Living in Singapore, without your parents, keeping in touch with family is important. Now I will introduce three ways to keep in touch with family, writing letters, phone call and E-mail.

Ø The first way, of course, is write letter. Here I just want to give some notices. First, to send a letter to China, you need a 60 cents stamp, if the weight of your letter less than 20 gram. Otherwise, you need to go to the postal, scale your letter and they will tell you how much you should pay. Another point is the form of the envelope. Chinese usually write the name of the country first on the envelope. However Englishmen usually put it behind the name of the writer. Here is an example

From: Mr Zhang

Apartment 801

Sembawang Shopping Centre

Singapore Code 758459

To: No 3 Middle School

Xuzhou, Jiangsu

China

Code 388000

In addition, you'd better write your envelope in both Chinese and English, because sometimes the poster may not understand English. Like in China, you can find Mailbox here easily. They are usually near the shopping centres and stations. In fact you can send your letters in school, that is the way we usually follow.

Ø The second way is call. You can buy phone cards here, then you can call home by using the public phone and the payment of the phone is about 2 Singapore dollar per min. There are two kinds of phone cards here, one is SingTel world card and the other is SingTel phone card. You can only use the SingTel world cards for international call, but the price of this kind of phone card is lower than SingTel phone card. To use SingTel phone card: first, insert your card into the public phone; second, input country code, city code and your family number. To use the SingTel world phone card: pull 1899 first and then follow the hint.

Ø The last way, which I thought is the best way, is use E-mail. For the Chinese scholars can use the computer at school freely, sending E-mail is the best way to save your money. Also, sending E-mails is much faster than writing letters. A letter goes from Singapore to China usually take 5 to 8 days but your parents can get your E-mail just after you sent it. To use this method to keep contact with your family both you and your family need to have E-mail addresses on the Internet. There are two popular places you can apply E-mail addresses freely: one is www.hotmail.com and the other is mail.yahoo.com

That is all I want to say. Wish you felt comfortable here.