A condensed report

It's very humid here. Lucy's house is lovely and spacious, and the stairs don't creak once when you step on them. She has a big black lab/chow mix, named Rugby, whose big droopy eyes remind me of my yellow lab, and who apparently hoards off intruders, as the Chinese are superstitiously afraid of black dogs. Behind her house is a hill, and behind that a large expanse of land that consists of coarse, sharp grass up until the point where the forest sprouts. The grass is filled will billions of tiny ants. We sat outside and drank Corona after Corona after Corona, and talked, and I showed Lucy the footage from my fishing excursion. There are little bugs that swarm around, that have red and brown polka-dotted bodies, and whose tiny wings are yellow with brown stripes. Lucy's family doesn't have a car; they take taxis everywhere. When we were in the taxi last night, we would pass dozens of flatbed trucks with exhausted looking dark-skinned men in the back, apparently Malaysian day workers, who have to trudge back home every night through the congested Singapore traffic. We went to a cocktail party--a "free flowing wine party"--at a bar hidden inside of Lucy's father's place of work, "Biopolis," which is basically Disneyworld for biologists, which also, as Lucy explained, could never exist in America, because we don't believe in scientific research to that extent. Apparently Singapore is saturated by a constant stream of unfathomable wealth that pumps relentlessly into its open crevasses. The whole thing is very sexual. We mingled and shmoozed with all of Lucy's parents' friends, all biologists, and from all over, but who have all inevitably been sucked into this small, humid, modernized Asian oasis. "It's Singapore," I heard a few of them exclaim, a couple of times, in regard to the fact that they would have to attempt to wake up before eight on Monday morning for a round of golf in Malaysia after a Sunday night dripping with white wine and whisky, or something like that. I thought of the day workers in the truck, and wondered if they'd pass each other on the highway. A lot of the biologists were English, and I enjoyed being witness to their quippy jokes about Oxford, pubs in Oxford, people from Oxford. Lucy and I talked about Edinburgh to them, and ate noodles, and I attempted to resist coming off as completely, unbearably awkward whilst feigning off the petulant urge to just pass out in the bushes, overwhelmed with synonyms for 'fatigue'. It was breezy, a beautiful night. In the taxi home, before I passed out, I mentioned how tall the buildings were, and Lucy told me that because the country's so small, they're forced to build up opposed to out. Everything is very fertile. Overwhelmingly so.