May 2007

S’pore

This is the first day of the rest of my life. Sunday night SFO International. My first Business Class flight on Singapore Airlines. No waiting in line. My baggage is tagged with priority to be offloaded first. I am escorted to the business lounge where I may enjoy an open bar and a variety of refreshments of my choice overlooking the tarmac. Six other Genentech colleagues join me.

We get our own private boarding gate to enter before departure. I have my own private pod with a reclining leather chair that operates in a multitude of directions to a full horizontal recline. I can’t even figure out how to work the chair or the remote. The personal TV has over 100 stations with movies in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and probably even Swahili if I look hard enough. There are four beautiful Singaporean women dressed in silk gowns who all call by name.

Not more than an hour in the sky, they are already feeding us (at 2am) on table cloths with real silverware and china. I am sure a terrorist can formulate a weapon out of my fork much easier than that tiny bottle of lotion they made me throw out in security because it was not in a zip lock bag. Waldorf salad, lamb shank, grilled vegetables, dessert, followed by a cheese tray. Everyone gets fuzzy slippers, a real pillow with silk sham and an actual blanket – not the felt paper from economy.

The bathrooms are spotless because the ladies in the silk dresses clean the pee off the floor. I watch no less than seven movies that night and read half of ‘Blink,’ a good book about thinking without thinking. I can do yoga and Pilates in my pod. Transferred planes in Hong Kong at sunrise, but nothing was open yet.

The airport in Singapore is lined with orchids. It is very clean and safe feeling. Our posse from Genentech includes two men over 6’6” and me with the yellow hair. We stand out in the crowd of Asians, especially on the mass transit, which we take into town to the Hotel Intercontinental. The landscape is lush and green. Even the housing projects are Cabrini-clean.

In half an hour we change and are in a taxi to Bovis’ office. The office of our general contractor is very Ikeaesque overlooking the Polo fields. I rapidly realize there are not many women in construction here. I am the only girl in the boardroom, and I’m at least ten years younger than everyone. There are two expats from Ireland working for an Australian construction company in Singapore. As we review the estimates, I am trying to do the exchange rates between SNG$, US$, Australian $ and sometimes even the Euro. All measurements are in meters. I know they are speaking English, but don’t understand words like ‘fly-tipping’ and ‘lorries.’ One guy on the team is named Kee Shin Keong – which sounds like Cheech and Chong whenever they say his name. I’m not the only one in the room smirking each time.

Our project is an Ecoli plant to manufacture one of our breakthrough drugs, Lucentis. Lucentis is made from a human antibody fragment and works by keeping new blood vessels from forming under the retina. People with a certain type of eye disease, new blood vessels grow under the retina where they leak blood and fluid. This is known as the "wet form" of macular degeneration. Lucentis is used to treat the wet form of age-related macular degeneration to prevent blindness.

We try to force ourselves to stay up until 10pm, so after the meetings, our Genentech team went to Newton’s Circus where there is a large open patio surrounded by street vendors. We got a little taste of everything to wash down our giant Tiger beers. Little Asian men are flashing us with fake Rolexes taped to their chest and Raybans down their pants.

2:45 pm Monday our time/5:45am Tuesday their time, I make it down to the gym. We are two degrees from the equator and it is pitch dark until 7am. Today’s meetings went for 12 hours! I was fighting to keep my eyes open and not trying not to puke as the waves of nausea came and went. Luckily we got out of the office for fresh air and to visit the site. As I roam in my OSHA approved open toed sandals, I am warned to watch out for Cobras and Black Mambas in the brush. This threat is balanced off by the fact that they have monkeys in the trees.

Driving back to the office, we pass what they call Bubble Gum Jail – where they sentence you to if you are caught chewing gum, which is illegal in Singapore. It is actually a Chinese prison.

Countess Keen

So when I signed up for my Singapore Air online, the information sheet has a list of prefixes containing Mr., Ms., Mrs., Miss, Dr., Professor…and if you scroll down far enough you will get to Baron, Count, Countess…hey countess, I know how to count, I can be a countess! So for kicks, I entered Countess. Now all my confirmations come addressed to Countess Kelly Keen and they even address me in flight with Countess Keen. My brother says they put one too many “o’s” in the word for me.