I am now at the end of my first week of living in Singapore (sort of, one day late), and I am almost settled.

The good news: I have found a room! Room The room is nice and spacy, though the furniture is a bit basic and the Wifi does not work yet. The airco works, which is a massive relief, and the view is pretty great, as can be seen on the right. Room

Furthermore, the location is fantastic; work is a 30 minutes walk, and the busstop is less than 5 minutes walk. There is also a mall reachable in 10-15 minutes, and a bigger mall reachable in 40 minutes. Within a radius of 20 minutes, there are also multiple spots to eat.

The bad news: I have not yet been able to pay for the room. It turns out that getting a functional bank account, for which I had to have a residential address (the room), requires about 2 weeks of working days, first to approve the application and then to issue a debit card. Luckily for me the landlord and agent (three hurrahs for the agent) seem to be fine with me being delayed in paying my first month of rent, otherwise this could have gotten quite nasty. (They highly preferred me using PayNow to pay them as opposed to transferring the payment from the Rabobank.)

The absolute knockout blow from the mace of bureaucracy in which I found that out was pretty magnificent. There I was, sitting behind my work desk on Friday, when I suddenly receive three mails from the bank. Paraphrased (though the order is correct):

Mail 1: “Dear sir, your request to update your e-mail address has been completed.”

Mail 2: “Dear sir, welcome to our bank and welcome to digibanking! Login to generate a digital token! Do not tell your login details or your one-time password to anyone.”

Mail 3: “Dear sir, your debit card has been issued; it will be sent to your address in 3-5 working days.”

Tom: Wot

Like an unbureaucratic fool, I could not see the beautiful perfectly sensible logic at play here; I had already waited for three working days for the application to be approved, so I didn’t expect to have to wait even longer for the debit card. I had also never received login information for digibanking, which according to the mail, I should never share with anyone. I checked the digibanking app: I could make new login information, of course, using five different methods (including using the debit card), none of which were available to me.

So I went to the bank twice that day, standing in no less than 4 lines in total before being plucked out of the last line near closing time and being helped by some lovely bank staff, who explained to me that the idea was that I could access digibanking after I received my debit card.

I can never tell whether it is just me in these situations, but I was again in my baffled tourist state at that point. Got a lovely tip to try out some mango-cheese smoothie at a store called Heytea though; forgot to ask the name of the guy who gave me the tip before I was plucked from that waiting line.

Luckily the bank teller was able to assist me in unlocking digibanking early; the next Friday was decisively after the deadline for paying the first month of rent for the room to such an extent that I was uncomfortable waiting until then. I still need to wait up to three working days to transfer the money required to do that to my Singapore bank though.

Smarter people than me may realize that maybe this could have been avoided through the application of a service like Wise or similar (as was recommended to me by Jagruth and Nikhil from St Jozef Doelen), but I remembered too late and decided to just go with this instead of complicating this situation further.

Am I done then? Not quite, as my employee pass appointment is on Wednesday, after which I have to give proof of Employee Pass to both the phone company and the landlord. Shouldn’t be too difficult, however.

And then, it will all have worked out. All that rests me for now is telling you the definite order of how to arrange things when you go to Singapore:

  1. Get a prepaid simcard. This cannot be an e-Sim; I checked.
  2. Get a proof of ownership for your prepaid simcard.
  3. Get a residential apartment/room/house/registered cardboard box/etc. Make sure that you can pay for this in some way preferably involving access to PayNow, Singapore’s fast payment system, but without requiring access to a specifically Singaporean bank account. Make sure to communicate with your agent and landlord, and remember that at least the Rabobank has a transfer time.
  4. Get an employment pass via work.
  5. When you have a residential apartment and, preferably, a Singpass, make a bank account. Do not make my mistake.

Furthermore: Arrange hotel bookings in intervals of one week, so that you can still cancel the unnecessary bookings. Trust me on that, this is probably the only real mistake I made.

There, done. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

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It turns out I have been in action mode a lot, so I am unsure what to do next, really. Probably work. My first workday was last friday; it was a bit hectic, as I had to go to the bank twice. There was a meeting on what the project was about; it sounds very cool, and it also sounds like I am going to have to become familiar with a lot of different systems in a short timespan. But then, that was expected. It turned out my NUS-id and password did not work yet, and my employee pass request was sent in a bit late, but that should be resolved by Monday and it’s not like I wasn’t running around between different bank branches anyways.

In a surprising twist, I shall first be familiarizing myself with Frama-C, which I first heard about from Bob not even two weeks ago. You can bet that I now regret leaving my Modern C book behind in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, I will still be installing Rocq on this laptop and work through it; I actually quite enjoyed the first bits of Volume 1 of Software Foundations which I worked through before I had to start arranging my move.

On the hobby end, I went to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It was good. It had quite some connections to the wider MCU, but it was a movie focused on Spider-Man first and foremost, setting the stage for a new era of MCU Spider-Man. If you like the MCU Spider-Man movies, give it a watch.

Furthermore, me and Erfan have eaten together a few times. He pointed out some good nearby restaurants, which we have been visiting. Here is a photo of us yesterday, sitting in a thai restaurant: Erfan and Tom Also dear god peppers are spicy here. I already burnt the inside of my mouth quite a bit with some noodles last Sunday and I suffered yesterday when eating a standard red pepper. Erfan told me some more about visiting Malaysia, and it definitely sounds like something I should do (probably with Bram, when he visits).

Next week, I will probably continue with the process of getting all the right documentation and paying for my apartment, as well as do work. I hope to find a way to watch the new Avatar movie, but I currently don’t have wifi, so let’s see whether that works out. I also think I should put some more time into the Discordia stuff, or do some sporting or something. For discordia, I put Krita on my laptop, so I should be able to draw stuff again.

I think I’ll just take it easy the rest of the weekend though. Not like I haven’t been busy a lot recently. Time for a walk.

Tom out.

Note: I have received some nice ideas for functionality on this site, but as I currently do not have wifi, me augmenting the site will have to wait until I do. Thanks for the ideas, though, and if you have another idea, please let me know.

Bonus: I have some additional photos! Two were made before my plane flight (featuring my mom and dad, and one featuring Joep), and one was made by Erfan yesterday. I also added a photo of me in fancy dress for my defense with Poekie.

Before leaving 1 Before leaving 2 Tom Eating Thai Food Tom Fancily Dressed

Bonus reading tip: If you like reading about my bureaucratic misadventures, you can certainly not go wrong with Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I remember reading this one winter’s evening while on my way to Amsterdam. I was so engrossed in it that when I got off the train, the cold of the platform, the sudden throngs of people and the fact that I suddenly did not find myself in a space that could be mistaken for the labyrinthine attic-like hallways that Joseph K. needed to navigate reduced me to the state of a baffled tourist. I remember only snapping out of it a few streets further, before which my body navigated to where I needed/wanted to be (a bookshop, in this case) while my brain frantically tried to get back to reality.