They Say It's an Island

I went to Singapore expecting it to be a bit like Vancouver. Liquor was certainly priced as though it were Vancouver, but I didn’t get the cityscape/ocean combo I was hoping for. The island is oddly secluded from the open ocean and the architecture is rather extravagant, but I think I appreciate Vancouver more than I did before.

Singapore is lovely, but I got the impression that I was walking around in someone’s pristinely made Sim City. I heard it described as “artificial” by people living there and apparently eating and shopping are the two hobbies of Singaporians, maybe out of boredom?

Fortunately for me, film was the hobby of my gracious hosts in Singapore. They spoiled me with a private screening of a Cannes Film Festival Film and then student screenings from the New York University Tische School of the Arts Film School, Singapore location (aka Pretty Big Deal). It was really inspiring to spend time with graduate students studying film. A lot of them come from business/econ/poli-sci backgrounds which I found shocking because at UBC I was the one commerce student allowed to take a film production class and the art driven kids looked at me as a capitalist anti-christ.

Anyways, I have been re-inspired towards film with some very ambitious and expensive goals. I have been dreaming about the New York University MBA/MFA Film Production Graduate Program. It requires being fantastic enough to get accepted independently into the NYU MBA and MFA programs then you enter their unique and first of its kind, film production program. Fortunately, one thing I realized in Thailand is that I am ambitious. I am over the culture absorbing aspect of Thailand where I can appreciate the uniqueness of the whole world stopping at lunch time and people coming to class an hour late – I need to get to New York, a place where people don’t stop walking on escalators and lunch is multitasked.