I love visiting Singapore and I have friends who live there and love it. I wish I'd tried harder to get a job there when I was younger for a few years. At the moment we have young children who have just started school and we're quite settled in our town in the UK, but I do still daydream about moving to Singapore.
One of the things I love about where I live in the UK is the beautiful English landscapes. We're in the SE of England, commutable to London and we're surrounded by forests and countryside. We cycle a lot into those forests.
A question if you don't mind, do you have children and how would you rate their quality of life in Singapore? I know there are a lot of parks but it does also have a sense of very built up and so kids grown up quite urbanised right?
I don’t have kids, but my niece and nephew visited a while back and loved it. It’s definitely urban. There’s often playgrounds and kids’ swimming pools in condos, parks are mostly urban with playgrounds, there’s loads of places for them to ride bikes safely, skate, etc. If anything, people complain about it being a little too sanitised. Unless you are loaded, you’ll be living in a small apartment rather than a house with a garden, but the condo facilities and parks make up for it.
It’s Singapore, so it’ small and you won’t get vast forests, but there’s enough nature spots to keep kids happy. You can always go cycling around Pulau Ubin at the weekend to soak up the jungle atmosphere or hike along the Southern Ridges or up Bukit Timah, and I often see smaller kids wandering around the mangrove boardwalks with their parents trying to spot lizards and otters.
It is expensive if you have kids though. You’ll pay a lot in school fees, and if public transport isn’t enough for you, cars are very expensive as well. Having said that, the schools and public transport are both top notch.
One of the things I love about where I live in the UK is the beautiful English landscapes. We're in the SE of England, commutable to London and we're surrounded by forests and countryside. We cycle a lot into those forests.
A question if you don't mind, do you have children and how would you rate their quality of life in Singapore? I know there are a lot of parks but it does also have a sense of very built up and so kids grown up quite urbanised right?