A studious day in Singapore with morning classes.

6.45am: wake up call. I reach out for the alarm clock.
7.00am: second wake up call. I finally get up. The sun blaze is waging war with my sleep. The city is roaring, a few hundred meters below my feet. I distractedly open one eye to face an unidentified bug on my wall. I discover another insect specie in the shower. Maybe I should take photos and send samples to National Geographic.
7.30am: I wish I could dip into the pool but I must wait for my torn muscle to heal. So I just leisurely stroll to school, wave good morning at the guards as I walk by the security house.
7.40am: I pick up the Financial Times and a coffee, before I set about reading what happened in the world while I was sleeping. Sometimes I wonder how I could sleep through so many important events, and not even realize that they were taking place. The Internet certainly has increased my ubiquity potential but not quite solved my fundamental desire to be in more than one place at a time.
8.10am: check e-mails from the rest of the world and various news websites.
8.30am – 1.30pm: classes for the day, small coffee breaks. I salute the sun and the heat with dismay. I find tropical weather too humid. Classes are challenging, surprising and entertaining.
1.35pm: I have 25 minutes for lunch. We are sharing stories of some Zouk and Velvet adventures, over a bowl of rice, by the fishpond. The sun is at its zenith and burns our eyes with over-exposed rays.
2pm – 2.20pm: time I allow for administrative matters today, such as paying bills, faxing my Singaporean bank details for the third time to my French bank so that they finally get going with transfer of funds. I also booked ferry tickets for a beach trip to Malaysia this weekend. Quite a few of us are going.
2.20pm – 3.30pm: I must do some work for the club that I am heading here in Singapore. E-mails mainly at this stage, and organize our first gathering. I have a meeting tomorrow with the faculty about the organization of a day workshop on entrepreneurship.
3.30pm – 5pm: I have some more work to do around some National Week organization to which I am lending my support. We have just signed up a major supermarket. These activities get interrupted as friends are passing by. Little stories and questions are flying over the cubes, hands are waving. I still see smiles everywhere.
5pm – 7pm: I am getting ready for next day’s work and future assignments. I must write up a case on the fall of the Lehman Brothers Investment Bank; fill in a personality questionnaire and write two pages about myself; prepare my Macro Economics group assignment on Brazil and read up on Asia for tomorrow’s jeopardy. From time to time, I take a few minutes for a drink with fellow students.
7pm: I meet up with E., my Estonian co-consultant for my OB class. I am sadly thinking that I could be jogging, were it not for a slight but constant pain on my side. Sigh…Muscles take forever to get back into working order.
We cross over to the local food court for a working dinner. Everywhere around us people are reaching home, or waiting nervously around the various counters for their turn. The tables fill up and the place grows increasingly noisy. People eat without looking up. Their eyes stare at their plate as if their life depended on the continuity of the noodle that they are holding up to their mouth. Food courts look like pockets of India, parcels of China implanted in an industrialized city, smuggling in islands of authenticity.
We start talking about our project but soon digress. We are now touching upon spiritual and professional matters. The fact that more INSEAD students are joining us for beers does not help. Working dinners are not part of their repertoire and we finally retreat to campus.
8.15pm: I head back to the school for my evening work. I will post something on this blog. I will start my OB paper and get organized for a job search.
1am: the concept of time is the strangest one I have come across in my short existence. Some days just never seem to have an end. Some days traverse your life like a flash of lighting and leave you with the memory of an instant. I wake to the reality of having worked for hours without realizing it. Enough for the day. I will be heading home, wave good night to the guard, look with envy at the last swimmers, royally ignore the quadrupeds in the elevator and open the door of my suite with majesty, before collapsing onto my bed for a brainless sets of awkward dreams. It is 1.30am. I forgot to buy milk.