My first week at work

My first workweek is behind me. I met all my new colleagues and got installed at my new workstation. I must say I love the environment and facilities here! Our office is on the 21st floor of a Suntec Tower 4 in the Suntec City, so I have a view on the famous Fountain of Wealth! Yes, that means I have a window view, for those who work in the natural light every day it is probably normal, but in almost all my jobs in the past few years I was always stuck in air-conditioned offices with no windows, so I can surely appreciate my own window now! Unfortunately I still have to deal with AC, but look, I have a window right? That’s definitely an improvement.

Another thing I love is the pantry area… OMG, we have cold/hot water machine, a fridge full of canned drinks at all times (Coke, green tea, juices, café frappe), milk, great coffee machine that makes milos, the local name for a hot chocolate, and lattes, at least 7 types of tea available, minimum 8 full pastry/cookie boxes, ice cream even! I am really impressed I must say! There is no canteen here, but downstairs there is a food court serving dinners with a world-wide variety for about 3-6 Singapore dollars, which is about €1,5-3! After lunch my colleagues have a habit of taking a stroll around the shopping mall, as both the food court and the shopping centre are within the Suntec City architectural structure. There are also restaurants around the Fountain of Wealth, but these are a little more expensive than the food court…

My colleagues are mainly Singaporeans, but there is a good diverse mix too. I struggle with the English accent used in here, but it will just take some time to get used to I suppose. When I came to Cork first time, I wasn’t sure I was in an English speaking country… It was really hard to understand people speak, and I studied English as my major for 5 years so I had thought I was all set! That was a real shock for me! After almost 4 years in Cork I was told that I had a Cork accent, so give me several months and/or years, and I will be speaking Singlish!

Well anyway, first week down!

New salsa dancers in town!

Dinner, cinema and salsa dancing… Perfect plan! We pay the entrance fee; I can already hear salsa beats… my feet are moving! We order mojitos and Cuba Libre and the band is getting on stage. Our friend Christine finds a table right beside the band, very close to the dance-floor, great job!

The dance-floor is quite small considering the size of the club, it seems that it is really a challenge to find a proper dance-floored venue for the dance addicts not only in Ireland, but once the musicians start their hot bachata it does not seem to be an issue! It gets full of couples moving smoothly to the rhythmic timing of the bongos. My first thought, they know bachata, that’s a good start! I wasn’t really sure what the salsa scene was like in Singapore, so I was a little anxious to start dancing here. Several salsa pieces later I get more and more comfortable, the songs sound familiar and so are the moves on the dance-floor. I must admit Herve did not loose his salsa moves, so I profit from it almost all evening…

Funny thing, I watched people dancing and I danced with several partners that night and I noticed something disturbingly familiar… One of my Asian salsa partners had a lead that resembled Pratheesh’es lead and another one I watched on the dance-floor looked like the Asian version of Fintan… That’s really weird… Maybe I just miss my salsa crowd I got into back in Ireland, but it made me feel a little more at ease. Great night, excluding 45min of taxi searching at the end of it, not so easy to find one after midnight apparently…

On our second salsa night we had some Korean food and we took a taxi to get to the ‘Pinguin Can Dance’ studio. Our friend Ion knows one of the instructors there so we get in easy, on the 14th floor of the industrial building in the south of Singapore. It’s not too busy yet, but the dance-floor is quite big. It is a theme party, ‘Black&White’… The level of dancing is a little different, we could see there were more students of the dance school practicing their routines there. It didn’t put us off though, we had great dancing night again, learned some new moves… I had another flashback though, among all the Asian dancers I saw the local equivalent of Ciaran, very similar lead… This time it was easier to get a taxi, we are home before 2am.

I think it will take some time before we discover all the salsa places here and decide which ones we like best, but for now we will just enjoy discovering Singapore-salsa-social…