Law, Partially

So Singapore is staging Formula 1’s  first night race . They’re worried it will rain, and the flood lights reflecting off standing water will create glare. It will almost certainly rain because it rains a lot in Singapore. The track is set up through the downtown streets. This could be kind of cool. But I won’t go to it. I don’t have a ticket. Plus, everyone and his brother and sister will be at this thing, and I have studying to do. This is supposed to be a tourist attraction to lure foreigners to come and spend their foreign currency in Singapore. Luring foreigners to spend their money is very Singaporean, but to be fair, all nations want foreigners to do this. Singapore just comes up with well-funded and well-run schemes to achieve this goal. I can’t say that Singapore is particularly F1 crazy, from what I’ve observed, but I’ve seen more Porsches, Maseratis, and Ferraris here, per capita, than anywhere else in the world I’ve ever been - even Dubai. I’ll assume that Monaco beats Sin

This talk about Singapore’s draconian criminal justice, with such harsh penalties for such minor crimes – deterring minor crimes will make major crimes even less likely; there will be no testing of the limits of prosecutorial discretion – I have to say it’s deterring some individuals from committing minor crimes. I’m not going to say I’m a newly-anointed party animal, but with my new Singaporean friends, I’ve stayed out late drinking a lot of beer, and I’ve been really tempted to urinate in public. In the States I would. I urinated in public in pretty much every European, North American, Indian, and Ethiopian city I’ve ever been to. It’s sort of a tradition. And when you gotta go, you gotta go. But here in Singapore, I’m too worried about being punished by public caning; not to mention, I don’t have time for court. (I’m not scared of being caned; I just don’t want to have to mess around with the hassle.) I don’t know for sure if urinating in public is the norm in China. It is in Indi

No doubt about it, Singapore is an urban nation. But if all this concrete and all these buildings weren’t here, this would be a rainforest jungle. We’re only 1degree north of the Equator, and it’s humid too (weather.com says 70% today). My room stays a balmy 84 degrees, and when I woke up from a nap on Sunday evening, my bed was wet with sweat; I looked at the thermometer on my alarm clock, and it was 90degrees. Typically, when I’m in my room, I wear just gym shorts, and an unfortunate consequence of frequent sweating is that shorts start to smell. I’ve never had stinky shorts before, but I know now that if you wear them too often and sweat too much, they start to stink – even after just one or two days. There’s an annoyance/reward trade-off with rain. Rain cools the air but is annoying. Singapore wasn’t so hot earlier this month when it rained every day for two weeks, but walking in the rain, umbrella or not, sucks. Now it has rained very little for the past week, and it is hot.

I am in school in Singapore, which partially explains why I don’t write as much as maybe I did in previous months. I don’t get the free time here to ruminate about my own and the country’s existence as often as I did in Ethiopia. There are some things I’d like to say about Singapore, a very interesting and very anxious city-state, but I’m not ready yet. Plus, I walk the streets with school on my mind rather than my blog. So maybe, dear reader, you wonder, what am I studying that’s so important that I can’t take any time for my audience? I’m at National University of Singapore in a one year masters program. In May I will be awarded an LLM (masters of law) degree. My major is Asian Legal Studies. Next school year I will go back to Pittsburgh for one more year, where I’ll finish my JD and MBA concurrently, then be ready to again enter the work force somewhere in the world. Why study Asian law? My brilliant plan is to become expert in Asian business so that I can specialize in trans-Pa

Singapore may have had a more sleazy reputation at points in its past. However, today in this country where so much is controlled by an intelligent and watching government, these parts of history don’t get much play. Like most good port cities, Singapore circa WWI was full of good times: gambling, prostitution, and the sailors who love them. There was also a bored European aristocracy who held fancy cocktail parties most nights, and a stream of rich Europeans sailing over and stopping by to go “oriental.” It was the imported labor (Chinese and Indians) and the Europeans-on-the-sly frequenting the prostitutes and opium dens. I read a novel set in Singapore in the early 70s, called Saint Jack by Paul Theroux, that styled Singapore as a destination for some alcohol and prostitutes amongst soldiers looking for some r&r during the Vietnam War. ( Click here for some lyrical, but not prurient, musings by Theroux on 70s Singapore.) Prostitution is legal to some degree in Singapore. I

…as in, mobile phone. This was a headline in the newspaper. Singapore is famous for being very tough on crime. People here are still talking about Michael Fay, the American teenager who vandalized in Singapore and was caned for his crime, with even the President of the United States appealing for the twerp to be let off the hook. In St. Louis I used to read the police blotter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to see where people were getting murdered. There were murders almost every day near O’Fallon Park on the Northside. In the U.S. you tell the police that someone stole your phone not because you think the police will find it - or even make an effort - but just because you want to have a police record to fill out an insurance form. But no, in Singapore, this makes the newspaper: http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Courts%2Band%2BCrime/Story/STIStory_274446.html

My (sort of crappy) apartment building. It wasn’t very easy to find an apartment that I didn’t have to share with the landlord. The rooms I initially looked at were extra rooms rented out by families and old men. Maybe if I would have looked harder and longer, I could have done better. But it’s difficult when you’re a foreigner, when you don’t know the city, you don’t know the public transportation routes, or even where your school is at, or even the terminology that’s used in apartment shopping. For instance, I live in a “private apartment;” which is different from government housing, called “HDB,” doled out by the Housing and Development Board; which is different from a “landed estate” and the elusive “condominium.” I spent days in Ethiopia waiting for webpages to load in order to try to learn the ins and outs and meet roommates. My apartment is a little far from convenient transportation. The building is old. My room is small. My roommates are marginally friendly — they all sta

I'm in the colonies -- Singapore, actually, and Singapore is not part of China. Singapore is far south of China. Singapore is a very small nation. It is an island nation, and the city of Singapore composes the entire nation that is Singapore. It’s a city-nation-state. My Singaporean friends tell me that Westerners always think Singapore is part of China. In a way, that’s not a completely uninformed guess, as China does have some special city-states that were former Western colonies – Macao and Hong Kong – and Singapore herself is a former colony city-state. And the majority of the population in Singapore is of Chinese descent -- as in, part of the Chinese Diaspora. But young Singaporeans speak English very well. It is their first language. The schools here are good. That’s why I came.  Can you picture the place now? One degree above the equator, snuggled between Malaysia and Indonesia, composed of nothing but a big island and a few smaller islands, ships with goods manufact

There were many tourism advertisement posters posted in my offices at the Ethiopian Ministry of Trade and Industry. The women of some tribes in southern Ethiopia don’t wear tops, and tourists actually go down there to gawk. It seems too voyeuristic to me, but maybe all tourism is anyway… And the lovely Ministry of Trade and Industry itself. This is the ministry in charge of Ethiopia’s bid to join the WTO, and this is where I spent my summer working. The squiggles above the Latin characters are the Ethiopic script, aka the Ge’ez script. Amharic is written in this script. Ethiopian attorneys. That is indeed a picture of an Indian god behind us because we went to an Indian restaurant for my Addis Ababa farewell lunch. I had a speech planned to give about my time in Ethiopia, but my boss didn’t ask me to give a farewell speech, so the lunch was unceremonious and featured mainly me impressing everyone with how much I can overeat. Ski Dubai inside the Mall of the

There are few streetlights on the roads of Addis Ababa, and often the power is out anyway. Businesses tend to be far from the street and sometimes behind walls, and the businesses aren’t brightly lit anyway, except for small fruit stands and meat kiosks with their huge sides of beef hanging inside. What I’m getting to is, the streets at night are dark and somewhat foreboding. On my second to last night in Addis Ababa, as I was walking the dark streets near my house, through the gauntlet of whores, to reach a restaurant that serves Ethiopian honey wine, called  tej , I was thinking of Lethal Weapon 3, where Danny Glover is in his last week on the police force before retirement when all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles. I thought, my last days in Addis, wouldn’t it suck if something bad happened now. But nothing bad did happen. The worst thing that happened was drinking the  tej . It’s not very delicious. And all the way from Ethiopia to Singapore was a series of minor disasters

And so quickly, it’s over. I’m ashamed that I complained so much during my short sojourn in Ethiopia, but as my Ethiopian colleagues tell me, the frustrations of Ethiopian life anger them too. The extortion and arbitrary rule of landlords. No water, then no hot water. No electricity, and I was treated to one last evening of reading by candlelight yesterday. All the hustlers out on the street trying to find you taxis, shine your shoes, hold umbrellas for you, all for a tip. Pick pockets. People on the street teasing foreigners. The dust. The mud. One colleague said that he grew up in the countryside, and even he gets pissed off by Ethiopia. I’m still embarrassed to be such a complainer because with all I learned about law, trade, development, and people this summer, I’m sure I’ll remember the good parts much more than the bad. I’ll miss fasting food (I’ve been to eat at my favorite fasting restaurant four times in a week and a half). Cheap food and beer. My colleagues. I’m having d

And a fine photography job I did on the Lion of Judah. Eh, it was raining, and some hustlers were yelling at me not to take the photo. They probably wanted to charge me for the privilege. Who knows? This statue is a national symbol of Ethiopia and predates the Italian invasion of the 1930s. During the occupation, Italy tore it down and buried it; apparently it was dug up after the occupation and perched atop this pedestal. A stamp in this statue’s shape appears at the beginning of printed collections of Ethiopian laws dating from the Emperor’s time. It is a symbol of the country. Below is the modern Lion of Judah that was erected in the ’60s and was thought quite progressive for Ethiopia. I am fond of the filthy statue. It’s cool and unique.

And from approximately May 2008 through the end of July 2008, there were many blog entries documenting my Ethiopian misadventures. Alas, they are gone for now because of Internet failures. I may be able to recover some of them, however. Stay tuned to this blog.

What a beautiful name that continent has. Like Asia, India, and America, it's Latin. It invokes in my mind a 2 dimensional outline of the continent's borders, the interior colored by three stripes of green, gold, and red, the colors of Ethiopia's flag, adopted by Pan Africanists as their symbol. (for pictures of the African flags utilizing these beautiful colors, click here ) Last summer I did South Asia. This summer, I do East Africa. Ethiopia. The cradle of humanity. The rallying point for Pan-Africanism. And the spiritual home of Rastafarianism. Their vaunted Zion, Jamaica being Babylon, where the Rastafarians felt enslaved. Africa. Ethiopian flag (I can't find a picture of this three-striped Africa map I've seen before) This also means the blog will be returning.