I spent about 10 days in Singapore. I was told that was quite a long time to spend as a tourist in Singapore, since the country is really small and you can feel like you’ve seen the city after about 4 days. However I was looking for something different there, I needed to slow down a bit and recenter myself after having been on the road for about a month and a half. I needed to find a slice of home away from home and rest there for a while and I found that in Singapore.
The City:
- I really like how ‘small’ Singapore is, everything is a short metro ride away and the public transportation.
- The city is exceptionally clean for how many people are here. I constantly see shopkeepers sweeping the outside of their stories.
- Public transportation is very cheap and convenient.
The Food:
- Cheap and tasty at the hawker centers
- So many different kinds of cuisines. I could have chinese porridge for breakfast, malay satay for lunch, and indian biriyani for dinner.
The People:
- I met a great group of pianists the ‘Pianovers’ that gather every sunday around street pianos and play for each other. It was a really welcoming and social community!
- I made a lot of friends and connections from the piano meetup, and I was lucky enough to catch their 99th meetup which was Halloween themed and their 100th meetup.
- Also connected with a friend from Singapore, which was the first time I saw a familiar face in nearly 2 months!
Of course I saw Singapore through the eyes of a traveler passing through and everything was amazing. I learned from the people that I met, that creating a life in Singapore is very different than what you experience passing through. Opportunities are extremely competitive here due to the population density, and housing and costs of living are extremely high; things that don’t affect people just spending their holidays here.
As a traveler though, I really enjoyed my time here. It’s the first place I’ve been so far that I have been reluctant to leave. I pushed off packing until the last moment, something I never do while traveling, because I didn’t want to feel like I was leaving yet.
I flew out of Singapore on Monday November 5th, 2018 headed for Kathmandu, Nepal.