Embracing Difference in Singapore

All Study Abroad experiences are adventures, but some are more so than others. Anton Wierenga, a UAlberta Chinese major, spent eight months on exchange in Singapore, a city very far from Edmonton in terms of culture, size and just flat-out physical distance. The experience, he says, was exciting, but definitely involved accepting a certain amount of uncertainty and embracing the differences between home and away.

Not many UAlberta students choose Singapore as an exchange destination so Wierenga had to develop the flexibility to deal with challenges on his own, far from friends and family.

"It was good for having that confidence… Like, not being able to ring up my parents and say "Can you help me with this?" Because that's not really an option when you're on the other side of the world."

Even getting to residence from the airport proved to be something of an adventure. Although Singapore is largely English-speaking, accents can be a challenge and Wierenga had to contend with his taxi-driver's expectation that he would know the local shorthand. A request to go to Prince George Park Residence at the National University of Singapore inspired nothing but confusion in both English and Chinese.

"Apparently, it's PGP. I should have said I wanted to go to PGP at NUS. Everything is acronyms."

University life itself had some interesting differences compared to Alberta too. NUS's campus, built around a hill, is so big that there are buses to take students between different clusters of buildings. The academic culture is also much more competitive than Canadian students are used to. Although getting top marks is not super important to students on exchange whose grades generally don't count beyond pass/fail, the intense competition does affect the campus atmosphere. During his first semester, Wierenga stayed in a residence with mainly Chinese and Malaysian students and rarely saw his neighbours because of their intense study schedules.

"It was like a ghost-town, like, there was never anybody there. But I knew that there were people there because I could hear them. But you'd never see them. So that was interesting."

Not all the differences were quite so jarring, however. Singapore is a sovereign city-state with a population of more than five million people so the city's culture life is generally much livelier than Edmonton's.

"Even on the weekend, we'd go over to Marina Bay, which is the downtown core area and there'd always be something going on."

Wierenga went to a kite festival and had the chance to attend a Formula One Grand Prix race. He mentions one weekend, coming downtown to find a yacht race in progress.

"It doesn't sound super interesting, but it's so cool because (the boats) are just flying back and forth."

Singapore also affords the opportunity to travel easily and cheaply to the rest of south-east Asia. Wierenga's travels took him to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other countries. He also took advantage of the chance to spend a month travelling by train from south-western China to Shanghai before heading back to Canada. The trip was, he says, "just incredible" and he met Chinese travel companions on the train who added an extra level of enjoyment.

"It was definitely helpful because they had ideas of places they wanted to go. I mean, I had some ideas…but other places I hadn't even heard of."

Wierenga generally had good luck in his Chinese travels. "Just all the way through China it was just like every new place I'd meet somebody who was really helpful and showed me around."

Good luck and a good travel experience, according to Wierenga come from just taking a go-with-the-flow attitude and taking what comes.

"It's an adventure so don't expect everything to go smoothly. It'll all work out."