Palamariu Family Blog

Between Bali and India, Singapore found his practical useful place. It’s quite handy to have such an organized and uncorrupted place so easy accessible from all the points of South East Asia. In Singapore we arranged our visas for India, which are harder to get than we initially imagined.

Of course, besides the administrative part of our traveling adventures, we enjoyed the company of friends. We had several board games nights, movie night at Vani’s place, Egyptian day with Yasmine. In few words, Singapore was a good relaxing preamble before India.

Moreover, we experienced Chinese New Year and its cultural side. As for other cultural events like Deepavali, Christmas, New Year etc., Singapore dressed up with lights and Chinese symbols for entering the year of Tiger. Since this is an important event celebrated by 70% of people living in Singapore, 2 days were declared public holiday; that made a 4 day weekend for Singaporeans.

The first day of the year is celebrated in very different ways by the nationalities living in Singapore. Malay, Filipinos, Indians, white people (everybody except the Chinese) filled out the parks along the sea side camping, picnicking and riding bikes or rollerblading. It looked like a 1st May celebration in Romania. I want to make a short parenthesis here: being such a small country, Singapore doesn’t have rural areas or wild nature, but it has huge parks (10+ km2). Therefore, for spending some time in the nature, people camp in the parks in the most organized way possible, being at maximum 1h by bus away from their homes.

For Chinese people, the new day of the year is celebrated together with the family – with parents’ siblings, grandparents and cousins. It’s a day when Chinese wearing very fancy clothes visit and spend time, catching up with their extended families. It reminded me about Christmas because of the family reunion, but also Easter because it was so warm outside and people shown off their best clothes from their wardrobe.

At a personal level, we had some time to evaluate Indonesia experience and its meaning but also the learning it provided us with. It’s quite interesting what we came up with: Radu sees us back to Singapore when finishing our travelings and myself I’m more and more attracted by the idea of starting a PHD in September… maybe in Singapore