November 29, 2005

A trip to Singapore: Prolog

Budi Rahardjo said:

My daughter is going to school in Singapore. She's got a scholarship. I am going to talk about education later on, but this time I want to talk about our trip to Singapore. We decided to go to Singapore together as a family (the four of us: my wife, my daughter, my son, and myself). For the next few entries, I am going to talk about my experience in Singapore. I've been to Singapore quite a few times actually. But, they were kind of spread over time (since 1982, I think) and I didn't put an effort to observe things. This time, I want to observe. So, enjoy the story ...

Link to Day 1
Link to Day 2
Link to Day 3

Recommended by tinkertailor: "An Indonesian man talks about his 3-day Singapore visit. He makes quite a few interesting observations, which Singaporeans often miss or take for granted. Required reading if you're from the Tourism Board."

Link

Submitted by tinkertailor on November 29//10:33am and published by jseng, tinkertailor :: 1979 reads | trackback
Comments 2

It always nice to hear a foreigner's view. I esp like the point about the youths thing. We are being westernized the wrong way. Dunnoe what he means but it sure makes sense.

Hi folks,

What I mean by "Singaporean youths loosing their identities" are those youngsters with "less dress" (hipster?) and smoking on the sidewalks (or Orchard Road, for example). I noticed that these smokers were mostly girls. In Indonesia, they are mostly boys.

I guess, I should not generalize it to all Singaporean youths. But, a few years ago there were not that many young smokers and Orchard Road was cleaner. Now, I saw lots of cigarette butts and these young smokers.

Or, maybe smoking is the trend? or the real South East Asian "culture"?

One thing is still good, at least, these youngsters are not into criminals (I hope).

-- budi