watch the skies

First of all, congrats to you all for posting more times than we did all last summer. yay, success! I'm glad to read that all of your summers are going well so far. Your adventures are all amazing and hope they continue in that magnificent fashion and that you'll share the exciting news with us all.

It only took me forever, but I'm finally mostly adjusted and settled here.. My room is approximately 1/3 of my room at LMF, with a sink, and a view of the bus terminal, another dorm, and one of the buildings I work in. The weather is still unfailingly hot and humid, but thankfully it cools down when it rains. Speaking of which, the thunderstorms here are epic!! and occur fairly often. Thunder that grumbles and cracks, shaking the very core of my soul, as it wakes me up in the early hours of the morning with the sunlight peeking over the hill making the sky just bright enough for my bleary eyes to know that it's morning, but not bright enough to motivate me to keep them open for much longer, and they wander back towards sleep.. and then FLASH! lightning covering my entire vision, just before my eyes fully shut and jolting me awake. so I fumble for my glasses to see what absurd hour this thunder has demanded I wake up. My watch reads 6:02am. Ehh, close enough to a normal time to wake up, and upon closer inspection of the chaos that lingers outside my window, I notice the unsettling lack of rain falling from the sky. And so it continued, this bizarre rumble and flash combination for 2 hours before the sky properly opened and poured its guts to allow the waterfall to come down. and continue pouring, and pouring, and some more because you can obviously fit that much water in those ominous grey clouds, and then when you think it's almost done, it falls even harder. Needless to say, I didn't exactly want to be drenched, so I spent part of the day marathoning Doctor Who and reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Here are some pictures of Singapore that I owe you all, but unfortunately I don't have any of the thunderstorms, not that they would turn out all that well. Most of the photos I have are pictures of orchids from visiting the orchid and botanical gardens last weekend, like these.
What would you call this color?








And we went exploring in the the forests in Sentosa... and as a result, I obtained many bug bites [not pictured: large, flying bugs that like to eat me]. This is a weird/cool plant in the forest... There is also a large copy of The Thinker, statue of the Merlion, Universal Studios, beach, luge-type ride, and other touristy things in Sentosa.







This is the top of a Hindu temple that we saw, while wandering through Chinatown looking for dim sum.












This is the Art and Science museum at Marina Bay Sands. It's the one that looks like a flower, not the hotel on the left. There was a really cool exhibition on Van Gogh, who now automatically reminds me of Doctor Who. On the right are a few buildings from the financial district.







Work is alright, learning some stats analysis to study cortisol circadian rhythms, how to read different MRI scans and identify strokes, infarcts, atrophy, etc. Every Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon, I get to be a wallflower and observe in the memory clinic and watch doctors determine whether or not patients have dementia. My keen observational skills have allowed me to conclude: Some old people are really cute. Others are not. Many are demented. Most have memory problems and are cognitively impaired. And a few are just plain delusional or depressed or cranky, but not demented. :] but you all already knew that.

I finally got around to trying the bubble tea (specifically caramel milk tea and plum green tea), and I do have to say it's absolutely, fantastically, brilliantly, wonderful and now I have ridiculously high standards and utterly addicted. ^.^

Also, last night I was lucky enough to finally get to see a lunar eclipse!! :D well part of it: at 3am, I woke up to see it disappear from 2/3 full to nothing, but there was an unfortunate large cloud that came in just as it was fully eclipsed, so I wasn't able to see the rest.. All the photos I tried to take turned out horrible, so the moon turned into a splotchy, whitish unknown shape. But in essence this is what I watched for 40+min: The grey stuff is the large, annoying cloud eating the moon and disrupting my view.