After 10 days of relaxation in Thailand and quick run through Kuala Lumpur we finally arrived to the country I wanted to visit for many years. Singapore.
Travelers’ reviews of Singapore vary from “the whole city is just one huge shopping mall” to “a place where you can meet all the cultures of Southeast Asia better than in the countries of origin themselves”. As always, truth lies somewhere in the middle and depends on your initial attitude as well as a chosen route. I personally enjoyed Singapore a lot.
I’m not going to tell you a long story of what unique place Singapore is and how highly developed it is compared to the surrounding countries.
Instead, let’s better look at the pictures which I will briefly comment.
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I’ve been thinking for a long time of putting all the travel lifehacks in one place. Finally, I found time to give a birth to this post. Name speaks for itself. So, I hope you’ll enjoy!
COSTS
Basically, all travelling costs fall down in few categories: preparation, getting there, living there, eating there, sightseeing, having fun there & shopping there. We will cover them all, one by one.
1. Preparation
People often spend way too much money on preparation stage. Let me suggest few alternatives. Instead of buying expensive Lonely Planet (or whatever) guides, use free web-sites. If you travel to the country where clothes are cheap don’t buy them at home even if you need them. If you travel to the country where everything is more expensive, then make sure you buy all your sun sunscreens, swimsuits and sunglasses at home. Common sense, but people don’t do it surprisingly often.
Get started:
- Wikitravel is an incredibly useful crowd-sourced web-site that covers widest range of places and topic;
- Google maps will substitute those maps you would otherwise need to look for and buy;
- Youtube can also be a very useful tool for your research into the place you’re going to.
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A month already passed since our trip to Southeast Asia. Winter sights and grey colors that we see everyday on our way to work don’t look unfamiliar anymore. Pictures from the trip, on the other hand, seem to originate from a completely different world. World that we were able to escape to for a while but that fades away now. I guess, blogging is just another method to get back in those days, awaken the memories and store them in a more reliable form. I invite you to join my reminiscence and travel with me to 3 countries of Southeast Asia. What I promise from my side is (hopefully) beautiful pictures, (probably) useful advice and (supposedly) witty comments.
Well, we had an ambitious plan: 10 days in Ao Nang – Krabi (Thailand) → 2 days in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) → 3 days in Singapore (Singapore 
) → 2 days in Bangkok (Thailand) → back to Moscow. Total of 5 flights (2 of which were connection flights) & one bus + transit to/from airports + subway. Not without a pride I can say that we carried out the plan on time in full.
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I came to Romania to work for 3 months. Frankly speaking I wasn’t full of enthusiasm about it from the very beginning. It’s not all that exotic — same old Eastern Europe, it’s not widely known as a perfect place for tourism and vacations with great beaches and service, it’s not in the list of the most developed and advanced countries in the world that would be interesting to see. In other words, I could not find a single reason to see it.
But at the end of the day why not to use the opportunity to visit country which I would otherwise most probably miss? Wouldn’t it also be interesting to see the country that only left its Soviet past behind in 89 and already joined EU in 07? Aside from that I didn’t know much about the country to be honest. Others around me didn’t seem to know significantly more though: I was quite tired of jokes about Count Dracula long before actually going there… In fact, it appeared to be quite an interesting country to visit.
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I would like to devote this post to Japanese temple, imperial palaces and just gardens. I believe, you can enjoy their beauty and sophistication regardless of your attitude towards monarchs, religion or concept of God in general.
A couple of words about religion. Buddhism and Shinto prevail in Japan, so these are the ones that I’m going to cover here. However, in general Japanese tend to associate themselves with few religions at the same time. Moreover, only 20% of population actually believes in any God.
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Also, in April 2010 had a chance to go to Turkey for 3 days. Curiously enough not on vacation but to participate in a work-related event. However I doubt that I’ll ever go to Turkey on holidays again taking into consideration number of times I’ve been there as a kid. Anyway, even work cannot spoil mountains, sea and sun. And this is what I suggest you to enjoy with me on the pictures below.
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My plans to visit Japan turned into reality! Thank you all for your recommendations! If I were to describe the trip in one word I would call it unforgettable. We usually slept for 4-7 hrs a night trying to experience as much as we could.
Let me answer expected questions right away. How did I get there? Well, have been a PhD student in Higher School of Economics during the last year and a half. As I surprisingly still didn’t get kicked out I decided to participate in the organization of the student exchange with the Japanese Masters and PhD students in June 2009. Took days off at work and helped guys to get around the city and see lots of cool things.
Then, there was a long delay with no news. So, I saved some money and vacation days at work. But after 10 months the reciprocal trip was organized! And it was organized on the breath-taking level!
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