I'm finally here!

Brigitte Pinochet
Feb 27, 2024
5 min read

Hey Blog!

I’m back! One week later! This week, in the best way, has honestly felt like 3 weeks to me. It’s been incredible, challenging, and exhilarating to be in another country again. I can already see visible growth in myself and I am really looking forward to the semester ahead. It took me about 30 hours to finally land in Singapore. My flight route was Greenville to Atlanta, Atlanta to South Korea, and South Korea to Singapore. I was fortunate enough to have a friend with me for the entire stretch, so we kept each other sane through it all. :) The 16 hour flight from Atlanta to South Korea was the longest flight I've ever been on, but I ended up sleeping a good bit so it wasn’t the worst ever. Once we landed in South Korea it was snowing! It was so random but it ended up delaying our flight by a couple hours. When we finally got to Singapore, the heat really hit us in the face.

Singapore is the coolest place. It feels like I'm in a rainforest half of the time, and the weather is beautiful (if you’re a fan of the heat). I love being outside and get so much energy from the sun, so I've spent a lot of time at the pool, walking around, and exploring the city. This past week I moved into my apartment, went to Sentosa beach, went to a huge Lunar New Year festival, got my Student Visa at my appointment, toured around my school and area, started school, and explored as much as I could. Everyday was really packed for me which has helped me stay excited and distracted from the big adjustment. The time difference (13 hours from my home) is big, but because the travel days threw everything off for me anyways, I haven’t had a hard time going to bed and getting up at normal time which I'm really thankful for. I miss my people from home and wish I could show everyone everything in person, but I've tried my best to journal and take a lot of pics for them! I’m honestly doing really well given that I’ve only been here for a week, so I’m proud of myself for going with the flow and adjusting with everything day by day. But, I still have felt all the feels and have of course had moments already where I feel homesick when I am not super busy. It's a huge change and that's normal.

Now I'll share a few sights/places I've been!

Here's a pic from my journey to "Sentosa" beach on day one!

I also went to a huge Lunar New Year parade hosted at Singapore's F1 Pit

And below is a cool place by the water where a lot of students hang out at night (Boat Quay)!

Although these are super cool areas, I truly haven’t visited a lot of the most popular places here yet. However, I’ve done that intentionally. I wanted to give myself this first week to get my footing, feel settled, and become comfortable with where I'm living and my new life here. I've been able to do some research and I have a lot of cool places that I want to see which are all doable in a day trip. As far as what I have seen though, Singapore has such a unique way of blending their city with nature that I really haven't seen in any other country I've been to. The architecture is insane everywhere I go, so it's been really captivating to take it all in. It's also super clean and organized- mostly due to their culture and very strict rules…

Now, to catch you up to the most recent things, I just had my school orientation yesterday! It was really nice to finally explore around my new school a little bit and reunite with my cohort. They did a big presentation for us and explained the rules that we all need to abide by to be legal students here. After this orientation, my school organized a “forest adventure” for us that consisted of ropes courses and ziplines! We had a lot of fun and the activity lasted all afternoon. All of this got me excited for the semester to start, especially since all of us have been on break from school since December!

Now that you're up to speed, today was my first day of class. I only had one 3 hour class about E-Business. I’m already liking my professor a lot and the class was really interactive (also the class is only taught to my cohort which makes it fun to have everyone together). The one thing that is weird about my school is that every single week my class schedule changes. There is no consistency with how many classes I'll have a day, and each day of the week is something new for the whole semester. So, every week I’ll need to stay really organized to keep up with the changes of my classes because Singapore is super strict regarding their attendance policies. But, on another positive note, my campus is really pretty and fairly small-with about 5000 students total. ESSEC focuses solely on business, so each class is intimate which I prefer.

My roommates and I before orientation!

I want to wrap up this blog by touching on something that I think is important to understand when you see others studying abroad… studying abroad is not a vacation. You still have your real life responsibilities, (although they may look different) and it is not a “free for all” glamorous trip every day. There will be uncomfortable differences that you have to adapt to everyday. One example, coming from the US, most of us have the convenience of getting in the car and driving whenever and wherever we want. We do this in our own time and are not reliant on anything but ourselves to get from point A to B. However, when you’re abroad you rely completely on public transportation. In some ways, I truly love this. It can be fun and freeing! But for me this has also meant days where I’ve been on the bus for almost 4 hours just to be able to see different parts of Singapore, or even to do things like shop for my groceries. This also means that every single day I do not have the autonomy to decide when/what route I would like to take to get to school, do errands, or visit around. It can be really exhausting and it is something to consider. Of course, there are so many other things that are super different, but I thought this was a good example of one!

All in all though, Singapore has incredible ways/processes that I wish other countries would adopt. There are always trade offs (wherever you go) so you have to remain open minded and take on the adjustments without judgment. I know this semester will go by really fast and I can already tell that I am going to miss this place so much!! :’)

And lastly, here's a few food pics from this week...