The Beginning of My Journey
Dear All,
My name is Kamila, and this is my first post to Geoblog. Here I will briefly tell you about myself and about my expectations from my cultural and academic excursion to Singapore. One of the reasons I decided to become a geoblogger is that I can consistently record my study abroad experience. Since I have an audience (students and study abroad staff), I’m also happy to share with them all the stories of my Journey to Singapore, which, hopefully, might be useful to them. In addition to that, writing things down will let the moments and memories live not only on the pictures and videos, but also as stories on the pages of Geoblog. Lastly, since English is not my native language, and a large portion of classes that I’m taking at Pennstate are engineering classes, it feels like I need to improve some aspects of my communication skills, so Geoblog is a great way to practice my creative writing skills.
So, let me introduce myself :] As I said, my name is Kamila, and I’m from Kazakhstan. Languages that we speak there are Russian and Kazakh; also I had some German at school. In 2010 I became a receiver of a Presidential scholarship that allowed me to study in the United States. I had a unique opportunity to study and practice English language at Boston University’s Language and Orientation Center, and later I was accepted to the Pennsylvania State University’s Electrical Engineering program. Now I’m a junior, and so far my favorite class is Nano electronics (It is very fascinating how stuff (transistors) get smaller and smaller according to Moore’s law!). To get some global engineering experience, I decided to apply to the National University of Singapore (which is # 11 in Electrical Engineering) via study abroad program.
The other reason why I’m very excited to visit Singapore, is that I can observe the co-existence of Chinese tea ceremony and Indian/British tea cultures. At Pennstate, I was involved with the Tea Institute (where we study tea ceremonies and tea chemistry) and became a gong fu practitioner (below you can see some pictures I made in the tea house). I’ve also heard there are a lot of beautiful Japanese, Chinese and Korean tea houses in Singapore!
Chinese Tea Ceremony (Gong Fu)
Japanese Tea ceremony (Chanoyu)
Also, I’m passionate about studying the local culture, that’s the reason why I’m taking some classes about the traditions of Singapore. I am familiar with zen-buddhism, I’m practicing tai chi, yoga and feng shui, so I feel like I’ll be comfortable in that environment. Other things that I like are painting and photography, so my future blog entries will be full pictures ;]
To learn more about me you can find me on facebook – my name is Kamila Dagilova, on instagram: inspir3d_m3, and http://satori1618.blogspot.com/
P.S. Below I have attached my application to Geoblog essay about stereotypes of Singapore. I’ll try to explore more about stereotypes when I arrive.
Singapore and Its Stereotypes
by Kamila Dagilova
Travelling is a nice way to enrich your life experiences, meet new people and see different places; however, it takes a lot of preparation before you go abroad, and it often happens that we don’t have enough time to learn about those cultures and places. By watching random videos on YouTube and reading web articles about the places you plan to visit, it is easy to become a victim of “stereotype” thinking. Stereotyping is just an easy way of thinking, because it simplifies our social world, and some people just ignore “deep” details. But things can be a lot complicated.
There are a lot of stereotypes about Singapore, the place where I’m planning to go this spring. This enables me to pay close attention at those particular things, to verify how close they are to reality. One of the stereotypes that I learned, conveys positive impression; it is about the thing that Singapore is the cleanest place on the Earth. Also, one of my friends told me that you are not allowed to chew gum in Singapore, because they want to prevent public littering, and fine or incarcerate people, who don’t obey the rules. This was quiet surprising! I cannot agree or disagree with that stereotype yet, because I haven’t seen the streets of Singapore with my eyes, but it does make me have high expectations and step back from chewing gum in public places during my first days in Singapore.
Another thing that I have heard is that it is important to know feng shui, if you want to understand the culture of Singapore, because the feng shui symbols appear almost everywhere. For example, all the buildings and roads are made using the rules of feng shui, according to which, the sharp angles are not allowed, and shapes of the buildings should symbolize the elements of nature. In addition to that, a prime minister of Singapore explains that the prosperity of the country is due to “good feng shui”, and even their currency has a symbol of Ba Gua, which brings luck to every resident of Singapore. I personally know some basics of feng shui, and I hope that I will learn more while I’m there.
There are some advantages in knowing some stereotypes, like for example, a stereotype about the thing that “all the rooms of all the buildings in Singapore are very air-conditioned because it’s hot outside”. This stereotype is helpful and prepares me to take some warm clothes with me, so I can avoid sickness. However, there are, obviously, disadvantages in stereotypes as well, when people actually start believing that these “generalizations” about a particular group of people or places are true, and they often rely and base their decisions on them, which can cause a lot of problems in the future. For example, one of my American friends, before coming to Kazakhstan, the place where I live, was influenced by negative cultural stereotypes about Kazakhstani traditions and people, after watching a British-American mockumentary movie about Borat. However, according to her, the experience she had there was completely different from herexpectations, so stereotypes are rarely a good thing to rely upon.
Location: Taldykorgan, Kazakhstan