“Our Beginning”
#1 Journal, 2nd April 2023

Today’s the day, the first day of the PPPK Petra Student exchange program. Today, we started our 6 days journey to Singapore, we also went to the Merlion and  Chinatown as well. And we end the day after arriving at the hotel, and prepared for tomorrow’s activities

We arrived at Juanda Airport, Surabaya at 5.30 A.M. All Petra’s exchange students were gathered at Soerabaja Cafe. All the senior high school students wore Pink/ White for the dresscode.

After several minutes, we were given our passport and boarding pass so we can pass the imigration section, but afterwards mr. Dwikki as our constructure, collected our passport again so we won’t lose it.

After we took some photos together for documentation, we went into a hallway, hop into the bus, and then we went into the plane.

We were seated seperately, Mr. Dwikki at 35H, Nixon at 37K, Andrea at 42C, Sharoon at 41H, Sean at 39J, and Rara at 28K.

The flight from Surabaya to Singpore takes about 2 hours. and then wiiiii~?? we were up in

the sky on the way to Singapore yey!!

We were given a choice between omelette or fish fried rice for the breakfast while we were in the plane.

Because we were so excited, 2 hours of flight felt like only 10 minutes. Thank God we landed at

Singapore safely at around 10 a.m Singaporean time. After that we went to the toilet, passed the imigration sections, and went for our luggage.

After we finished grabbing our luggage, we were met with miss Priscilla, our tour guide. Miss Priscilla briefed us on what we were going to do today and we got on the bus. Before we started the tour, we had lunch at Qian-Xi on “Tessensohn rd” where all of us ate Chinese food. Next on our schedule was the tour, we visited many places such as, The arts house at the Old Parliament, The statue of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, The Singapore River, Merlion statue, and lastly China Town. Miss Priscilla told us the brief history of each landmark and how it came to be. We were given the chance to take group photos for about half an hour at Merlion statue.

In China Town, we were allowed to roam around and also buy souvenirs.

After exploring Chinatown, we were having dinner at YENNEY. .The restaurant is located at the basement, but it didn’t take long for us to find the place. For our dinner, we had eggs, prawns, chicken, pickles, cabbage mixed with carrot, and siobak. Siobak is a dish made from pork. We ate watermelons as our dessert. Exploring Chinatown drained our energy. It was very fun and tiring at the same time. We felt hungry so we ate so much until we were full. The boys even asked for more chicken and prawns. They looked at the girls’ table to see if there’s any prawn or chicken the girl didn’t finish eating. Our next stop was the RELC hotel, a place where we are going to stay for the next 5 days. On our way there, we passed the orchard road, Singapore’s retail heart. It was already 7pm when we arrived there but the sky hadn’t yet darkened. Before

going to each of our rooms, we gathered in the lobby and the teacher announced our roommate and the hotel room. The lobby was nice. Although it wasn’t that spacious, 52 person fitted in it. After the teacher have announced the roomate, we went to our own room and cleaned ourself. We packed our things and get ready for the evaluation.

Before we went to sleep, we did our daily journals first. We gathered at Nixon and Sean’s room to finish our journal. We had a lot of chit chat with our group members and it was a great time that we can spend a whole day with friends.

Our highlight of the day is when we forced Andrea to buy souvenirs for her family at Chinatown, she hesitated at first, but in the end, she finally gave in and spent 80S$ worth of gifts/souvenirs. It was very funny.

Our first day went without a hitch, it was very fun and everybody enjoyed every second of this day, we hope that everyday was as fun as this day and we hope to gain many experiences in this program.