I was a journalist and had been working for a media company in the United States for three years. Before that I had worked for a radio station. At the media company, I had been able to focus my attention on the field I loved most. TV reporting. My passions were however not for just simply reporting, I wanted to be able to travel and report bigger things than simply local news. Therefore when a Non-Governmental Organization company approached me with an offer to help them make documentaries all over the world, I took the opportunity.

Our first visit was Singapore. The head of the team was a Singapore Native and he wanted to honor his homeland by starting with it. This would be my first time in Asia. I was delighted at the prospect of making my first travels to the populous continent.

By the time I had landed in Singapore, I had made friends with the camera guy and his wife who was also his assistant. They were a jovial crew. I leant that they had been in this business for six years working together. They had a lot of experience and had travelled to all the major places in the world. They had told me that the only place they had not toured significantly was surprisingly the United States, their mother country.

“Whenever we are in the country we focus all our attention on our kids and family” they went on to explain. “We also find other countries more appealing due to some kind of adventurous appeal that comes with foreign destinations”, they went on.

I was glad to know that they had travelled to Singapore often and were fairly acquainted with the City State. Since our documentary would mostly cover the lifestyle of the modern people in Singapore, the couple assured me that everything would be pretty straightforward. They even offered to take me under their wing and help me get oriented with the place.

The camera man, Tony went on to tell me that he had a local Malay friend who had told him that he had 2 common rooms for rent right in the town where we were to work from. He suggested that I could join them and take the rooms. I would occupy one room and they would occupy the other. This way we could live close to each other while saving a lot of money through these cheap accommodations.

I welcomed Tony’s idea and saw the brilliance of it. Many times when people are out making documentaries, they lodge in hotels which end up being very expensive. Hotels also prevent one from getting to really experience the actual life lived by the locals. Tony went on to explain that through experience he had learnt that getting convenient short term vacation rentals in Singapore could be hard and they might come at a high cost.