The journey to Singapore and Malaysia was broken up into stages. On Saturday, June 28th, our group of 22 students, 2 teacher participants, and 5 Cultural Vistas staff arrived at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California to begin the American Youth Leadership Program to Singapore and Malaysia with a pre-departure orientation.
This orientation time was a chance to step away from our busy lives and focus on what we would experience in both Singapore and Malaysia, discuss our roles as cultural explorers, begin to define the quest for environmental sustainability around the world, and get to know the students and teachers that we would be traveling with for the next few weeks.
Our group has only been together for a couple of days, but this group of students is proving themselves as thoughtful, articulate, and both globally and environmentally engaged. It is exciting to think about how this program will empower these students in their future endeavors.
On the evening before our departure for Singapore, we shared a Malaysian meal from a local LA restaurant. There will no doubt be more blogging about food in the future, but here's what we started with:
Again, I can't wait to learn more about and try the wide variety of local food in both Singapore and Malaysia, but we started with turmeric rice, fried rice, green vegetable curry, chicken satay, a mixed vegetable and fruit salad, as well as a variety of dressings, peanut sauce, and pepper sauces. My impression of Southeast Asian food has always been that the incredible combinations of spices, sweet/savory/spicy flavors, and perfect matches of meats/vegetables/fruits make for dishes that are incredibly easy to get excited about trying. Truly looking forward to the culinary adventures of the next few weeks!
As I alluded to above, our task within this program is to be a cultural explorer and look at issues of environmental sustainability in both countries. With regards to culture, exploring this region opens the door to far greater understanding of all the cultural influences that have and continue to shape both Singapore and Malaysia. These two nations have been greatly shaped by their strategic location in the South China Sea, along the Strait of Malacca. This geopolitical reality has placed these two states within the larger spheres of influence of India, China, Muslim merchant enclaves, European colonial interests, Japan during the lead up and through a portion of World War II, and to some degree the sometimes cooperative and sometimes competitive interests of both the United States and China in the world today. However, despite all of these outside influences, there still exists a local culture that may be influenced by the outside, but is still all it's own. My goal is to try to understand the complexities of these cultural realities as fully as possible. I also hope to investigate political and economic realities that make nations like the United States, China, and India such key partners in the region. While this may sound like an overly generalized explanation of what I'd like to learn about, my hope is to break down small observations and insights into far more coherent blog entries.
With regards to environmental sustainability, I think it will be fascinating to see how Singapore's very unusual situation of being incredibly poor in natural resources (Essentially, they have no naturally occurring potable sources of freshwater or major mineral resources.), has led them to use focused and intentional investment in human resources and innovative technologies to deliver one of the highest standards of living on the planet. In Malaysia, there will be other opportunities to look at both local and global environmental issues, including agricultural practices, such as slash and burn cultivation in the production of palm oil.
I have to admit and apologize that this entry has gone far too long, but what is one to do when one is at 35,998 feet, cruising at 584 mph over Alaska's Aleutian Islands, roughly 6 hours into an 11 hour flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo? (Gotta love the flight info monitor! I don't think I'll ever get tired if trying to wrap my mind around the incredible distances we can travel relatively quickly in today's world.) The scary thing is we have a 7 hour conecting flight from Tokyo to Singapore, so I can't promise that there won't be an update to this entry.
All I know is that we left Los Angeles at roughly 1:30pm on June 30, 2014, and we're set to arrive in Singapore at 1:30am on July 2, 2014. Singapore is 13 hours ahead of Central Standard Time, and I'll be 9,188 miles from Kearney, Nebraska. Here's to the next chapter of a sojourner's voyage!
Update: Arrival in Singapore!
We're here. We made it! From travel to Los Angeles from our homes on Saturday to our marathon flight path that began on June 30th in LA and had us arriving at Changi Airport in Singapore on July 2 at 1:30am. In just a few short hours the in-country portion begins, but for now, as I sit and finish this up at 4:00am in Singapore, it's time for a little rest before today's activities.
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