Mathew's first day of work

I'm probably supposed to start this with a summary post, which would explain everything I've done for the past two weeks between leaving the country and arriving in Singapore, but I think I'm going to skip that for now. =P At some point I promise to come back and take care of that, but for now, my first day of work.

After getting up and venturing forth with Jenna this AM to find breakfast (which I'm sure she'd like to talk about in her own post), I made my way to the office with David, one of the Project Managers from Dublin who is over here for a few weeks. We took a cab rather than giving the SMRT a try (though later this week I plan to... a cab may be cheap at S$10 in, but the train is cheaper at about S$2), and got here around 10am local time.

Of course, absolutely nothing is ready for me here. :) There's an iMac, but most of the work I'll have to do will be on a PC, which has been ordered but supposedly isn't arriving until tomorrow. Further, none of the software on the iMac seems to have been properly registered... Office thinks it's an Upgrade, CS3 wants to be activated because it's no longer on Trial, etc etc. Oh well. I guess that just means I kill time today, and will worry about really getting set up and started on work tomorrow.

The only thing I've done of interest today aside from sit at my iMac realizing nothing is working is having lunch at this little hole in the wall food stand downstairs. It consists of two food booths (one that serves rice dishes, and the other that serves noodles, though only the former was open today), a drink booth, and about 40 tables, all set up in what basically looks like a large garage bay. My lunch, which consisted of rice and three sides (chicken and two random vegetables) was S$2.80, and a 330mL Coke to go with it was another S$1.30, bringing my lunch (which was very filling) to a total of S$4.10. They weren't joking when they said food is cheap here, and definitely very good. The rice had a unique flavor, though I can't quite put my finger on it, the chicken had a flavor somewhat like what we thing of as General Tso's chicken in the US, and one of the veggies (perhaps green beans, though I'm not entirely sure) had an odd fish flavor to it, but I found all of it very agreeable and happily scarfed it down. :) I'm certainly not going to go hungry here. Joycelyn, a Singapore native we've hired on to work in the office, says we'll go have Thai food for lunch tomorrow. Thai has always been one of my favorite things to go out to eat for in New Haven, so I'm excited to see what it's like here. 

Well, I suppose I should do something that resembles work. My company has a lot of plans for me over the next 6 months, so even though it seems to be getting off to a slow start today, I fully expect to be quite busy for the entirety of my stay here.