The Straits of Singapore

Singapore is so pretty when the sun is rising; there's a long strip of park along the waterfront that runs nearly to the airport. I wanted to jump off the cab and stroll through it, maybe set up a picnic and gaze across the straits to what I think may have been Malaysia.

It was a quick trip. I landed yesterday, and today I'm off to Beijing. Yesterday, I met a warm welcome at ACS, the school here competing in Scholar's Cup: another school I might been happy to attend. There's a perpetual student in me, that's for sure.

By the end of my visit, I was probably visibly deteriorating: I become a snowman in May when I haven't slept in a day. I got back to my hotel, stripped off my suit and, scarcely one or two e-mails later, pulled myself into the "business-class" bed.

Then my room phone rang. It felt like no time had passed at all since I shut my eyes. Whoever it was hung up, so I figured it was my 5:30 am wakeup call. I called down to the desk in such a confused state of mind that when they told me it was 10:30, I asked "am or pm?" After hesitating a moment, the person on the other side answered "pm."

There, he must have said to his colleagues, is a guest with jetlag.