Today I started to question this whole gig. It feels more than a little strange in a country where labor is cheap to have paid money to come here to build houses with a team of twelve other people who have little or no construction experience, when the same money could have paid for more than twice the number of experienced builders. I don’t want to be cynical, but feels just slightly artificial, designed to make some well-to-do foreigners feel better about ourselves.

We were split into two groups today, and I worked with four other team members and a dozen or so local construction guys to transport and raise eighteen concrete columns and set them into the footing holes of two houses. It was hard work, and it felt good to have done it. But there were a few local guys just hanging around, and it made me scratch my head a little.

Meanwhile, the folks I’m with are so eager to lend a hand it’s comical sometimes. If a guy turns and reaches for, say, a shovel to scoop sand into a basket, my habitat compadres leap into action. One goes for a shovel, another a basket. Without really knowing what the guy wants to do with them. Or knowing only perhaps that the sand is for mixing into mortar. So the sign language ensues.

Shoulder shrug, hands in the “huh?” position [how many baskets?].

Wrinkled brow, some words in Thai [I don't know what you're asking me].

Or, maybe no wrinkled brow and some other words in Thai [add six baskets of sand].

???

And so it goes. Eventually, the baskets get filled with sand and tossed into the mortar mix, and all is good.

I think I’m just cranky. Having someone who’s never done a thing in her life tell me how I should do that thing is something that apparently rubs me the wrong way.

I’m also feeling pretty done with traveling alone, after almost a year in Singapore and weeks of travel in the region, here I am again. If I didn’t have to use this two weeks before the end of the year, I’d have saved it.

But what a thing to complain about. My Singapore stint was an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything, and I’m sure this will be too.

My eyes are puffy and sore.

Tonight I went to see some sort of celebration. It was no big production, and it wasn’t all that interesting, but the vibe was good.

Some people in a village 30 minutes south of here set up a small stage by a big blue boat that washed into their village during the tsunami. A band was playing. People were selling silk flowers, woven handbags and other crafts. A group of women had set up a booth offering free foot massages. All of it was to raise money to rebuild the waterfont there, and also to support the burmese community. Legal and illegal aliens from Myanmar who make up a significant percentage of the population in this part of Thailand, and who perform most of the construction and labor jobs around here.

They’re leaving the boat there, in the middle of their town, as a tourist attraction. Makes sense. It would cost money to take it away, but if they work it right, people will pay to see it, buy postcards of it, etc. They’ve nicknamed it the ‘blue angel’ because as it drifted through the village, it didn’t hurt anyone or damage a single house. In fact, a number of people were able to cling to it for support and buoyancy before it finally came to rest.

An orange boat down the road, on the other hand, has been dubbed “the demon” because of the death and destruction it left in its wake.

The angel and the demon. Blue and orange – opposite colors on the color wheel.

Today I learned to lay cinderblock. Something I’d never done before. All fourteen of us worked on one house. A few of the villagers helped too. They don’t speak any English, but we have a translater whom we keep plenty busy. In any case, the language of smiles and hard work is enough to get us through most interchanges. We dug holes together, hauled blocks, mixed concrete.

There are two guys in our group named Hal. Hal Schmitz and Hal Taylor. Both white-haired retirees. Hal the greater and Hal the lesser as they like to say. Hal the greater because he’s the team leader. Hal the lesser because he’s not. I like to think of them as Hal the serious and Hal the funny. Hal the funny is a rocket scientist. He actually worked on the Apollo project that sent men to the moon. Now he runs his own consulting business, working with firms – mostly in Russia – that mine titanium for aviation and aerospace applications. Hal’s got plenty of opinions and likes to talk about himself a lot, but in an amiable way that somehow doesn’t offend or annoy.

Hal the serious is a war veteran. Not exactly sure which war, but I’m thinking Korean. He’s the right age. He’s responsible for us, and the success of this project, so it makes sense that he’s a little more serious than the rest of us. But he’s starting to loosen up a little.

It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon here, relatively cool. I woke up very early this morning, tossed and turned in the pitch darkness for a while, then watched the interior of my room gradually take shape as the sun rose. The air conditioner hummed along and cooled the room nicely, but filled it with a faint mildewy smell.

I have a roomate. Tom. He’s from L.A., a nice guy but the kind of nice you want to hate. He sold his company a few months ago, and he’s been traveling ever since. He’s got some money. He’s smart, good looking, in good shape.

At 7am, Tom’s alarm went off. He got up and showered, and I stepped outside to feel the air of the new day. Not a leaf was stirring, and there wasn’t so much as a ripple on the pool. Warm and humid, but not hot. I just stood there and enjoyed the silence for a while.

Today was not a work day.

We toured a few tsunami-impacted sites, taking pictures. It’s an amazing thing to see the exploded remnants of steel-reinforced concrete walls once belonging to a five-star resort. Even more amazing to see a 100 foot military police boat sitting in a farmer’s field, two kilometers from the sea’s edge (and to know it was two kilometers offshore when the waves hit). So, it was carried four kilometers from where it had been steadfastly guarding the king’s grandson, who was jetskiiing at the time and died that day.

On the much brighter side, we also saw some of the houses Habitat built in June. Met the happy homeowners and their grinning children, who proudly took us inside and toured us around.

We had a delicious family style lunch of cashew chicken, grilled salted fish, deep fried prawns and shrimp, tom yum soup, stir-fried greens with garlic and of course lots of steamed rice. After lunch, the group split. Some went back to the hotel, while the rest of us took a short 1km hike to a nice beach with a view.

We sat and chatted for a while, and then from there, we went to an elephant orphanage, where we were treated to a steep muddy ride. I kept thinking I was going to take a header over the front of the thing, but it was a lot of fun, and the elephants definitely deserved the bananas and pineapple we fed them at the end of the trail.

I’m in the Bangkok airport right now, with a couple hours to kill. Friends have asked me whether this trip is for business or pleasure, and the answer is a little more complicated than that.

It’s definitely not business. Let’s call it pleasure with a purpose.

I had a couple of weeks of time-off I needed to use before the end of the year, and I signed up for a trip with Habitat for Humanity to work in the tsunami-impacted town of Khao Lak for a couple of weeks. As far as I know, we’ll be working on a single house for one family, but I’ll post the details here after I get to Khao Lak and get the scoop.

Anyway, assuming I can find Internet access there, look for a bunch of new posts.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working in LA. My hotel, the LAX Plaza, is across the street from our office, and our office is across the street from the client. So I walk to work, walk to client meetings. I can’t get over how bizarre that feels in LA. Of course I still rent a car, because after work, the Culver City area is just a strip mall ghetto.

They’re renovating the LAX Plaza one-room-at-a-time, so our office manager in LA told me I had to ask for a “new” room. She also told me not to eat in the hotel restaurant or hang out in the hotel bar.

The place is a far cry from some of the places I’ve been lucky to stay in over the past year, so I’ve put together the following list of things the LAX Plaza does not give me for $99 a night…

10. Elevators that tell you what floor they’re on
9. Cable television (except, alternately, CNN or Discovery)
8. Internet access
7. An alarm clock
6. A “Do Not Disturb” card for the door
5. A mini bar
4. Bath slash shower gel
3. Pillows that don’t smell like “head”
2. A blanket without cigarette holes in it
1. That clean feeling

And one old, relevant Top Ten list from the Late Show:

Top Ten Things You Don’t Want To Hear From A Guy In A Hotel

10. “The desk clerk is nuts, so whatever room number she gives you, add three.”
9. “I wrote you a note about halfway through your roll of toilet paper.”
8. “Meet me in the whirlpool in twenty minutes.”
7. “If you want a bellhop, press ’1′ on your phone; If you want a hooker, press ’2.’”
6. “Ring this bell again, I’ll burn your luggage.”
5. “Hey, could you go over to the Ramada and swipe us some towels?”
4. “You know, every room has a hair dryer — How’s that for ritzy?”
3. “Are you the bastard that took my gin out of the minibar?”
2. “Wanna see the pictures I took of you sleeping?”
1. “Do you mind sharing your room with a monkey?”

Next time I’m staying here. It’s hardly luxury, but it’s next door.

My job has me traveling again already. This time it’s just to LA for a short project, so I can come home on the weekends. Seems like all of our new business is in SoCal all of a sudden.

Bizarrely, the client is a block away from my company’s LA office. A walking commute in LA?

Tonight, I was supposed to see my friend CC and possibly her crew of Singapore Airlines flight attendants, who are coincidentally in LA for the rest of the week. But she had other plans tonight, and I have to fly back to SF tomorrow. Anyway it’s ok, because next Tuesday I get to see John Vanderslice bowl!

/s

I had brunch at The Ramp this morning with my friend Bee. The Ramp has been my default Sunday post-laundromat stop for the past couple of weeks (and for the month of May, when I was last in SF). The weather has been perfect, and The Ramp offers some of the best outdoor seating in the city, right beside the water in China Basin.

But that’s part of what bothers me about the place.

If I owned a restaurant in such a perfect location, I’d want to make the dining experience as special as the surroundings. The prime plot of land deserves it.

Instead, The Ramp is furnished with beat up old wooden tables and worn umbrellas. This would be charming if it felt intentionally old, like a $150 pair of distressed jeans, but it just feels sort of half-assed. Worse, the place serves mediocre food and drinks – using plastic cups and cheap cutlery.

Their bloody mary is decent, but the plastic cup subtracts a couple of points.

It irks me that the place has no commercial incentive to improve. It does a booming business. It’s packed every weekend, and I’m one of the suckers – which in turn irks me even more.

To kill the best part of an hour at Changi Airport, I went for a foot massage.

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.

For the past few days, I’ve taken every opportunity to tell people here that I’ve been in their country for close to a year, and that I’m headed home now. I suppose it’s as if I’m secretly begging Singapore to say it will miss me.

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.

Soon after I arrived in Singapore last October, the Straits Times ran a series on customer service in Singapore. The paper’s assessment was pretty grim. It seemed the caliber of customer service in Singapore was awfully low.

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.