A few minutes of reflection: HNMUN and New York

Harvard National Model United Nations Conference 2006 – Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, MA.

16/2/2006 - 19/2/2006.

It finally ended on 19/2/2006, Sunday at 1pm.

After 4 hectic days of deliberating, speaking, debating, mediating and striking compromises, together with the fun of forming a bloc of my own, a resolution of sorts was reached with Singapore’s interests in it. I will type out the resolution in another post soon. Have to comment that I realized the narrow-minded mentality of the Americans in the way they formed their foreign policy, (I can have a delegate representing Thailand telling me that Thailand is a predominantly Muslim country :( ) Still, I have made wonderful friends in Americans who really knew their foreign policy ( Zach from USMA is a really good example with Brazil), and the Latin Americans who were pretty impressive ( Ana from Bolivia representing USA and Adriana from Venezuela representing France are two good examples :D ) To top it off, I am really honoured to know and work with people who have really studied in Singapore, e.g. Mardan from University of Pennsylvania and Yash from UC Berkeley, and Ronald who is a SAFOS from Berkeley. Mardan represented the PRC, while the latter two represented Nigeria, who were instrumental in gathering the African Bloc. Special thanks also goes to Kelly from Wheaton College for helping me gather the bloc of ASEAN countries though.

Thanks to the above friends for making my conference so wonderful.

There also marks the end of Historical GA 1971, Bangladesh crisis.

As I finally decided to go to sleep, I also thought of the awards and realized that the awards went to Americans alone. No wonder, since the conference itself is a ‘National’ rather than ‘International’ conference. But I realized that this is one which the experience will be invaluable in making the local version more professional. Guranteeed.

Then on, me together with Thomas and Yuneng went to NY on a whirlwind one day trip. Yup, you are not reading it wrong. It is a one day trip, and what a heck of a one day trip I can tell you guys…

It was a very wild trip to mention from the start. We initially pushed off from Boston at 8am and reached New York’s Chinatown 4 hours later. After a handsome lunch, the 3 of us went on a quick spin of literally all the prominent places we could find: (in order) Ground Zero, Wall Street, NYSE, Statue of Liberty, UN Headquarters, 5th Avenue (a famous shopping mall), Empire State Building, Times Square and eventually, this one I must mention: Madison Square Garden. We were just literally trigger happy and took a lot of photos here and there, and bought a lot of souvenirs. But I was just swept by the electronic billboards that surrounded the famous junction of Times Square, managed to see the whole of NY atop the 86th storey of the Empire State Building, and finally, took 3 valuable photos outside Madison Square Garden. Photos of these places available so long as you ask me...the only sour point is that I was not able to find the stuff that Fiona and Jianwu wanted me to find…so apologies to my dearest friends for disappointing you.

That’s about as succinct as I can be…I rather show you what I have seen in pictures…indeed, pictures tell one thousand words…so imagine how many words these pictures tell. In short, seeing all of NY in one day was tiring enough, but then I decided that it was worth all the rush. At least I can declare to all that I have been to some of the most prominent landmarks in the world and left my mark there, however small and insignificant.

The following few posts will be all pictures and abit of descriptions...this is to make up for my inability to blog while in Boston...stay tuned...and apologies for not submitting a V-day post as I mentioned earlier...sleep mattered more to me I figured...