We were strangers, starting out on a journey
Never dreaming, what we’d have to go through
Now here we are, I’m suddenly standing
At the beginning with you
No one told me I was going to find you
Unexpected, what you did to my heart
When I lost hope, you were there to remind me
This is the start
And life is a road that I wanna keep going
Love is a river, I wanna keep flowing
Life is a road, now and forever, wonderful journey
I’ll be there when the world stops turning
I’ll be there when the storm is through
In the end I wanna be standing
At the beginning with you

We were strangers on a crazy adventure
Never dreaming, how our dreams would come true
Now here we stand, unafraid of the future
At the beginning with you
And life is a road that I wanna keep going
Love is a river, I wanna keep flowing
Life is a road, now and forever, wonderful journey
I’ll be there when the world stops turning
I’ll be there when the storm is through
In the end I wanna be standing
At the beginning with you

Knew there was somebody, somewhere
A new love in the dark
Now I know my dream will live on
I’ve been waiting so long
Nothing’s gonna tear us apart

And life is a road that I wanna keep going
Love is a river, I wanna keep flowing
Life is a road, now and forever, wonderful journey
I’ll be there when the world stops turning
I’ll be there when the storm is through
In the end I wanna be standing
At the beginning with you


Will continue the post trip blog when I’ve got more time! Till then, toodle loo! Estee signing off!

P/s: Thanks mummy for sneaking stuff into my bag, I NEEDED THEM!! And thanks to all the rest of the other mummies sneaking stuff into the other’s bag! I know for a fact you were just as grateful as I was for those added pounds – it’s was well worth it, mummy knows best! : )