Good morning! It is 5:30am in Singapore and I just can't sleep. I bought 3 hours of internet time and feel so cheap that I need to use it all. I know I'll pay for this idea tomorrow in meetings, but it seems so brilliant to me right now.

We traveled for 30+ hours to get to Singapore. The only tickets that worked for us included a 7 hour layover in London which was quite boring in the airport. We saw some grass briefly through several layers of glass and doors. I still wonder what London looks like. It made me feel very poor to look in all the shops in the airport. Londoners have a strong pound and they are able to fly almost anywhere and find their pound to be stronger than the local currency. So, the prices weren't out of line for a Londoner.

We had meetings all day yesterday with Kathryn Elsmore, our host - the director of Alpha India's development projects. She is a lovely woman who has been living out of hotels for the past 3 months or so - all over the world. Her colleague, Julia Evans joined us last night for Singapore Slings at the Raffles Hotel. Julia is an editor and is working on developing anime cartoons for Alpha Asia Pacific. She works directly with a team of the best cartoonists in China, so she travels quite often to Bejing. These women are so well traveled that it really made a contrast to Canadians who may travel one time to another continent in their lifetime.

We also had meetings with the team at the Singapore office to learn what they all are doing and to figure out how the internet can be developed to help them. There are some very real barriers with language in this area of the world - as there is no common language that ties the countries here together. Most of the team that flies around the Aesean region relies on translators for their work even though they are fluent in Mandarin and English.

We toured Chinatown last night and had a hot pot of soup. Singapore is super clean, all english and very beautiful. The people are very friendly and women can feel totally safe walking alone at any time of night or day. You can leave your purse on a table and walk away from it with no fear of it being stolen. The water and lettuce here are safe so I've been making sure I get enough of both.

We meet again with some key members of the Singapore team tomorrow and then fly to Chennai, India later in the evening. It's unbearably hot there, apparently. Kathryn also said that sometimes there are power shortages that cut out the air-con, so that's something else that can happen.

Our flights so far have been very good. We flew Singapore Air to Singapore from London and each got a row of seats to ourselves. This was extremely helpful for sleeping throughout the flight.

I'm going to try and get some photos onto flickr and into this blog, too.

Cheers,
Sharon