I have fallen in love. Every 5 meters walking in this city, I am falling in love. It is all clear to me now: I will have to marry an Asian. I am not even very specific on which side of Asia. From Turkey to Japan; they are all so, so pretty. This whole Singapore thing is turning out rather nice.

For two days I have been at the pool, in the sun, a lime juice in my hand. When I get restless I indulge completely into a capitalistic lifestyle of buying goodies. I have new sunglasses, shoes, and wristwatch, amongst others. Not to mention that Singapore is known for its food.

Apologies to my dear reader for being so overly enthusiastic (my manic side). I am enjoying myself. Tomorrow the conference starts, it will be nice to actually talk to somebody, too.

I am wondering what time it is. Sure, my watch will tell me it is 8:45 in the morning and I woke up not too long ago. Makes sense, if it was not for the fact that my body and brain are set to think it is 8:45 in the evening. And where is my Thursday?

I left on Wednesday and after my arrival I went to sleep. But when I woke up this morning, it was Friday. Singapore lives up to expectations; it is clean and wealthy. My hotel is very good and I have already been in a shopping mall. I think I will hang around next to the pool today, work a bit on my laptop with a cocktail in my hand. Hopefully the sun will break through but it sure enough is very warm here. My conference starts on Sunday, I hope I will not get bored tomorrow!

I know, I know. It is kind of boring to write about how busy I am. Everybody is busy. If you are not busy you are not part of this society, if you don’t want to be busy - do something about it. At least, that is what I think. But I try to write about what I do, and in this case it is seeking the balance between work and parties.

For the next four weeks, I am going to travel. It starts tomorrow with Washington DC for one night. Wednesday morning I have a 20 hour flight to Singapore, for a conference. On April 2, I leave Singapore to visit Remco in Papua. After two weeks there, I will fly back to Boston with a stopover for three days in the Netherlands.

All very cool. But I have to give a talk in DC tomorrow and have to prepare a poster for the Singapore conference. For both, I had not even started this morning. Not due to bad self-discipline, but due to being swamped by experiments resulting from the Chapel Hill meeting. It is part of the job, complaining is in my Dutch nature, I do realize that I am friggin lucky to travel for business. For the next week my contributions to the blog will be on and off depending on internet access (and whether I will be able to get anti-malaria profylaxe in Singapore… oops).

Chapel Hill was a fun, although busy week. The weather was phenomenal with temperatures around 25C/74F. This may not be so surprising when you realize that Chapel Hill is at the same lattitude as for instance Gibraltar. On the other hand, Boston is at the same lattitude as Barcelona but it is still f*-ing freezing here.

On the upside: fresh from the airport on Friday I went to Vermont for a weekend of skiing. Most likely the last skiing of the season. I will be gone for the next four weeks and Spring is about to be unleashed. That is, as far as Boston has spring: it is usually involves a lot of rain. The weekend was one of the most fun things I had done in a long time, being with a group of 15 fun people. Amazing how much fun you can have with people that, in fact, you hardly know.

…Chapel Hill, North Carolina, your reporter is bringing you the latest news. Which is that all is ok. For one of my projects, we collaborate with institutions all around the country and the University of North Carolina is one of them. So I am there now to do some hands-on analysis together.

Several things have come to my attention. A) The weather is great here in spring b) you get so much more done when you work physically together and c) it is disappointing how little we are getting done. I am currently blogging from my hotel room, waiting for some analysis to finish since we would like to present some results on Friday (cool: we are going to do video conferencing with fancy equipment to allow Boston and Bethesda to watch).
I have been talking to my host here about getting faculty positions - the next step after a postdoc. My host did his postdoc in my current lab and then went straight to UNC, and is loving it. Would I like to work here? UNC is not Ivy League but is not far off. With another great university close by (Duke is around the corner) and Washington in a four hour drive the area is pretty good science-wise. And the weather here is great. It seems in the end I will have to make a choice between my love for the Netherlands and my love for working in this country. And perhaps I also need to produce some papers that make universities wanting to hire me, too

IT HAS ARRIVED. It is the beginning of weekends of musical fun. It is the weapon against any boredom. I finally got an electronic drum set. The picture is the actual drum set (for the musicians: it is a Roland TD3 with an extra CY8 cymbal and a DW7000 double kick pedal). Given the current of the euro, ($1.53!!) the set was not even that expensive.

So if any one wants to buy some new instrument or other electronic equipment: contact me, I give you good price my friend! It is not only the low dollar that makes it interesting to buy stuff over here. For some reason, electronics and for instance cars are quite cheap here. The difference in car prices is pretty amazing. For instance, a three year old Volvo S60 costs about EUR25.000 to EUR 30.000 in the Netherlands. The same type of car goes for $20.000 to $25.000 over here. If anybody is interested in buying a new car: a car that has been registered here for 6 months can be transported to the Netherlands by the owner, without having to pay import tax. So if you buy a car here and let me drive it for six months, you can then ship it and you get a very cheap car. A really good deal. Anybody? I could use some wheelz