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Published: February 10th 2014
Well, Singapore’s a strange place isn’t it? There are lots of things to like and lots to dislike but almost all of them are in some way strange. As per usual I knew very little the country before arriving. I know a lot of people who have spent time in Singapore so naturally assumed that it must be some sort of reasonable sized place…it’s not. It’s one major island that is like 40x20km and a few other small islands. I suspect that makes it smaller than Calgary by footprint (I only suspect it cuz I’m too lazy to look it up and confirm it – besides, I don’t have wifi in the lovely café I’m currently spending the afternoon in while you are all at work!) but with approx 6 million people.
Singapore is an amazing example of how a developing country has managed to transform into a developed country. There is no land, no natural resources, no space and yet somehow they’ve become one of the most important ports in the world, a financial center and an incredible tourist destination. Most of what I had heard about Singapore was the severity of their laws and penalties for
Transformers
Ready for our mission...5x that is!things like spitting on the street, drugs, etc. And it’s true; this country loves its rules and penalties. Because of those rules it is an exceptionally clean, safe place. But those same rules have also served to make the whole place feel a bit contrived. I have to admit that from the moment we drove from the airport to downtown past perfectly manicured parks and flower gardens to the hour we spent in a “garden” filled with gigantic artificial “super trees” (more on this later) before heading back to the airport, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in an amusement park the whole time. The subway system is incredibly clean and efficient. Shelagh insisted on carrying a coffee onto the subway every morning and I had to continually remind her not to drink it as there is a $500 fine (fully enforced) for consuming any food or drink on a train or in a station. I just had visions of spending a portion of our trip in a Singaporean police station. I’m guessing the “amusement park” atmosphere does not extend to the police station.
As a natural rule-abider myself I felt quite conflicted by Singapore.
For example, in the subway stations there are lines beside where each train door will be. There is signage telling people to stand behind those lines and information about how 95% of people agree that if you let the people off the train before trying to get on the train everything will run much more smoothly. I LOVE IT! Every time I watch people cram onto full trains, in any city, I shake my head and think “don’t they realize there is a better way to do this?” I also appreciate the lack of garbage, saliva, urine on the streets and sidewalks of Singapore, what’s not to love about that? However, the flip side of this is the amusement park feeling.
When we were in Papau New Guinea we were talking with some locals and Singapore came up and they said “why can’t we do that?” meaning why can’t PNG transform itself economically like Singapore has. I suspect the answer is incredibly complicated but has something to do with a citizenry who are unwilling to subject themselves to oppressive infringements on their personal freedoms.
Singapore is a very multicultural place with about 70% Chinese
descent and then a mix of Indian, Malay, and “other”. I kid you not, if you didn’t fit into the first three categories your identification actually used to say “other”. Singapore has been growing and continues to grow aggressively in terms of population as a way to drive its economic growth. However, the birth rate in Singapore is not even at population replacement levels. Someone told us that Singaporeans love to travel and children are incompatible with travel – their words not mine! So the growth has to come from immigration. As with anywhere this brings issues. Recently there have been some riots among migrant workers.
Singapore has the highest rate of any country of people who live in government housing. For many years the government has been building enormous high-rise buildings (but built in a good urban planning strategy where shops, food, entertainment and work should be within 3 km of your living space) to house the population. Singapore has several distinct areas such as a China Town, Kampong Glam (the Arab quarter), Little India, etc and those areas obviously have a predominance of restaurants, shops, religious institutions, etc for that culture. However, the government is
also aware of the impact of separation of cultures and ghetto-ization (word?) so in the public housing buildings ownership of units has to reflect the overall cultural make up of the country. In other words, it doesn’t matter if the building is in China town, only 70% of the units can be owned by Chinese. One impact of this is that when someone from a smaller cultural group such as “others” (there’s only 5 or 8% of these or something) wants to buy a unit, they often have to wait forever because they have to wait until an “other” unit comes on the market whereas people of Chinese descent can almost always find somewhere to buy.
I feel like when you are in a place that is strange you should try strange things. So, Shelagh and I went to a “fish spa”. Shelagh had seen this on Dragons Den (spoiler alert, it didn’t garner a huge investment) and we were both curious to try. Basically you put your feet in a tank of these little fish and the fish eat the dead skin off your foot. Not surprisingly there are some concerns around the hygiene of this.
It is an incredible sensation when you first put your feet in the tank. Literally about a hundred fish start swimming around your feet and ankles and start to bite you. It can be an issue for people with ticklish feet. I was a bit worried about that but it turns out that instead of being ticklish I was just plain freaked out. There was squealing and screaming and I pulled my feet out of the water numerous times in the first minute. I know for certain that I cannot be a contestant on fear factor. It seriously wigged me out that fish were eating my feet. I eventually started to relax. Then I remembered that I had a bandaid covering a gouge on my foot that had been there for about 10 days and wasn’t healing. Shelagh suggested I take the bandaid off so that the fish could get at it “because that will help to heal it”. Well, let me tell you, when those little fuckers started biting my open cut the experience got a lot less pleasant. I’d also like to refer you back to the concern over hygiene. When I told the guy that it hurt
where they were biting my cut he said “you have a cut?!?! Take your foot out!” In hindsight, I would suggest to the fish spa industry that if you are concerned with things like people having a cut on their feet then you should screen people in some way such as asking them “do you have a cut on your foot?” At any rate, a week later now and the cut has gotten to the point where I don’t need a bandaid and I have not yet noticed any symptoms of “fish foot disease”. Shelagh keeps insisting that it helped my cut heal. I keep ignoring her.
One of the highlights of any visit to Singapore is the food. Because it is such a mix of cultures there is a wide variety of awesome food available. Most people eat from Hawker stalls. Back in the day Singapore was filled with vendors selling street food. The government was worried about the cleanliness and hygiene of this so moved all the hawkers off the street and into covered areas filled with stalls and established a strict inspection program. Every stall has a rating displayed on it showing how they
faired in their hygiene inspection. Singaporeans don’t actually care and will eat at a stall with a bad rating but us westerners with western digestive tracts should likely pay attention. We ate quite a few meals of good noodles, rice dishes etc. One of the foods that is particularly en vogue right now is just “chicken rice”. It’s literally boiled chicken and rice. Gordon Ramsey came to town and challenged local hawkers to a competition of three popular dishes. We ate our meal of chicken rice from the stall that beat Gordon Ramsey in the competition. Anthony Bourdain also raved about this same stall. There were several options on the sign in terms of what part of the chicken you got. Whole, half, drumstick, spare parts. There were many other delicacies on offer that we didn’t partake in…Pigs Organ Soup, Birds Nest Soup, Turtle Soup.
For our last day in town we went to Universal Studios. I think that tells you what a strange place this is. I could be in most places for an awfully long time before heading to an amusement park. It was really fun. We went on all the big kid rides. We
had bought the pass that lets you skip the line so we felt obliged to go on some of the rides a number of times. The transformers ride was our favorite and we went on it 5 times. We both laughed through the whole thing every time.
We were proper tourists in Singapore – lots of walking, going to things, wearing runners and socks because they’re good for walking despite looking silly with your outfit. The result of that kind of touristing is that one gets hot, and thirsty. Luckily, Singapore is filled with skyscrapers of various descriptions and clever people have put fabulous bars at the top of many of them. I think we went to four different, but equally outrageously overpriced, bars to have a cocktail and enjoy the view. One of the most spectacular sights in Singapore is the harbor itself. I cannot explain how many massive container ships are sitting moored waiting to come into the port. There are literally hundreds. I know this may not seem interesting when you read it but it is quite stunning to witness.
The government has decided that 50% of Singapore should be green
space. That’s noble and smart, however in a little tiny island with a huge population that is also clearly impossible. We saw a scale model of Singapore that apparently shows every building and there is nowhere near 50% green space. They are becoming big on green roofs, green on balconies of sky scrapers etc, and that all counts towards the 50%. Regardless, I think they have a way to go. So, the supertrees I mentioned earlier… There is an area that I think is reclaimed land (oh by the way, Singapore is constantly reclaiming land because…well…they don’t have enough) where they have built these super trees that aren’t actually tree but are rather big tree-like structures. But then on the structures they have planted things. Now, I’m a bit short on good information here because by the time we got to them we were so tired that all we did was went up to the top of the tallest one where there is a …yes, you guessed, bar! So we sat and looked at the trees but didn’t actually go around or through them or read any of the information of what a marvel of biology they are. Those of
you readers interested in this sort of thing (you know, nature, the environment, crazy impossible feats of engineering, etc) should probably google Singapore Super Trees (ooh, I just did it myself, turns out its called Supertree Grove in Gardens by the Bay). Anyway, basically I think these things will eventually be covered by plants and will solve the worlds CO2 problems or something like that. However, they are also very weird.
One can’t go to Singapore without going to the Raffles hotel for a Singapore Sling. Well, actually, one probably can if one does not get caught up in the tourist traps/feel the need to somehow participate in a sliver of colonialism. Raffles was the first big colonial hotel in Singapore and was “the place to stay/drink” for a hundred years or so. A bartender there invented the Singapore Sling, which is fruity deliciousness with booze in it. It was a strange flashback to my university days, and the only other time I’ve had a Singapore Sling, when a bar in Saskatoon called Checkers used to have fishbowl Fridays and we would order Singapore Slings which literally came served in a fishbowl with a little
blue whale candy floating in it all for some ridiculously low price like $6. We would drink several of these and dance away to “It’s the end of the world as we know it” by REM…oops, I’m on a bit of a tangent but Rhonda Kay if you’re reading this I bet you appreciate this little stroll down memory lane! Anyway, the drink was delicious, we can now say “this one time while I was having a drink in Raffles…”, and Raffles was a great place to spend an hour while waiting for our overnight flight back to Sydney.
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Rhonda
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Appreciated
I'm guessing somewhere in Singapore you can find blue whale on a menu, but it probably isn't much of a drink garnish.