RoboCup Singapore 2010

Well, this has turned into being more of a travel blog than a mass transit blog. Sorry if that disappoints you.

I'm in Singapore right now to compete in the RoboCup 2010 World Championships. My team is in the RoboCup Junior Rescue B competition, in the secondary school division. There's five of us here, four programmers (of which I am one, and one of the mechanical design guys. We also have our teacher, Mr. Jump, and his wife along as chaperones.

The flights here were okay.

The 12.5 hour flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo was somewhat challenging due to the fact that it took off in the middle of the day, and thus everyone was wide awake, and it had no in-seat entertainment options. I have to say that the food on Asian flights is better than on European flights...yum shrimp cocktails and Thai pork & noodles. Japan looked really interesting from the air; various industrial zones and seaports, connected by strips of really dense housing seems to cover almost the entire country, with tiny agricultural areas of rice paddies wedged into the little space that wasn't developed. Also, there were too many golf courses. I don't understand why.

Tokyo was very strange, exactly how I imagined Japan. By Tokyo I mean satellite 1 in terminal 2 of Narita airport. Not really Tokyo. They had lots of shops filled with very strange things, from 32 GB (!!!) SD cards and various "novelty" USB devices, to bags filled with dried calamari and baby crabs. We bought a bag of these strange tiny little bite-sized crabs with the shells still on that were dried and coated in some type of sugar stuff. They were disgusting. It tasted like a mixture of oysters and kettle corn. Yuck.

I slept most of the 7 hours from Tokyo to Singapore, as it was about 7 AM CDT when we boarded the plane and I hadn't slept. We arrived in Singapore at about 2 AM on Friday. It felt like we skipped Thursday.

Customs were surprisingly lax, and we met some other people here for RoboCup on our way through. We got in some vans and headed out to the hotel. The landscape from the airport into downtown felt like southern Florida, only with 20-30 story apartment towers as far as the eye could see. Then we came over a bridge of some sort and the downtown came into view. It was gorgeous. It's like something out of a Jackie Chan movie...a huge sprawling, modern, and bright Asian metropolis.

Our hotel is VERY nice. It's very small and modern. The lobby feels a lot like the new W downtown. The rooftop pool is one of those infinity pools and it faces the skyline of the financial district, which is probably about 2 miles away. There is a separate skyline to the side that is much closer, with the SunTech convention center (where the RoboCup competition is) and opera house at its base, about 2 blocks from us. It's beautiful.

We ended up going to bed about 5 AM last night. We woke up at 8 today, but it felt like we got a full night's rest.

The weather here is crazy. Temperature is in the upper 70s- ow 80s... but the humidity is ungodly. Nothing like in Minnesota, or even in Florida. It feels like you're walking around in a steam room whenever you step outside.

We walked around outside for awhile, exploring the area around our hotel, and stopped at a Chinese restaurant for some soft of fabulous noodles and pork. Came out to about $2.00 a person. Nice. While we were eating, a torrential downpour started suddenly, lasted about 5 minutes and then stopped as instantly as it started.

Came back to the hotel to settle down into a long day of programming and testing. We blew the power to the hotel room when we first plugged our equipment in without the big power converter. Put the converter on and everything was fine.

Until next time,
-Drew

Imbabazi

Last night after dinner all the water in Ruhengeri ran out. It came back on at around 3 PM today. According to some of the locals, the water goes out once or twice a week during the dry season.

We left this morning for Imbabazi orphanage, which is in a very remote part of the country near the Congolese border. We drove an hour down a paved highway out of Ruhengeri, and then moved on to a terribly made dirt road which basically consisted of volcanic rock with some gravel to "level"
it out. On the way we saw lots of interesting things.
-A UNAMIR refugee camp for civilians fleeing the conflicts in the eastern DRC
-Groups of convicted genocidaires in pink and blue prison jumpsuits working on a drainage ditch under guards armed with assault rifles and shotguns.
-A dozen or so volcanoes
We also saw from our vantange point on a mountain road Lake Kivu and the Congolese town of Goma, which is the centerpoint of all the fighting in the eastern DRC. Goma sits right against the Rwandan border. The town was almost completely destroyed in a volcanic eruption in 2002, which caused the relocation of the crime-ridden refugee camps from around the city. The town remains the central hub of the arms trade in the DRC. Our guide told us we were 15 KM from Goma. At one point, we were about 4 KM from the Congolese border.

At the orphanage we watched the kids learn spelling in Kinyirwandan, and then taught them some english. After about an hour in the classroom, we ate lunch with Kellen, the curator of the orphanage. Then we walked with some of the older kids up the nearest volcano and down into its crater. I have some pretty cool video of that.

When we returned to Ruhengeri the water was back on, and we were very thankful.

9 of us went with Bosco to see his family and deliver donations. That went fine.

Eh, everyone else is waiting for me to finish up, as per usual.

Until next time,
-Drew

Rwanda Countdown: 12 Hours!

Note: To anyone who normally reads this for transit commentary, if you don't want to read about a 17 year-old kid going to Rwanda for two weeks of cultural and genocide study, don't read this for the next two weeks. If that sounds interesting to you, by all means continue reading.

If you're reading this, you got the message somehow, either via facebook or through the email I'll be sending to the family list.

For anyone who doesn't yet know, I will be traveling to Rwanda tomorrow with 18 other students and 4 teachers for two weeks of cultural and genocide study. I plan on using this as a medium for keeping in contact with everyone whenever I manage to get internet access. I think that I will probably have internet almost every day while I'm in Kigali but I doubt that I will have any while in Ruhengeri. I plan on giving a relatively detailed account of what we did since the last update. I also plan on posting videos and photos on here once I get back (I've got a camcorder with me).

The leaders of the trip, James Cave and Dave Kuntz, both history teachers at my school, will also be keeping a blog. You can find their accounts of their two previous trips to Rwanda there, along with an account of their brief but scary trip into the DRC.

We had an exciting change of plans that we just found out about today: Our group has been invited by the president of the United Nations court for the prosecution of genociaires from Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania. He has offered to fly us in, all expenses paid, on a charter plane out of Kigali. We will be doing this on either the 10th or the 16th.

We leave MSP at 2:00 tomorrow, bound for Chicago, then Brussells, then finally Kigali.

Until next time,
-Drew