Essentially, It's The Same Wherever You Go

I'd resolved to write a summary piece on my experiences in Singapore after my first month or so here. I'd resolved that I'd make the piece quite good and spend a long time on it, and I'd pour into this hypothetical piece all of my experiences in this tropical blast furnace so that others might benefit vicariously from my miserable suffering.

This is not that piece. I'd forgotten that this is the last week The Daily Campus publishes. In fact, I only realized that about four hours ago. I immediately resolved, of course, to write the summary piece that I told myself that I'd start working on over 90 days ago.

I cannot profess any life-changing and mind-altering experiences. Singapore is not exactly all that different from an American city. Bangkok is not exactly all that different, either. Neither is Kuala Lumpur, for that matter. Singaporeans aren't so entirely different from New Yorkers who aren't so different from Germans who aren't terribly far from Minnesotans thereupon from Swedes, from Californians, from Spaniards and the Japanese.

But that doesn't mean there haven't been plentiful opportunities to suffer from unfamiliar conditions. I used to think, before I came to Singapore, that I liked the heat - that I liked humidity. These preferences were not, as I had mistakenly believed, intrinsic. After the wind tunnel that is the Storrs' campus and the searingly dry air that predominates New England during the majority of the year, anyone could be lulled into thinking that they enjoyed humidity.

The Tropics are out to destroy me and everything I have ever loved. Especially all of my technology, my camera, laptop, watches, jewelry, clothing, food, and even water (bottles) have all fallen prey, in varying degrees, to the disgusting scourge that is air which, in terms of tangible composition, constantly hovers somewhere between water and pure gelatin.

One begins to feel slighted, somewhat tricked that they tromped so far and paid so much only to come to reside in a society bereft of intrinsic enlightenment , not so very different from their own asides that everything is submerged in a broth of boiling Jell-O.

Therefore it is necessary, if only for the sake of alleviating cognitive dissonance, to begin to play the Traveler's Game. The Traveler's Game, especially apparent in its more obnoxious variant, The Backpacker's Game, is an amorphous pursuit the rules of which have never been and will never be explicitly laid down, for in doing so the players would simply deem the referee's judgments too "touristy" and begin to practice the game in the most different possible in another desperate attempt to grasp at a misty sliver of authenticity.

However, the basic objective of the Traveler's Game always remains the same: to prove how hardcore of a globetrotter you are to your friends and family and potential hook-ups by traveling to the Third-World for three or four days so that you can come back and change your Facebook status to something deep about having been impacted by seeing "How the other half of the world lives," before changing it the next week to "The nightlife in Hong Kong is so good!" Extra points are scored for sleeping with natives of the countries you travel to - provided that you don't have to pay for the pleasure - and for taking photographs of yourself standing directly in front of jaw-droppingly beautiful monuments and natural landscapes. For the latter achievement, points are awarded in proportion to the percentage of said vista or architectural marvel that can't be seen. Extra merit is also awarded for giving the peace symbol or posing in a manner which unintentionally defames the local culture. The more inaccessible or obscure your destination, the more valuable the experience.

The trickiness of the Traveler's Game is also that is very possible lose points - for example, by bragging about having visited Y and done X to someone who already visited Y and did X last year, "when Y was having a local religious festival, too." Nonetheless, the best strategy is typically to remain on offense for as long as one can. Therefore, whenever one meets any individual of the most insubstantially different ethnic, religious, or cultural background, it is necessary to begin to mine them for potential point-scoring opportunities. The result of this will inevitably be Brits, Yanks and Kiwis sitting around discussing their incredibly minute linguistic differences in tones of hushed wonder, as they stop to ponder the dark chasms separating "taking the mick out of" and "making fun of" someone. (Canadians are not included in this analysis primarily because I do not know colloquial shorthand for their nationality.)

There comes a time, however, when one begins to realize that their pursuit of the game is endangering their very lives and that they have crossed the line from "roughing it" to "killing themselves." For me, this point arose when I discovered that I could play tic-tac-toe upon my own left foot, so swollen with blood and pus from abrasions and bites collected during a solid week of jungle trekking that when touched the skin would turn white and remain so for a solid fifteen to twenty seconds. If one executed their moves with appropriate precision, it was even possible to trace out a rather passable game of hangman.

I thereupon decided to retire from my point-gathering adventures to Singapore's largest mall, whereupon I had the ill-fortune to discover that it was May Day. For some incomprehensible reason, Singapore - which is all respects apparently designed from the ground-up to appeal exclusively to the prurient interest of Adam Smith - celebrates what is essentially a Marxist holiday. I therefore had the pleasure of walking through the most crowded mall in the world's fourth-most densely populated sovereign entity on an international holiday, whereupon I arrived at this final point of wisdom: relationships are inconvenient worldwide. Holding hands in the middle of what can only be described as a human, urban kaleidoscope is about as ill-advisedly irritating as it can get. Relationships - if it's not people holding hands when you're trying to get past them, its long-distance boyfriends who may or may not be mentioned and whose emotional claims may or may not be extant.

And so, for my final enlightened discourse, I leave the reader only with the conclusion that I made a tragic error in coming to a southeast Asian country. I was never particularly attracted to Asian women; I have a terrible time doing things I'm not intrinsically motivated to do. If it isn't, "Baby Bryan, eat your broccoli - it's the only way to get your vitamins," it's, "Slightly-Older Bryan, go for the local women, it's the only way you're going to get your jollies." In either instance, my response is extreme obstinacy.

Therefore, I've already decided upon my next act: Buenos Aires. Manzano-traseros, here I come.

Weekly Columnist Bryan Murphy is a 4th-semester economics major currently studying abroad in Singapore. His column appears on Friday. He can be contacted at Bryan.Murphy@UConn.edu.