Its like using something from the 60-70s, but with this giant hotel provided power converter, I am now able to have power for my computers in the room.
While most people in Singapore apparently understand enough English and use it conversationally, apparently there are some people who don't. I was talking to the guy who was doing house keeping and trying to ask him if he needed me to keep my room key in the door (you put the key in the door and it activates all the lights and such), but he couldn't understand me. And now I am starting to understand how people began teaching each other language. In order to get him to understand what I was saying, I pulled the card out and the lights went out in the room. I pointed to the card, then pointed to him. And he understood that he needed to go grab his card and use it.
international travel looks to be able to teach me a lot more than I expected. Hopefully this sort of thing will also work in Tokyo, because I have to admit - Tokyo is fairly intimidating for me and I was just in the airport. I think some of it has to do with some bad experiences I had when travelling abroad years ago when I was stopped (with the rest of the folks I was working with) at gunpoint along the backroads of Panama by some ad hoc roadblock of the locals. We gave them some cash and they let us on our way.
Since then I've been a little gunshy (hah, a pun) about diving deep into foreign cultures.
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