Lion City

My five days in Singapore last week passed smoothly enough, visiting customers Mon-Wed after the weekend rest. I didn’t explore much Sunday, preferring to relax at the lovely Grand Hyatt. I did sample the reportedly authentic Malay breakfast one morning called kaya toast, thin squares of buttered and sugared toast made with coconut milk, served with barely-touched-the-boiling-water, runny-as-can-be poached eggs…not bad. A wealthy, sweltering Malaysian island-city-state of almost 5 million people, Singapore’s fame derives mainly from its strict societal organization, e.g., immaculately clean, no gum chewing, extremely safe, brutally caning vandals, etc. (Singapura means "lion-city" in Malay). No surprise then that the authorities relegated heavy industry, of which Singapore as a major historical trading hub hosts plenty, to a fascinating place--a series of small islands off its south coast.

On both Monday and Wednesday we dutifully jumped the paperwork hoops through the crowded, boring security checkpoints to enter Jurong Island (pictured above); Wednesday we entered a sub-industry campus called the Singapore Petrochemical Complex, a compound containing the enormous plants of eight major petrochem companies. The complex maintains its own police force, security measures and driving regulations. Massive parallel and diverging metal pipes sprawl everywhere, also bending upwards amidst mazes of scaffolding, peaking as spikes of towers across the horizon. Kinda cool in a massive industrial way. Too bad our attempt to close a sale there turned into a way-too-technical 4-1/2 hour long meeting.

Tuesday required registering, queuing and waiting for a 10-minute ferry to Pulau Bukom, a smaller island entirely owned and run by Shell Oil, their single largest worldwide oil refinery. The ferry that transports thousands of workers, contractors and visitors (like us) back and forth to the refinery every day reeked incredibly of diesel fuel (workers used to live on the island, but no longer). One of many shuttle buses drove us to and from our appointment. Funny that after fifteen years as a chemical engineer--a profession born from the petroleum and petrochem industries--I finally visited my first refinery and first petrochem plant, in Singapore and in fine fashion no less.

A few industrial pictures are attached, snapped at great risk from my cell phone, but actually nothing too exciting: http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=2hd8fyj.3s224cyn&x=0&y=4ot1va&localeid=en_US. Overall, Singapore and especially the people receive high marks, nearly every bit as friendly as the world-friendliest Thais. As I type, we’re nearing the end of our 13 hour flight from Singapore to Frankfurt, where I catch puddle jumper to Zürich. Back to the continent of espresso over tea. Nice indeed to be home with NO international travel plans for all of three weeks, although I must admit that a guy can get used to hanging out at the Grand Hyatt Singapore.

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Otherwise Unavailable, Part 2

Touching down later Sunday for my first-ever Houston visit (somewhat unbelievable as I’ve experienced Dallas, El Paso, College Station, Austin & San Antonio), I drove a solid 45 minutes at 80 mph from the north-side airport to a southwest suburb. Why? Because everything is FAR AWAY in Texas because it’s all BIG and because everyone else drove 95mph in blatantly oversized vehicles to stimulate the local Big Oil economy (oh, and because that’s where the office and hotel were). Have you noticed the complete absence of city streets in Texas? That’s right, because everything is actually highway. Exit the 80 mph expressway only to drive 60 mph on an access road to screech into the hotel parking lot. Bigger, farther, faster, better. Houston is a generally OK town, though, a big improvement over that enormous blotch Dallas-Fort Worth.

I feasted on an IHOP good ol’ American club sandwich that evening with fantastically delicious unsweetened iced tea; I drank a gallon of refills. Club sandwiches in Europe range from fairly good to kinda weird, but they never use the right deli-sliced ham or turkey, the toast isn’t quite correct and they include a fried egg (no complaints) and use some pink salad dressing sauce instead of regular mayo. Perkins or Denny’s couldn’t have done it any better, this one was sublime. Ooh, and with onion rings too. Fries are generally excellent in Europe but no onion rings, so I scarfed those suckers.

Monday with work colleagues again was forgettable, lousy Jack-In-The-Box lunch (huh?) and OK steak tenderloin for dinner, with a baked sweet potato the size of Mars and more dry iced tea. The bleu cheese drenched wedge salad was a winner though. Tuesday on the road featured McDonald’s lunch (huh?) and a solid Mexican-ish dinner with fish tacos, spicy black beans and surprisingly the best guacamole this side of Frontera Grill. Wednesday: dinner of so-so fried soft-shelled crab but another nice wedge salad.

Thursday made the entire trip worthwhile. Temporarily freed from colleagues, I walked a short distance from the hotel for lunch at the classic American Mexican-run Mexican restaurant, Las Haciendas. See picture above…tacos baby, feed me then shoot me, enough said. Then with time ticking away, I grew conservative and started repeating myself. Thursday dinner featured another IHOP club sandwich/onion rings/iced tea extravaganza, and then a final fantastic farewell lunch on Friday at Las Haciendas, exact same order, same quest-clinching experience. Friday afternoon I loaded my salsa-breath self onto the plane home, but not before pausing during the 45-minute drive for an unsweetened iced tea for the road.

Otherwise Unavailable, Part 1

I really must dust off some half-written blog material from my recent unproductive past regarding my U.S. return about six weeks back. Remember that trip, to Miami and Houston? Is it surprising that my only notes from the trip concern food? If the following culinary travelogue seems at times…um, mundane, recall that nearly every food item is generally otherwise unavailable through normal channels in Switzerland. Now, I believe I left off just after bedtime in Miami on a Wednesday night after arrival…

That sunny, warm humid Thursday morning required an hour-long drive from Miami north to the West Palm Beach office (by the way, don’t let the name fool you, WPB has plenty of palms but no public beaches). Strange to say--although it certainly ain’t real Mexican food--I was regretting passing Taco Bell for dinner on the prior evening’s short drive from the airport to the hotel. Simply to amuse myself, I rolled into the parking lot at 10am on the outside chance they’d be open. The “restaurant” didn’t open until 11am (rats!) but, lo and behold, the drive-through stays open 24 hours. Of course it does! It’s America! I’d almost forgotten the concept of drive-through. Soon happily eating my pseudo-desayuno, I was suddenly slightly dismayed discovering they’d passed me an iced “tea” as enormous as it was atrociously sweet (they should call it Iced Sugar). I reentered the drive-through (it wasn’t busy) for a trade-in, only to find no unsweetened tea available. I washed down the 7-layer burrito with hot sauce.

After work that day (details unimportant), my new U.S. colleagues led our group to a wildly popular, wildly overrated seafood restaurant on the docks in WPB; the sesame seared tuna was fair but not fantastic. Friday evening saw me solo at some popular WPB sprawling outdoor mall/entertainment complex a short walk from the hotel. I held high hopes for the fancy-ish looking wine bar, but the chef’s special roasted lamb looked much better than it tasted, although the goblets of sauvignon blanc and especially the zinfandel (not white zinfandel please) were excellent. Quite a refreshing change from Switzerland where every restaurant measures wine in exactly 1 deciliter pours, little more than a large mouthful. Alas the two big glasses combined with jet lag hit me like a prizefighter to end that evening early.

WPB hosted a boat show Saturday, filling the hotel and town-at-large with the cream of Florida’s beach loafer crop. A pre-lunch heavy dark beer at the mall’s requisite local brew-pub didn’t jive with the comfortably muggy weather, so I switched to Bud Light but almost mistook it for carbonated European mineral water (ha!). I finally bulls-eyed the beer at lunch, pairing a fantastic 16-oz. diner hamburger--topped with onion rings no less--with a Sam Adams for a mere $9.60, a laughable third of the price at home (when even available).

I partied like a rock star Saturday evening, pocketing a cigar en route to my reservation at the Steph-researched (she never fails) trendy Cuban restaurant on the apparently only happening block in WPB. My sidewalk patio dinner progressed from a mojito to two glasses of awesome Oregon pinot noir with a fantastically delicious starter of stewed mushrooms with Cuban garlic bread (easily individually DOY--Dish of the Year--so far) and a fantastically thin and long Argentinean-style churrasco garlicky steak. Smoking the cigar on the way back to the hopping mall complex, I knocked back a Bud Heavy (much better) listening to the plaza rock band before stumbling into bed. My tongue tasted like asphalt during Sunday’s return to Miami airport, near where I met a Colombian ex-work colleague and hubby for lunch at an old-school Cuban restaurant for house-specialty roasted pork with fried plantains. Nice! Next stop: Texas.

So I’ll finish later with Part 2 (or is it Part 3?) and the Houston portion. Do you know which country is near Houston??

The Big Reboot

Conventional travel wisdom suggests one recovery day for every time zone traveled before the body fully adjusts. That's pretty close for me, but my physiology is perhaps a bit faster: I usually top out at five recovery days even on a seven-hour time zone change as with this current trip.

The usual symptom of course is disrupted sleep patterns, especially for me waking up way too early. I'm more of a nightowl and love my sleep, on average requiring eight hours per night. So imagine my chagrin waking in Korea at 5am Wednesday, 6am Thursday, 7am Friday, etc. Wednesday I popped a 1/2 Ambien to sleep three hours more, Thursday I went for an early-morning run (a sure sign something is amiss), Thursday I read in bed (another oddity). Saturday's early flight to Singapore required a 7am airport arrival, again too early for my liking. Korea and Singapore aren't close: the flight lasts 6:15, like flying from Chicago to Bogota, Colombia. So today Sunday was my first real chance to sleep in. Before hitting the sack at midnight last night, I ratcheted the shades up tight, inserted the trusty earplugs and set no alarm.

I was quite annoyed waking Saturday feeling still groggy in the dimly lit room. I shut both shades even tighter, so not even a crack remained and returned to bed with a pillow over my face, only to toss and turn. I finally got up, resolving on a nap later in the afternoon. I was slightly confused checking my watch...yes indeed, 1:30 in the afternoon. The hot post-noon sun flooded the room upon finally cracking the shades. OK, well...over 13 hours of sleep, mission accomplished.

To complete my recovery, I ate an entirely Western (British) breakfast...um, brunch that is, here in the excellent Grand Hyatt Singapore (Steph's work favors are treating me right). Billed as afternoon tea, the small but exquisite buffet was quite phenomenal, including a "starter" of the best scones on the planet. Imagine the best scone you've had (not so great, right?) and multiply by 10 just to get close. They more resembled an upper-class buttermilk biscuit but with currants. The baker in me was extremely jealous. I hit the fitness center later, another key component to feeling whole again. Dinner with our local host seemed to arrive quite early, but he chose an excellent Japanese restaurant, probably the best start-to-finish Japanese meal I've had (admittedly I haven't had that many) including a very good warm sake.

From what I've seen, Singapore is quite a nice town. Hot and humid as can be, and rich in a way that just exudes rich, doesn't hit you over the head with it. Every square meter is immaculately groomed. A blend of East and West with an ingrained emphasis on the West, still with a large British presence vs. say, Hong Kong, another East/West blended city but one leaning much more towards the China side. With limited experience to date I prefer Southeast Asia, i.e., Malaysia and Thailand, to East Asia, i.e., Korea, China, Taiwan.

So consider me now mostly recovered three days before returning home and repeating the process. That's just the way it works. A few minor pics from the trip: http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=2hd8fyj.6n3rbx73&x=0&y=1540tc&localeid=en_US

That Spicy Garlic Aftertaste

As anticipated, the food here in Korea has been…well, fairly weird by Western standards. But my previous trip has helped with expectations. Exactly what does one think of, when one thinks of Korean food? Kimchi primarily, then barbecue. If you’re unaware, classic kimchi is pungent fermented chilied cabbage, with a sour, spicy hot taste and cold, crunchy squishy texture. Mouth watering yet? It's a bit of an acquired taste, and I'm still working to acquire it. The Korean national dish, kimchi comes in dozens of forms, sliced or shredded or fried or wrapped in cucumber or use your imagination, eaten aside breakfast lunch and dinner.

More to outsiders’ liking is Korean barbeque, which we’ve enjoyed for both dinners so far. The party sits at a tabletop charcoal/gas grill and cooks thin slices of marinated pork or well-marbled beef in the center. The first night the Swiss couple and I muddled through, grilling beef strips accompanied by bowls of spiced green onion salad, spiced hard-shell crab, spiced tofu, fibrous greens in spicy cold broth, garlic, shredded shoots, roasted corn, white radish and several (spiced) kimchis. The second night with Korean hosts, we grilled 1/2-inch thick, 8-inch long bacon slabs, which are then held up with tongs over the grill and cut with kitchen scissors into 1-inch chunks to cook longer; the fatty meat is then dipped in salt, topped with chili paste, grilled garlic and onions and shoots, wrapped in a lettuce leaf and eaten in one enormous bite. Different, but quite good. Dessert was piping hot spicy soy soup with vegetables and tofu ("good for the health!") and also somehow strangely good.

Lunch Wednesday was forgettable, our hosts talked me out the spicy noodles ("too spicy!") for noodles in a bland black gummy mushroom and roasted onion sauce. My Swiss colleague and I ate the slippery noodles with metal chopsticks, a feat that brought the waitress running with two forks. We persevered however, bearing the badge of honor: noodle-splash black stains on our dress shirts. Lunch Thursday was much better, a traditional mixture of hot sticky rice over unidentified crunchy vegetables garnished with lots of red chili paste; three types of kimchi available along with pickled sear-your-tongue peppers (I volunteered unbidden, then kept a stiff upper lip) and spicy tofu. All in a throwback ancient Korean wood-timber and red clay hut, no less.

I won't say I'm not looking forward to more cosmopolitan Singapore (my first visit) on Saturday, as waking up every morning with Godzilla breath and the garlic-and-chili burps wears thin fairly quickly (like in two days), but at least we enjoy a palate-cleansing Western-ish breakfast at the nearby truck stop cafeteria each morning. The nice waitress/cook emerges from the kitchen and says "Toast!" and we say "Egg!" and everybody smiles and it arrives: toast, fried egg, single slice of plastic-wrapped processed American cheese (insults the Swiss), dishwater coffee, some tangy juice conconction and a surprisingly tasty hot creamed rice porridge with corn. What, no müesli? All in all, Korea has been not stupendous and not terrible, almost exactly what I expected, which is why my fourth and final day Friday feels like a perfect fit.

Power Monger

Since my first work trip three and a half years ago, I found myself Tuesday a second time arriving into Seoul, South Korea. The first trip had amounted to a three day long low point in a three week tour of Asia, not unpleasant but perhaps a tad dull compared to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tokyo and China. Expectations this time around were not necessarily much higher, as the entirety of trip #2 is spent in industrial Dangjin instead of bright blinking Seoul.

Other than my already diminutive butt now resembling a pancake after too many consecutive long airplane hauls, the total 17-hour journey from Zürich to Frankfurt to Seoul transpired without mishap. Lufthansa opted for Korean fare over Schnitzel in-flight, so I tried the Bi Bim Bap (simply for the name alone), fairly tasty ground beef and vegetables mixed with rice which I adorned with a healthy dollop of garlicky Korean chili paste. I avoided the pre-packaged kimchi, however, and later gratefully received a Western in-flight breakfast, anticipated to be my last fermented-cabbage-free meal for some time. After rendezvousing at the airport with my previously-arrived Swiss technical colleague--traveling for work in Asia for six weeks with his wife--a mere two hour bus ride deposited us in Dangjin.

In a case of the blind leading the blinder, my company sent the new marketing guy (me)--as yet officially untrained on our products and studying the petroleum market for all of five months--to a Korean power plant to give a technical seminar to other 15 other power plant prospects. Did you catch what power plants have in common with petroleum? That’s right, nothing. Except a new market opportunity for us. So arriving Wednesday morning with some scattered info and not one presentation slide prepared, I only needed to prepare a two hour technical talk, final copy for submission first thing Thursday morning and seminar Friday; my technical colleague plans only to fiddle with our product in the lab for a few days, no help on the seminar. No sweat. I arrived wielding an outsized weapon already paying huge dividends while conducting business in Europe--you guessed it, English as the mother language. Thus I lounge now in the power plant Thursday afternoon, mission accomplished and blog authoring. My best blogging minutes this year come during downtime at customer sites (a la Vado, Italy).

So this power plant is monstrously HUGE (the pic above is about 1/8 of it), a cool site especially upon arrival after crossing a miles-long dam. Our hotel in rural industrial Korea is not quite as cool, but not terrible. The hot water is hot, the cold water is tasty. I’m not sleeping on a bamboo mat, although I wondered when we checked in. English out here is nearly non-existent, which I didn’t remember being the case nearly so much in Seoul. We’re resorting to more pointing, gesturing and shrugging than usual and even our hosts’ English is marginal at best (although I now know painfully how that feels with German). The Korean countryside feels relatively still rather crowded, a hodgepodge of unkempt small towns plastered with chaotic blinking advertising, broken up by enormous industrial sites (a Hyundai factory is the largest single manufacturing facility I’ve ever seen, miles long) and the remaining land patches divided into ponds of shallow standing water and mud for rice farming. Korean culture feels to me like a paradoxical mix of high- and low-tech with an inexplicable childlike quality just below the surface.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post when things really get interesting...as we strap on the feed bag.

Waking Up Where?

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Work sure has cramped my blogging style. Perhaps not work per se, but the recent deluge of travel associated. Yes, I've recently exited Work Phase I (Sit at Desk Reading & Learning) and entered Phase II (World Travel To Visit Customers). These are exactly the phases that I anticipated after accepting this job, and called them out as such during the interview. Also as predicted, Phase II is starting to tax me ever so slightly, especially having to show up in Lausanne whenever I'm not otherwise flying around. I've refrained from saying "I told you so" to senior managers, as conventional wisdom dubs this a not-often-career-furthering move. And when I'm not traveling for work, we seem to be jet-setting on vacation. That's a nasty one-two punch to blogging, no doubt.

Since my last half-finished blog entry regarding my ten days in Miami and Houston in early April, I spent a week in Belgium for work (Belgium rocks!), London over a four-day Easter holiday for vacation (shopping, shopping, shopping and a Meal of the Year candidate!) and then ten fantastic days vacation in the Caribbean, flying into NYC for an afternoon and evening, then to St.Thomas and sailing the British Virgin Islands for a week on a catamaran (every bit as fantastic as it sounds, run don't walk and book your trip for 2010), a quick overnight at the Ritz-Carlton St.Thomas, and finally flying out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, after finding the undoubtedly best mofongo (fried plaintain) and Argentinian-style churrasco steak on the island. Now I'm headed for work again to Korea (no worries, the southern one) and Singapore for the next ten days. Because I like to calculate such things, I've calculated over 70% of my days spent on the road in one form or another since starting work in December. Tugging your heartstrings yet?

Ah, it breaks my heart how mightily the blog has suffered. It's a fun method for us also to recall our various crazy experiences. Since I've slacked off, Steph has visited Duchanbe, Tajikistan and Johnnesburg and George, South Africa (the map above shows our travels so far in 2009, yellow for Steph, red for me, blue for both). I never finished our skiing stories from St.Anton or during the World Economic Forum in Davos. We squeezed in weekend trips to Paris (yet again!) and Colmar, France. We've seen Oasis (surpisingly so-so), The Killers (surprisingly awesome) and The Gaslight Anthem (surprisingly loud) in concert. I'm continuing studying German--my abilities now steadily approaching the scant edge of decent--and I ate tongue for lunch at my beloved work French-cafeteria (tastes like beef, oh wait, it is beef). And since my income after four months now appears dependable, we've subsequently bought wine, furniture and garden patio supplies like crazy. Most excitingly, we welcomed my wonderful nephew into the world last week, the first child of my younger brother!

We have been collecting a decent number of pictures over the past months, hopefully I'll have some downtime in Korea to caption and post those with a quick recap. That wouldn't be a bad review of the year. Wish me luck!