PUBLISHED ONAugust 03, 2024 11:58 PMByMelissa Teo On Aug 9 every year, Demetrio Leonidas Stanescu Motatu and his wife, Sarah Lim, would gather with their family to watch the National Day Parade.
They even got lucky once and managed to snag tickets to watch the parade live in 2016.
This year will be no different, and the family plans to head over to Leonidas' sister-in-law's place to celebrate.
Despite not being from Singapore, the 50-year-old Caucasian, who was born in Germany and is a Singapore Permanent Resident, looks forward to the festivities.
And now, he calls Singapore home.
Falling in love with a Singaporean
Leonidas, who is a dental technician and actor, met Sarah online while he was still living in Spain.
Sarah, a Singaporean, flew to Spain for three weeks to meet Leonidas for the first time in January 2008.
They continued their long-distance relationship before Leonidas popped the question six months later.
In September that same year, Leonidas flew to Singapore to officially tie the knot with Sarah.
After doing so, the couple moved to Spain, where they lived for seven years.
During this period, the couple would occasionally fly back to Singapore for a few weeks to visit the family.
But in October 2014, Sarah had to stay in Singapore for a longer period of time to take care of her mother, who had gone through surgery.
"In that moment, we had no idea that we would move to Singapore," Leonidas said.
When that happened, Leonidas was also managing his one-year-old start-up company as a dental technician in Spain.
"It wasn't an established company, it was still new. So I was facing more bills than benefits, it was kind of difficult," he shared.
Because of this, he hesitated to follow Sarah.
Leonidas urged her to go on her own and the plan was that she would stay there till February 2015.
But her mother's broken dentures ended up landing Leonidas a job in Singapore.
Moving across the world to the little red dot
Leonidas has a friend in the dental industry in Singapore named Mrs Tan, and in 2011, she encouraged him to fly over and work with her.
However, this never came to fruition.
Fast forward to November 2014, Sarah had been caring for her mother when the latter's dentures broke. So, she asked Leonidas if he could reach out to Mrs Tan for help.
Though Mrs Tan was unable to help with the dentures, she told Sarah that there was a job opening in the lab she worked at and said that Leonidas could consider it.
The opportunity meant that Leonidas could move to Singapore without worrying about income.
So he flew to Singapore for two weeks in December 2014 for the job interview and on Feb 14, 2015, he officially moved to Singapore.
"On Valentine's Day, it's easy to remember that one," he said with a chuckle.
Though Leonidas had wanted to move here for some time, scoring the job was the push he needed to finally do it.
"If the job hadn't happened, it may have taken a while for me to come to Singapore.
"I knew I wanted to come here to live because I loved it. It was love at first glance in 2008 for me."
Localising himself
Uprooting one's life to move to the another part of the world can be challenging but Leonidas apparently didn't struggle much.
"I wasn't a stranger to Singapore when I moved because I had come here many times already and I wanted to leave [Spain] so the adjustment was pretty easy for me," he said.
As an actor and screenwriter, Leonidas even wrote a comedy called Local-ised, which was inspired by his own experiences about relocating to a new country.
The story tells the tale of a Romanian scientist called Gustav, who navigates the cultural differences and mishaps of working in Singapore.
Upon arriving in Singapore, Gustav struggled to adapt to the local customs and way of life, leading to many humorous cultural misunderstandings and awkward interactions with his new co-workers.
Though Leonidas has properly settled here and considers himself one of us, some locals still view him as a foreigner.
In one incident, Leonidas shared that he was having breakfast at a coffeeshop when a woman accused him of taking a table that she had choped.
This turned out to be a misunderstanding but it made Leonidas realise that some Singaporeans still think that he does not understand the local culture.
"Come on! I know this. I also chope tables with tissue paper packets," he said.
"I've been living here for so long. But some people see me and think that I do not know how things here work."
There have also been minor incidents when Leonidas had been approached by restaurant staff with fork and knife as they had assumed he didn't know how to use chopsticks.
"They don't know that I've learned to live with chopsticks since I was 14 years old," an amused Leonidas told us.
He feels at home in Singapore
When Leonidas was a kid, he was constantly on the move.
His parents, who are Romanian, had moved to Germany, where he was born.
When they returned to Romania and then moved to Spain, Leonidas shared that he was bullied in both places.
But that hasn't happened since he moved to Singapore.
"I see that bullying is actually a serious offence in Singapore, so this is the place for me," he said.
One factor that makes Leonidas so comfortable is our multi-racialism.
"Seeing Singapore was a mind opener because there were so many ethnicities living together," he said.
"It's very difficult to find this overseas. Normally, when you have a majority ethnicity, it will always bully the minority. I never liked that because I myself was practically an immigrant."
When asked if he has experienced the occasional homesickness, Leonidas said no.
"By birth, Germany should be my home. But I left when I was five years old, so it's nothing to me, there's no feeling from me towards Germany.
"Singapore is the only place I feel at home. Since the moment I landed in 2008, I've not had homesickness at all because I am at home."
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