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Carrie Capizzano

And finally, some videos!

Forgive us – we’ve been busy. All blog and no video? How’s anybody going to get a picture painted without footage?

We’ll have some footage of the first WaterFire lighting in Asia in just a bit. Meanwhile, here are a few short clips to give you a sense of the place we’ve been so graciously invited to experience.

First, a quick glance at the marketplace across the street that we’ve visited for one reason or another pretty much every day.

Read More »And finally, some videos!

Building Braziers, Singapore Style

Today, the work kicked in.

It started with another Asian breakfast (gotta love those spicy noodles!) and a long walk around the reservoir from the university we’re hosted at to the event site, which was buzzing with activity. Fortunately, a lot of that activity involved putting up tents, because the sky immediately opened up for what we now know is a classic Singaporean downpour. The longer you’re in Singapore, the more you realize just how many infrastructural details and architectural quirks are built around the assumption that there will be a flash flood basically every day. At least, I think that’s the reason that sections of every floor abruptly go two inches higher or lower for no obvious reason.

But our new braziers had been delivered! They were carefully constructed in an outdoor fabrication shop in Indonesia – bear in mind that Indonesia is so close that it’s visible – ready to be assembled.

WaterFire Singapore brazier baskets

That’s when the local volunteers arrived. And they made short work of all fifty-eight new braziers.Read More »Building Braziers, Singapore Style

Welcome to Singapore!

So this is the country we’re dealing with.  We got off the plane into an airport that looks like this:

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Only with more art and soothing music than you’d know from the photo. When we’d traversed the immaculate marble floor and were standing in the immigration line, a motorized lift appeared. We looked up, and oneof the hundreds of lights above the room had burnt out. Singapore knows how to have nice things. This is the land where cars that are ten years old must be scrapped, or their owners must pay an enormous fee to keep them. This is a land with so little crime that people will claim a table in an open food court by leaving their wallet unattended on the table while they go get their food. This is famously the land that outlawed chewing gum so it wouldn’t get on the sidewalks.

We volunteers have had a windfall of free time since we got here two days ago, as the local crew is doing brilliantly on its own. Here is one of the new braziers, anchored at the site on the Bedok Reservoir:

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Not quite like those in Providence, with some different (and very resourceful) floatation devices. We look forward to trying them out.Read More »Welcome to Singapore!