[To keep the blog active while I’m traveling I’ve asked 3 of my favorite expat bloggers to answer 10 questions about their experience abroad. I’ve enjoyed reading their answers and am excited to share them with you!]First up is Flora from Jeffrey and Flora: Living in Singapore. Flora’s blog is full of valuable information on moving to and living in Singapore. She was even a finalist in the Singapore Blog Awards for the Best Travel Blog category, so you know it’s good! Thanks to Flora, I’m confident that if I ever visit Singapore I’ll know just where to go and what to do.
Here’s Flora’s 10 Questions:
1. Current address:
Singapore
2. Previous address(es):
San Jose, California, USA
At Pulau Ubin, a small island just a short ferry ride from Singapore. You can rent bicycles and ride around the entire island. It is green, peaceful, mostly undeveloped and completely unlike Singapore.
3. I landed here because…
My husband Jeff had an opportunity to move to Singapore for his work. We were ready for something new and the chance to move abroad came at the right time.
4. The best part of living abroad is…
All the new places we travel to. Singapore is a great jumping off point for travel in Asia. We’ve been to Vietnam (twice), Indonesia, China, Malaysia (several times), Australia and Thailand in the past year. We are trying to plan a few more trips in the near future, too.
5. The most difficult part of living abroad is…
How expensive everything is. Shopping used to be fun for me, but now it hurts! I don’t shop the way I used to. Singapore “sales” aren’t that great and things are marked up ridiculously. Even going to the grocery store can be really painful at times.
The building in the forefront is government housing called an HDB flat. This type of building can be found all over the island.
6. Before living here (abroad), I never realized…
How bad durian smells. I catch a whiff of the stinky fruit at least once a day and I’m still not used to it. It also has a funky aftertaste that I can’t get used to.
7. An addition to my day to day vocabulary is…
Lines are queues (as in “line forms here”). Plastic bags are carriers. Garbage cans are bins. Trucks are lorries. Sometimes I use the Singlish terms “can” instead of yes and “cannot” instead of no.
Satay and chili crab for dinner from a hawker center. Chili crab is a famous dish in Singapore.
8. Three words to describe my host country are…
Vainglorious, modern, competitive.
The Singapore skyline is beautiful at night.
9. If I could live anywhere (hometown excluded) I’d choose…
This is a tough question to answer. I would probably choose a big city though, like New York, Santiago or London. I love city life!
10. A traveler or expat (famous or not) I admire is…
Agnes Newton Keith. I first learned about her when I was reading about the world’s largest flower. I saw the Rafflesia Keithii, the species named after her husband, in person when I was in Borneo. She lived in Borneo in the late 1930s and 1940s with her husband and wrote a few books about her time there. She was also imprisoned at a Japanese internment camp for a few years during World War II with her family and wrote about it after their liberation. She makes living abroad as an expat today in a country as modern as Singapore look incredibly easy!
To see more of what it’s like to be an expat in Singapore, visit Flora’s blog.
Thanks for sharing, Flora!
xo, jill
[All photos by Flora Moreno de Thompson]
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