Day 2 (7/5) - Palo Alto
The Malaysian, Chinese and Indians all needed visas to enter the US, but the Singaporeans didn't. This is what we get for sucking up to the US.
The Comfort Inn breakfast was much better than I expected - they even had a waffle maker.
u r wt u wr has an overseas edition. This will be published separately from the main travelogue.
The VTA buses had signs not only in English and Spanish, but Vietnamese. Wah - trilingual.
Someone thought the local team was the 'Shanks' (they're the 'Sharks'). I imagine cheering on slabs of meat is very motivating.
Unfortunately some of the pictures look a little dark. It looks like they still haven't solved the problem of pictures looking brighter on the camera LCD than on the computer. Oh well, there's always Photoshop to correct my mistakes.
The air was cool but the sun was hot (thankfully it wasn't humid, unlike awful Singapore, so it was still alright; I can't imagine how anyone can like the weather here, but then masochists abound). Apparently this was atypical for the time of year, and indeed it was only so warm from Sunday to Tuesday, after which we had nice weather again.
Someone said that someone providing a guided tour of NUS's University Hall said it was 'Neo-Post-Modern' in architectural style. I would imagine Post-Modern architecture to consist of formless shapes. I have no idea what Neo-Post-Modern would look like.
The formal program began with a talk by our Stanford host, Don Emmerson. Our visit was in reciprocation of one 15 Stanford students had made to Singapore in September 2006 for 3 weeks. At the end, they'd been asked if Singapore was vulnerable, and 11/15 said it was, with only 4/15 saying it wasn't. They'd picked up our national atmosphere of vulnerability despite our 9/11 moment being 4 decades old.
Talk by Don Emmerson
He was in Singapore in 1965, and even then, when he'd suggested to a taxi driver that he unplug the thing that chimes when you speed, the driver had turned livid and insisted he could not, since if he did so all the other taxi drivers would do the same thing and start speeding, with accidents and disaster ensuing (perhaps it's not just the social engineering that's done this to us, then). He said that over the years, the initial response had mediated, with many saying it was a good idea but they'd be fined for doing so. The theory was that economic growth led to individualism.
He also introduced the Third-person effect ("a person exposed to a persuasive communication in the mass media sees it as having a greater effect on others than on himself or herself"), and how it applied to Singapore: most people interviewed were in favor of censoring media violence, and believed this justified because they believed that even though they themselves would be unaffected by the violence, others would not. The problem here is the same as the one where 80% of people think they are of above-average intelligence.
He also pointed out that the Faustian bargain ("We'll give up our political rights if you let us make money") Singaporeans have made is not unique - the Indonesian Chinese did it and so did the bourgeoisie in 1848 France.
Exposition on the Hoover Tower by the same
Students promoting events - to think that some people in the Premier Institution of Social Engineering complain when much less is done
We had lunch at the Tresidder Union house, where they were really into environmentalism, with compostable salad bowls (indistinguishable from normal transparent disposable plastic ones), plates and cutlery ('spudware', made of potatoes). While an admirable demonstration of liberalism, really, it'd save lots of energy if they just used reusable cutlery and crockery (hell, for all you know spudware might be more environmentally unfriendly than plastic due to production costs).
Palated posts in Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden
I was going on about commodification and transplantation into a foreign cultural context and was told to shut up because no one wanted to hear Adorno.
This was taken after I said, "I feel marginalised by my gender", after seeing the girls do this.
Faux Roman painting
Sign by Lake Lagunita ('No swimming')
Our first view of this was like the scene in Eurotrip where the guys are at the foot of a small slope, beyond which lies a nude beach. At a signal, they pull down their swimming trunks and run up the slope... only to find a beach full of nude, balding old men. Similarly, we had to walk up a slope to get our first view of the 'lake'.
At first I thought this was some sick undergrad joke, since there was grass growing in the empty 'lake'. I asked 2 women nearby and they said they didn't remember when it last had water. Apparently the truck in water sometimes - how bourgeois.
'Lake'
Building 250
Green library
Hoover Tower
We then went for a tour of the campus. I'd suggested that we go for this tour: it was too late for me, but the ginna might stand a chance.
Waiting for the tour to start
Hoover Tower
Oval
Memorial Court/Church
Entrance to Main Quad; 'Greco-Roman [Ed: ???] / Spanish Mission [Ed: More accurately, {Spanish} Mission Revival] style', 1891.
Memorial church exterior. The observant will note that, from left to right, the figures at the bottom are Love, Faith, Hope and Charity. Idiots. They can't even do it correctly!
Inside
There's a petrified slice of pizza in one Stanford time capsule. Supposedly, an international student majoring in Chemistry had never eaten pizza before, so he petrified one of his first slices, kept it for 4 years and it got voted into the time capsule.
Fountain before the bookstore
Oddly enough, despite assurances (alternately glowing and scathing) that I would see lots of girls in bikinis walking around campus, this was but one of two times that I glimpsed such a sight, and the second time I only saw one girl sunbathing beside a fountain.
I can think of only 2 suitable water bodies in NUS to do this kind of thing - the Koi pond at University Hall and a fountain at PGP, and the latter is too out of the way.
Muwekma-Tah-Ruk - Native American themed house (dorm)
Native Americans get priority for 50% of the spots in here, and the other 50% is free for all.
There're only 2 frat houses on campus. Wth.
Jamba Juice seems to be a very popular juice/smoothie chain in the Bay Area. Employees get a free smoothie each shift. Wah.
In the late afternoon we had a reception where we met most of the Stanford students who'd come to Singapore last year.
At night some of us were hungry so we tried going to Jack in the Box, which had a 24-hour drivethrough. Unfortunately they refused to serve us since we were not in a car (wth) so we went to Taco Bell.
Stanford has a 'feminist studies' department. This is a lot more honest than calling it 'gender studies' or even 'women's studies', since it admits to the underlying paradigm in the discipline.
Quotes:
[On skateboarders in Stanford] The only people I see skateboarding are Mats in Tampines.