Category: Thinking

My daughter excels at expressing herself, as I’ve always known. Despite this, it still astonished me when she described a rushing gecko that she met tonight; she used “yi liu yan”(it is a vivid phrase in Chinese, which means like in the blink of an eye) to describe how fast it was.

It’s the rainy season in Singapore, which starts in November and lasts until January the following year.

Frequent pouring rain defines this period, and even sheltering under an umbrella offers little protection from getting wet. Despite this, I regularly forget to take an umbrella with me when heading outside; therefore, I usually have to wait for the rain to stop for over 30 minutes.

The good news for me is that the temperature drops significantly during this period, and sometimes you can even feel a little cold.

After struggling to check off a litany of tiresome tasks, I received my deposit of $8400 from the agency tonight. Finally, my move-out process that lasted over 2 weeks was officially finished.

The main task is to polish the floors for three rooms, the living room, the bedroom, and a small room off the bedroom.

We spent over $1000 on this project. For the bedroom, we reached out to the worker directly and negotiated a better deal, otherwise the total cost would be even higher.

The second main project was the dry-cleaning of curtain and room cleaning. We involved an individual worker to finish it at the beginning, and it cost us $260.

Unluckily, we were informed that the cleaning should be delivered by a professional cleaning service provider that can issue us with an official invoice according to the rental contract, despite the fact that the original cleaning was perfect. We spent another $460 to engage a professional cleaning provider just for a compliant invoice, and we didn’t even ask them to clean again.

Another crucial part of the move-out process was repainting the walls. It totally cost us $600 to have all the walls in this house repainted.

Actually, when comparing to other painting providers’ quotes, this was really a better deal for us although $600 was still quite a high price.

I’ve been busy checking out of the apartment in Sophia Hills these days. Unluckily, I was also on duty, and piles of tickets need to be processed.

When it comes to checking out, it’s just another pile of tiresome stuff, including repainting, floor polishing, cleaning, etc. It’s so complicated and sometimes ridiculous, and I will share a detailed introduction in another post.

We moved house from Sophia Hills to The Mint Residences, where we lived for 2 years. My daughter was 2 years old when we just moved into Sophia hills, and now she is 4.

We spent the first 2 years in Sophia Hills after moving to Singapore from China in late 2023, the scenery and the basic facilities here are perfect, and my wife and my daughter learned how to swim here.

My daughter experienced two preschools close to Sophia Hills—the first one is Maplebear, and the second one is Busybees—and she made lots of friends there, both nice teachers and lovely classmates.

We left Sophia Hills to get a bigger room for my daughter’s growth and study, and my wife made the decision to choose this apartment, which features 3 bedrooms, a spacious living room, as well as a large terrace—although the rent is quite high, nearly $5000.

Well, here’s to wishing us all the best in our new life here.