That, incidentally, is another thing I’ll miss about Singapore. Storefront massage. Why can’t our country – somewhere amongst the Radio Shacks, Foot Lockers and Jamba Juices – stick little, pretty massage and foot reflexology joints?

There were several young, spry looking people working there, but they were all occupied with other customers when I arrived. So I got an old Chinese uncle with one front tooth and the strongest fingers on the planet. I lucked out.

He inflicted great glorious pain upon me, and I loved it. He would look up at me during the most excruciating moments, and I – with jaw clenched and tears welling up in my eyes – would nod at him as if to say, “bring it on.”

He would nod back in silent acknowledgement and then press just a little bit harder. Each of us satisfied with his role in our brief partnership of pain.

But the truth is I’m secretly telling Singapore I will miss it.

When I agreed to travel for this project last October, it was on the condition that it would be for 3-4 months. It became clear relatively early on, however, that we were in over our heads, and that I would have to stay longer.

The client expected us to take their website from its rather ragged, prehistoric (in Internet time) state, and make it the best in the industry. In seven months, with a small team, and a small budget.

I was asked to stay an extra month, then two, then just a bit more – for a big presentation. Then, I went home. Goodbye parties. Re-entry blues. Three weeks later I was asked to come back to Singapore for a month. Which turned into two. Now I’m leaving again, with no plans to return.

And such mixed feelings.

I’ve never worked so hard on anything in my career, and I’ve never been so beat up and exhausted by work. I’ve never had a more demanding and less appreciative client.

I’ve also never worked with a group of people who, through so many unbelievable challenges, were able to produce such consistently great results. There’s nothing like working with people who respond to adversity by laughing (and then, by the way, by overcoming it).

I hate adjectives like amazing, great, wonderful challenging, difficult. So imprecise. But it’s impossible to find any words that do justice to these last nine months.

I will miss Singapore.

The food. I sometimes felt like I’d reached my limit with the food here – fish porridge, chicken rice, wanton mee, laksa – but a big bowl of steaming noodles with some char siew on top sounds like the perfect thing right about now.

The weather. Sometimes I felt I’d had enough of the hot humid weather, but as my last days were waning, I thought about how much I’ll miss the Fraser Suites pool, swimming, spending the whole weekend in sandals.

The people. I’ll really miss the girls of Singapore. In San Francisco, beautiful girls (especially beautiful asian girls) are a hot commodity, and they know it. They always seem to be sizing you up with a sort of I think I can probably do better look.

In Singapore, if I smile at a girl, she’ll usually smile back. Then it’s pretty easy to approach her and strike up a conversation. More often than not, the conversation can lead to an exchange of phone numbers and at least one follow-up date. In San Francisco, if I smile at a girl, she’s thinking, who’s the creepy guy with no friends, and why is he looking at me?. And San Francisco girls always complain about a lack of eligible straight guys in the Bay Area. My advice: Try smiling. It’s more attractive than that scowl you think makes you seem cool. (Also, complaining does not count as conversation.)

But I’m getting off track.

Ah yes, I’ll miss friendly guileless, cynicism-free Singapore, where the cover bands rock, where the taxi drivers are half-mad and where every old man is your uncle. Where you can get almost anywhere in the entire country via the MRT (underground) in less than an hour, where you can spend the weekend experiencing any of dozens of other cultures or lazing on any of dozens of tropical beaches. Where you can party until 3am, then have your choice of thousands of snacks, party some more, always get home safely, then complain about how Singapore is too boring.

Ah yes until we meet again dear Singapore.

This didn’t ring true to me. Or at least it wasn’t a reflection of my own experience. At that time, I had just finished a one-month stay in the Conrad Hotel, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been served so attentively and cheerfully in my life.

Whenever I would mention this to my Singaporean friends, they would shrug it off as a function of my skin color. “That’s because you’re caucasian.”

This may be true to a certain extent, but I attribute it more to the fact that I hadn’t made any special customer service requests to date. As a customer, I had so far managed to operate entirely within the accepted bounds of my role.

Yesterday, however, I tried to return a shirt I purchased last week, and I got a taste of what the Straits Times was talking about.

While ironing this shirt, I had inadvertantly melted some of the (apparently synthetic) stitching. The thing is, I had looked at the care label first, which I’ll admit is entirely uncharacteristic of me, but I really liked the shirt. The tag said the shirt was 100% cotton, and it had a little picture of an iron on it. I took this to mean that ironing it was ok, and I proceeded to set the iron’s temperature setting to ‘cotton’.

Then I smelled burning plastic. Stitching, ruined.

Now, it’s worth noting that when I took the shirt back to the shop, I wasn’t looking to get my money back, or even store credit. Again, I really liked the shirt. I just wanted a fresh, unburnt one.

The first girl I talked to at the cashier stand scrunched up her face and made a hmm sound. She consulted with her colleague, who pretty much did the same thing. They called another colleague over, and the three of them examined the burnt stitching, then the care label, then the stitching again.

“It looks like nylon.” One of them said to me.

“Yeah.” I said.

“You can’t iron nylon,” he said.

“I know. But I didn’t know it was nylon. The label says 100% cotton, and see that little picture of the iron?”

“This picture says 50 degrees. Did you have your iron set hotter than 50 degrees?”

“That 50 degrees is for the water temperature,” the first girl chimed in.

Nods. “Hmm.” Long pause.

“I’ll have to go confer with my manager. Would you like to have a look around?”

“Ok,” I said. I wandered over to the rack where I’d found the shirt the previous week. There was one left in my size. I picked it up and examined the stitching on the back, where I’d burnt the other one. It looked like cotton thread. I brought it over to the girl, who had seemed close to crossing over to my side of the negotiation. “Look at this thread,” I said, “it looks like cotton. How would I know I shouldn’t iron it, especially since the label says ’100% Cotton’?”

She nodded. “Maybe this one has different thread.”

I wasn’t sure whether this observation was for or against my case.

The other guy returned after a while with the burnt shirt. “We’ll have to keep this for a few days.”

“But I’m flying back to the US tomorrow.”

“Hmm.” Long pause “But you should not have had the iron so hot.”

“I just put it on the cotton setting. The label says 100% cotton, and see (showing him the new shirt) this looks like cotton thread.”

“But it must be nylon or something.”

“I know that now, but how could I have known that before?”

“You must have had the iron very hot.”

“I just had it on the cotton setting.”

We went back and forth on this two or three more times, before he finally said, “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll exchange it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Thank you so much!” Not sarcasm, but relief, like a drink of water after a desert crossing.

After staying there for nine months (minus the Month of May), it seems my room was not available for one more night.

A while ago, Thavy said I could stay with her anytime I want, so I tried yesterday to take her up on her offer. She’s got a very comfortable (two-bedroom?) flat just down the road from Fraser Suites. She’s also a whiplash-inducing hottie of a girl, an amazing cook and an all around rockstar of a person.

Unfortuneately for me (but lovely for her), she’s stateside right now for her sister’s wedding.

So I’ve booked a room at Raffles, The Plaza, where my brother in law always stays. They’ve put me on the sixth floor of the North Tower, and my room faces a little garden with some bamboo and a flourishing rhododendron. There are no other rooms overlooking this garden – on the sixth floor anyway – so it feels like I’m in my own private villa.

Nice place to spend my last night in Singapore.

I had planned to travel a bit in the region – Cambodia or possibly Vietnam again – before returning home to San Francisco, but it’s the middle of the rainy season across this part of the globe. So between the gloomy weather and my utter eagerness to return home, I’m flying to San Francisco tomorrow.

“I’ll get the next one.” I held the next door for her, and we shared the elevator. She commented on the quantity of bottled water in my shopping bags, and I made a lame joke about having a pet fish (or maybe it was about being part fish).

She had a sweet laugh, and I’m a sucker for a Japanese accent.

A few days later, I got my follow-up opportunity by the hotel pool, and I asked her out – for coffee, dinner, drinks, whatever.

One night, late, she texted me to ask if she could come over – in her pjs.

I’ve been spending every night with her for a few weeks now. When we talk, her soft full lips always reveal the hint of a smile, and her eyes have a brightness to them that makes it hard to look away. Kissable is the word. And I love her body. Wrapping my arm around her petite waist.

For the past few nights, my j-girl has been working very late, so she hasn’t wanted to sleep over. And the last two times she came over it was “only to sleep.”

Maybe she doesn’t like me “that way” anymore. Maybe she’s just tired from working too hard. Maybe she’s on her period and doesn’t want to tell me. Maybe she’s being Japanese (or a woman, for that matter) in a way that I (as a gai-jin and a man) can’t understand.

Anyway, I’m not really sure where this little fling is going, or whether it’s going anywhere. It’s too early to tell, as the fortune teller said.

A while ago I asked her a question, during a playful exchange of words after sex.

“Don’t you think it’s a little strange to spend so much time with someone, to really enjoy each other for a month or two, and then just say ‘goodbye’ at the end?”

A pause and a smile.

“Nope.”

My colleagues were amazed and sort of freaked out by how accurate – and specific he was, without any input from them at all. So I couldn’t pass it up.

I had a sort of double motive for going. My life feels very up-in-the-air right now. My time on this project is coming to an end, and I’ll be returning to the US in a few weeks. I wanted to see what Marwan would say about this moment in my life.

I also thought it would be a bit of fun.

I told him literally nothing about myself, and he started talking right away about how I was shortly going to return home after an extended period away – about eight months, he said.

Bingo.

He said I had mixed feelings about returning home, and that my life felt transient and very up-in-the-air at the moment.

Bingo.

He said he thought I’d recently met a girl – Japanese maybe. He said it was too early to tell whether this Japanese girl would become significant in my life. He said he thought she liked me, but mainly she liked the sex.

He said that sometime in the next six months I’d be entertaining job offers I’d recieve through some contacts in Japan. He didn’t say for sure whether he thought I’d end up working there, but in any case, he said Japan would be a good place for me.

He talked about a “court case” I was involved in. He said it’s good that this court case went smoothly and was coming to a close. I had no idea what he could possibly be talking about, but then he said it had to do with a woman I’d been with for a long time. A divorce maybe, he said.

Bingo.

He talked about my parents and my brother. He said my father’s health was unpredictable right now – that he’d require hospitalization for something in the near future. He said he didn’t think it would be serious.

He talked about how my father and my brother had a big falling out recently, and he said it was mostly because of the woman my father is married to. Not your mother, he said.

He said that within the next year, I’d be partnering with some people to buy real estate – on the third floor of a building, facing the sea, a half hour outside San Francisco. He said I wouldn’t live there. I’d buy it strictly as an investment.

He said that I’d left a weaker self – and a lot of drama – behind about eight months ago, when I left my country.

He said that I tend to follow my emotions too much and I need to make sure I use my brain more.

But, he said, I need to be fearless.

Which is exactly what I did today.

I’ve been neglecting this blog, emails from friends and family, and all my hobbies really, not to mention my own health and well-being, for weeks.

My thoughts aren’t completely consumed by work, but my time is. I have plenty of things to write about. Things occur to me all day, but by the time I find a few free minutes, I often don’t have the mental energy to write, or the will to spend one more minute in front of my computer.

That is, if I even remember what I wanted to write about in the first place.

He led our group through the PADI theory class and the pool session – both of which I skipped, because I’d already passed the SSI version of these. I did show up for the final evening of quizzes and review sessions, and to finalise the itinerary for our trip to Malaysia.

As the de facto organiser and spokesman for our group of six, I was regularly tasked with extracting key information out of Raymond – when is the final exam?what time are we leaving? where are we going now?

Raymond has a way of evading even the simplest of questions. His favourite response seems to be, “um…later I tell you.” Sometimes he’d actually address my question, but always without answering it.

If I was sent to ask him, for example, the simple binary question, “are we paying for this meal, or are you paying for it?” I would return to our group scratching my head. “I think he said…”

This was sometimes frustrating but generally endeared him to us. The only time we lost our patience with him was during the harrowing death-ride to Mersing. All the vehicles on the road to Mersing drive rediculously fast for the road conditions, but Raymond seemed determined to be the fastest. He passed every other car, truck, van and motorcycle.

Ultimately, though, we were difficult customers, and we knew it. Raymond was very flexible and accommodating considering this. He worked around our schedules, provided us with door-to-door service for the entire learning process, and organised a really fun first dive trip – oil spills not withstanding.

Six of us left Fraser Suites just after dinner. We stopped at Raymond’s office to pick up our rented gear and another couple of divers.

Next was a truly harrowing night ride to the port of Mersing in Malaysia. 100+ kph. Skidding around tight curves. Swerving in and out of the way of oncoming traffic as we passed every fast-moving car, truck, van and motorbike between Johor Bahru and Mersing.

We arrived at our boat at about 2:30am and tried to catch a few winks before the boat embarked for Tioman Island, but the mosquitoes were fierce. Three bites on my face and one inside my ear – not to mention eight or ten on my arms – were enough to guarantee a sleepless night. All of us did manage to doze off for most of the 3 hour ride to the island, once the boat started moving.

We had a quick breakfast on the island then headed out for our first dive – ever.

Into an oil spill.

Apparently, a sizeable spill occurred off of Johor Bahru last week, and some of it made its way over to our first dive site. To be fair, we couldn’t see the oil from the boat. It was only after we’d been in the water for a few minutes that we started to notice a scattering of sticky black droplets on the surface.

While we waited on the surface for our instruction, bits of the oil started to stick to our faces, hair, gear.

We descended to six or eight meters or so and went through a few skills for about 45 minutes. When we ascended to the surface, it seemed like the oil had cleared. But I was the first to swim to the boat, and as I reached to sweep the first clump of kelp out of my way, my arm and hand were suddenly covered in globs of thick, sticky oil.

Crude oil, as it turns out, is much more like tar. It’s sticky rather than greasy, and all the divers and snorklers on the boat were covered in it. Faces, arms, hair, wetsuits, bikinis and all our gear. We had to use diesel fuel as a solvent to get the stuff off our skin and out of our hair.

After the dive, we spent a few hours cleaning our gear and ate a small lunch before heading out for our second dive.

As a side note, it’s interesting that I’ve maintained a steady – if very infrequent – sms correspondence with Sharon. I chatted with her just once in a bar. That’s all. And although I haven’t seen her since that first night – months ago – she said she would have agreed to go away with our group for a weekend dive trip, if she did not already have plans to go to Amsterdam. It’s possible she has a better memory of me than I do of her, but the likelier story is that we just mutually trust that since we exchanged numbers a long time ago, we must have found each other interesting or at least harmless enough.

Anyway, I bring up Sharon because she recommended a dive instructor in one of her text messages months ago. I couldn’t remember who it was though, and when I tried to contact her to get the name, she was already on her way to Amsterdam.

So we ended up with the man we call crazy Raymond, whom I met through a dive shop in Lucky Plaza.