Singapore!

Sorry, a little bit late, here some information about my trip to Singapore in January 2008: well, let me think... guess I should look at the pictures to remember. You all know my short term memory. :-)

As every trip should, we also started at the airport. Usually I always travel on my own. So it was really quite fun to hang around there with my whole class of 29 people. In advance I can say that this trip helped me a lot to feel even more integrated and accepted. Sometimes I felt just like another foreigner. Well, I guess this feeling has vanished since then.

OK, already after six hours... ( I am not used to these short flights) ... we arrived in Singapore. In Korea the temperature had been far below zero... this was a jump of more than 30°C, from about -5 to +28 and a humidity around 80%. I loved it!! That was the only reason why I survived the cold Korean winter, because I knew in Singapore I would be able to wear normal clothes again (and not like an old woman with long underwear).

First a big misunderstanding about Singapore on my part was removed. Singapore is not the whole island, no Melanie, it's a small city! Only about 5 mio. inhabitants (of which 1 mio are foreigners) and the city is only located on the Southern tip of the island. I had always imagined it as a mega city. Well, this mistake may be have been provoked by my logistics professors, who always praised Singapore as "the" logistics hub in Asia. To me it sounded like the city is a metropolis. Maybe they should have mentioned that the reason for Singapore's success in logistics is mainly due to its huge, huge sea port.
Well, since the city is not that big we were confident to see the most important sights during this one week I should mention here that our schedule was really tight. Every morning we got up around seven and came back to the hotel around 12 hours later. During these 12 hours we visited different companies and sights, all of them related to logistics of course.
In the evening then we finally had time to discover the city.

And of course, since we were a group of girls... where did we go first? Orchard Road! WOW! Alone because of this road I could imagine doing my internship in Singapore! I honestly fell in love with this street, the atmosphere there, the friendly people... and the clothes stores. :-)

The cool thing about the trip was, that actually, if you didn't want to, or didn't go out at night with friends, you didn't have to spend any money. We had every meal together with the whole group. Lunch was usually just something quick since we had only about one hour lunch break during speeches or visits to sights like the seaport, the airport logistics park, the DHL Quality Control Center, etc. Well, but unfortunately I had totally forgotten about Korean eating culture. Many (excl. Janghee and Yeonhwa) Koreans cannot live without their daily portion of Korean food (Ramen, Kimchi). So already at the airport some class mates praised their instant noodles (Youngmu...). Unfortunately this was a bad, bad omen. During our week in Singapore we went out to eat dinner five times. Three of these five times we ate Korean (horrible Korean food)! I really like Korean food, but that was not real Korean food. Anyway, my class mates seemed to be more than happy about that.
As you can imagine Galina and I were quite pissed. BUT except the travel guides who didn't know any English and got on our nerves with their constant babble in Korean (especially on Galina's) the trip to Singapore was really a great experience!

The country is really exotic. I have never before been that close to the equator. So one of our trip showing the beauty of the country was to a bird park,another one to a huge aquarium with an underwater tunnel and of course some nice pictures with photo shop... and finally another trip to a botanical garden where we could not only see huge palm trees and nice orchids but also were able to experience and feel a real tropical shower.

Concludingly I can say, Singapore is a great city, not only is it

• really clean,
• people are friendly (they can even speak English - wow!),
• the sights are great,
• the buildings are impressive,
• the clubs are nice,
• but another factor making Singapore so interesting to me is the fact that quite many big German logistics companies are located there, ...where I could do my internship and master thesis in logistics. :-)

We will see!