My family and I moved to Singapore, which is a small city-state in Southeast Asia when I was 4 and my sister was 2. We stayed there for three and a half years, and I attended kindergarten through second grade there. I went to a school called the Singapore American School, where children of all nationalities would attend school, and be taught in English, not in Mandarin Chinese like the traditional schools there. It was really cool, there were probably 20 different nationalities represented in my kindergarten class alone.

In Singapore, they do not get snow, or even have your typical seasons like summer, fall, winter, and spring, they have a wet season and a dry season. The temperature is about 80 degrees year-round, and during the wet season, the thunderstorms are unlike any thunderstorm you will ever experience.

Although living in Singapore provided me with so many opportunities and experiences that typical kids do not get to experience, like traveling and going on vacation to over 20 countries in Asia, it was still difficult for me to adjust to life when I moved back to America.

While I was overseas, obviously the culture was different, but that meant that I did not watch your typical movies or TV shows like they had in America. I did not watch hardly any Disney movies, I didn't watch any of the typical American children's cartoons, all we really had was Drake and Josh and Captain Caveman, which is an old show on Boomerang. The food and the sweets and candies and everything were different, I ate Chinese food almost every day and our "treats" or "junk food" was walking to the nearest 7-Eleven and buying a Slurpee.

The experience of living in Singapore: the culture, food, weather, people, everything, was incredible. I would not change living there for the world, but it did distance me from the American kids for a few years when I moved back.