Weekly Update 6: Work, Blind Theatre and Jerusalem

This week, I mostly hung out with friends, travelled and ofcourse the usual work!

Work was quite interesting this week-we tried brainstorming new ideas for marketing. We also got some help from our users in coming up with new ideas-which was amazing. They come up with way better ideas than we do! We came up with some good ideas too though that we're going to start implementing this week and next week. It's so fun to brainstorm and try to think of things that people haven't tried before. I hate doing tried and tested things because they're usually the things that everyone is doing (which makes them less effective especially in marketing).

I met with friends for dinner a few times this week and Skyped with Yale-NUS friends, which is always great. Also, I went for a meetup at Google Campus. This one was a live stream of the Lean Startup Conference that happened in San Francisco last Tuesday and Wednesday. I just watched two or three talks on the live stream (which were pretty good) and spoke to a few other people who were hanging out at Google Campus for various events (which was even better!).

Vegan food with Caroline! Never eaten this much vegan food in my life. 

Live stream of the Lean Startup Conference

Dinner with Sharon!

On the weekend, I took a day trip to Jerusalem with Aileen. We just explored the old city, which is where a lot of the churches and historical places of importance are. We went on a walking tour of the old city in which they showed us the 4 different quarters of the city-each of which are occupied by Christians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews. Learning how the city was historically built was quite interesting-there were so many different people and rulers passing through Jerusalem, that the city kept seeing new kinds of structures built with every group of people that passed. I also met some nice people on the walking tour!

Jerusalem!

On Sunday, I went for a blind theatre performance. This was a theatre performance at the same place where I went for the dinner in darkness last week. It was basically a theatre performance by people who were either blind, deaf or mute. Many were blind AND deaf or deaf AND mute. It was really interesting to see their performance. The way the actors would communicate with each other during the performance using sign language and other cues was especially amazing.

At the theatre performance

Also, I've been reading a lot more these days. I've been less energetic and jumpy (probably because of the weather), and that helps me read.

Weekly Update 5: Dinner in the dark, got a tattoo

It was mostly a chill week with a good balance of work and other stuff. I actually got to do some pretty fun stuff this week!

First off, my friends and I went for something called Blackout, which was a dining experience in a pitch dark room. The idea was to simulate the kind of experience the visually impaired would have while doing simple things like eating a meal. We were led inside the restaurant by a waiter who was blind. She told us where to walk so that we didn't bump into other tables. We sat down and she told us where our forks and napkins were. She told us where the jug of water was and insisted on us pouring water for ourselves for the sake of the experience. The whole thing was really interesting. For one, we had to feel all the cutlery, the plates, the glasses before we could use them. Secondly, we found ourselves focussing much more on each others' voices than we usually do. So we were better listeners in general. For the first few minutes, our eyes kept trying to adjust to the darkness, since that's what we're used to when we enter a dark room. But it never happened! The room was pitch dark throughout. The food itself was pretty good. They had the option of ordering a surprise main or a surprise dessert. So you wouldn't know what you'd be ordering and could only use the sense of taste to guess what it was when you got it. I ordered a surprise dessert-it was good, but I still don't know what exactly it was!

My friends and I with our waitress Ruth after the dinner (once we were back out in the light)

The other exciting thing I did this week is that I got a tattoo! I'd been thinking of getting a tattoo for a while, and now just felt like a good time to do it. So I got the word 'maya' tattooed near my ankle in hebrew. Maya means dream in Sanskrit, truth or reason in Japanese, generosity in Persian, princess or honourable matriarch in Arabic and love in Nepali. I like that it has so many meanings-a lot of which I relate to (especially the Sanskrit and Japanese meaning).

Aileen had a couchsurfer over this week! He was our tallest couchsurfer by far, and he travels a LOT! 

I also made good progress on the startup project I've been working on-got to speak with interesting people in the edtech space who gave me some great advice on things I could do to create a better product! But I don't want to talk too much about that publicly, so will leave it at that!

Last weekend, I felt the urge to read fiction so I spent Friday afternoon at a cafe reading Metamorphosis by Kafka. It was really fun to read and it was a really quick read (took 2 hours to finish the whole thing)! I downloaded a few more books on my Kindle to read this week/weekend. Do you have any favourite books that you'd recommend? I've been asking friends for suggestions so if you have any tell me about it!

I was a bit sick for a day or two last week-the weather is changing and I'd forgotten how easy it can be to catch a flu when that happens. It's getting colder-which for some reason makes feel tired more quickly and get headaches more often. But nothing that can't be handled!