Chasing storms, bands and friends in the USA

A furnace. That’s what Singapore feels like after returning from a nearly five-month getaway in cooler countries such as the US and Japan. Although, to be fair, I was only in those countries during late winter, spring and early summer. I heard that summers in the US and Japan could be warmer than it usually is in Singapore.

01
The University of Missouri-Columbia

It had always been my dream to visit America some day. This is mainly because it has an individualistic culture that I can relate to better than Asia’s collectivistic culture. Also, it is simply a new place to explore. As I travelled alone, I relied on Google Maps heavily. Even though I’m back in Singapore, I now find myself consulting Google Maps even when travelling to everyday locations.

Sightseeing is typically the focus of a student’s post-exchange travels, but it was different for me. While I still went sightseeing, my post-exchange vacation was more social and musical. I’m an appreciator of heavy metal and its various sub-genres, and I have been writing about metal on and off for five years now.

Many metal bands hail from America, with Metallica being the most famous. (Although I’d argue they are a hard rock band.) And many fellow writers I’ve befriended on the Internet are from the land of the free, Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks coffee, too. 

Hence, picking America as my host country was the most utilitarian choice. Doing so would enable me to see underground bands that might never perform in Singapore and visit my online friends in the flesh.

All in all, I attended six concerts and met five online friends in person for the first time. I killed two big birds with one fantastic stone.

Missouri School of Journalism

I spent my exchange semester at the journalism school of the University of Missouri-Columbia (“Mizzou” for short). Priding itself on being the world’s oldest formal journalism school, the school takes a hands-on approach in educating its students. They call it the Missouri Method. It’s a fancy name for how mass communications students in local polytechnics are already being taught, but I guess the difference is in the experience of the instructors. My instructors there were seasoned American journalists. With journalism being one of “the most American professions”, I think most people will agree with me that practising it under the guidance of American journalists makes for a good experience.

I thought I would take it easy during my exchange semester, but no, it was probably on par with my previous semester in terms of workload. Apart from one non-journalism module, I took three journalism modules that are usually taken by juniors or seniors, and I was kept busier than I expected. One of the modules required me to be a blogger and somewhat of a digital editor for a weekly city publication called Vox magazine, and it kept me busy. I had nearly 100 contact hours for that module by the time the semester concluded. A normal module would have you accumulate about 42 contact hours in one semester.

Although I often grumbled about the workload I received for that module, it did make me see and do things I normally wouldn’t. For example, while doing live coverage for the annual True/False documentary film festival, I met the lead “actor” of the 2013 documentary, Particle Fever: David E Kaplan, a theoretical particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider. He was in town to promote the documentary.

02With David E Kaplan

Other than meeting Kaplan, another memorable journalistic experience was writing a story on storm chasing for a class assignment.

Missouri is a state in the Midwest, which is a rural region full of miles and miles of flat land. The weather there is erratic and can be extreme, too. So it is perhaps no surprise that tornadoes form frequently in the Midwest, with Oklahoma being the state that experiences the most tornadoes (and often the most destructive ones).

Tornado shelters are a common sight, and during my stay, I heard the tornado siren wail twice. It was not anything serious, though. On both occasions, it was just a tornado passing by Columbia (the city containing my campus). But perhaps I’m not too concerned about it because I don’t actually live there. I know the local residents generally take the tornado warnings seriously even if it’s just a tornado passing by their city. I guess in the Midwest, you are probably more likely to die from a tornado than, say, a terrorist attack.

03A wall cloud I saw during the storm chase

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to experience storm-chasing for the first time in my life. After all, the only natural disaster we experience in Singapore is the occasional flash flood. There will be no tornados to chase on our generally safe island. So I reached out to atmospheric science professors, asking if they knew any storm chasers who were willing to let me chase storms with them in the name of journalism. Fortunately, a storm chaser got back to me and was willing to let me accompany him and two of his pals for a storm chase. My story ended up being published in The Columbia Missourian, one of two daily newspapers in Columbia. Additionally, I wrote a first-person account of the storm chase here.

The people

Chicago, Illinois. Toledo, Ohio. New York City. Seattle, Washington. Tokyo, Japan. These were the five cities I explored during my post-exchange getaway, which only lasted about three weeks. Still, I accomplished quite a lot of sightseeing and friend-visiting during those 21 days.

As I mentioned earlier, one of my main reasons for picking the US as my exchange destination (and Japan as the last stop of my three-week vacation) was so that I could visit some online friends in person for the first time. The phrase “familiar strangers” perfectly describes our friendship prior to our meeting. Every single one of the five online friends I met surprised me in some aspect that wasn’t obvious from their 160×160 Facebook profile pictures. I had more time to spend with some than the others, but everybody was equally fun to hang out with. It’s too bad I had limited time and resources to spend. I will try my hardest to find an excuse to go back to the US and Japan to visit these guys again some day.

From top to bottom: The guys who write for Angrymetalguy.com, the guy who wrote for a now defunct blog called “The Number of the Blog”, the secretive editor of Nocleansinging.com, and an American Japanophile known for his unique sense of humour.

04 Buddies in the flesh 

05

06The secretive guy

07Meet-up season

Last but not least, I got to see some of my favorite underground metal bands perform in St Louis and Chicago. Needless to say, I took photos with them. They were all friendly and down-to-earth people. Of all the bands I saw, the following two had the best live performances.

08Skeletonwitch (USA)

09Coffins (Japan)

For a genre that sounds as loud and abrasive as metal, songs that sound good on record don’t necessarily sound good live. This is because the electric guitar is often set at such a high volume that it overpowers the bass and/or vocals. Another common scenario is the drums’ volume being so loud that it overpowers even the electric guitar. So kudos to these two bands for doing proper soundchecks and achieving a well-balanced audio mix for their live performances.

Lone tourism

Travelling alone is great because you truly feel like the master of your own destiny. Unlike travelling with a group of friends or in a tour group, you don’t have to wait for anyone to finish using the toilet or crossing the road, etc. As with everything, however, there are pros and cons. But still, I’d say the biggest downside about travelling alone is that you have to ask strangers to help you take photos of yourself with whatever sights that catch your fancy. (An alternative would be to take selfies all the way.) And that is not too bad. It could even be an excuse for you to make some new friends!

And a word of advice: Because your mum isn’t there to be your human alarm clock, you’d better wake up when your smartphone’s alarm goes off. Remember that your modes of transport do not wait for you, especially when they are cheap. As a rule of thumb, wake up three hours before your scheduled international flight. I missed my plane from New York City to Seattle because I overslept. (I woke up about 40 minutes before my flight’s departure time, which was too late. But luckily, the airline was able to put me on the next available flight.)

Sightseeing

I mentioned earlier that sightseeing wasn’t my main priority when picking the US as my exchange destination. But still, like any tourist with cameras, I snapped hundreds of photographs during my short stays in each American state and Japan. I found myself relying on my smartphone’s camera frequently because using it was more convenient than using my DSLR camera.

But when it came to the really important photos that I now use for bragging purposes, I needed to snap them in DSLR quality. This is because a DSLR camera detects light better than a smartphone camera. Smartphone camera photos only look good when taken in sunny areas. The first of the following four photos was taken with my smartphone, while the last three were taken with my DSLR camera.

10Part of the Chicago skyline (Chicago, Illinois) 

11A cruise around the Statue of Liberty (New York City)

12Outside the original Starbucks (Seattle, Washington)

13 Inside the Pokemon Centre (Tokyo, Japan)

And speaking of Japan, Japan is truly a kawaii country. More on that in part two.

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