On 21st -23rd of June 2008, a group of 13 Biomedical Sciences students with 3 lecturers made an educational trip to Singapore. As the participants, I’m really glad to be chosen as one of them.
In Singapore, we stayed at Hotel 18 Opera. We arrived there by public bus from Kuala Lumpur. It was a bit of energy consuming when coming to matter like finding places for meal each time because we need to think about getting halal foods, which was not as easy as our own country. This experience really remind me of my dad story when he was doing his intern year in Jogjakarta Indonesia. My dad and his friend went to a restaurant for lunch. Once they received the menu, they attracted to a menu which sound like ‘chimey’ if I’m not mistaken. However, once the orders were sent to their table, it really surprised them. The meal was actually frog meat (it just that Muslim is not allowed to eat them). Within seconds, they run out of that restaurant. I really hope that similar situation wouldn’t happen to any of us. Back to my story, since some of them already been there before, it was quite helpful. In term of transportations in Singapore, we normally used taxi (…but it was originally a van that modified to be taxi…to accommodate more people like us). In my observation, there weren’t many individual cars on roads since the citizens preferred to use taxis, buses or MRT as their transports.
Since we arrived here earlier, we had a walk aroud our hotel area such as to Kg. Gelam. This place tell a story about malay in the land of Singapore. We also went to Geylang area to fill our free time before going back to hotel for a rest and sleep. Before that, we also went to some historical places to have an overview of this country history.
We began our formal activity on the 2nd day to National University Singapore (NUS). There, we visited some of the departments under Biology Fakulty. We also got chance to have a short visited to their animal museam that display variety of fauna species which some of them came from Malaysia. One of their popular research here is designing fish that able to glow in the dark know as zebra fish (this is quite interesting part of the visit). From there, we continue our afternoon activity at the Botanical Garden. Besides experiencing with diversity of flora species (which is totally different from the previous place), we also had enjoy time to shop here even though the prices were quite high for us to afford items they sell here. We finished our first day trip by returning back to our hotel.
Third or last day was coming after all. According to our schedule, we ought to go to Biopolis that morning. Before that, we checked out first. The Valley really fascinated our eyes. The place is like the building we normally saw in most science fiction building with complicated stuffs (…it might be just me that imagine it like that). The building that we visited was known as Genome since it normally deals with genes or genetics. As far as I can comment, it really occupied with latest technology that surely cost billion dollars. Before return to Malaysia, in the afternoon, we went shopping for souvenirs. Some of us had their own time to enjoy the visit.
