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Published: November 20th 2005
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Mosque in Singapore
Here's the mosque in Singapore. I had planned for a ten-hour lay-over in Singapore on my way to Capetown from Taipei. It was my second time in Singapore, having been there once in 1999, though it was with a tour group. First off, I hate tour groups. They control your time, and you always have to wait for the slowest in the group to get ready. And the Chinese ones at least, they always take you to eat at the Chinese restaurant no matter what country you’re in. I think I could get a more cultural experience from watching a foreign film than by traveling with a tour group. That’s enough of my tirade.
Singapore is a smorgasbord of cultures. You start with your native Malays, then pour on some Chinese, dabble on some South Asians, and finally sprinkle some English on top. That is Singapore in a nutshell. In the mere forty years of its existence, Singapore transformed from a swampy island to a world-class city, thanks to its strategic position and shrew management of its Chinese-led authoritarian government. Today it is one of the world’s largest container ports and one of the two top financial centers in Asia. Nonetheless, the city state did
Hindu Temple in Singapore
Here's a Hindu temple in Singapore. not lose its cultural heritages.
I started the visit with a trek through its Chinatown, which is bizarre given that Singapore is something like eighty percent Chinese already. Then I went to the urban planning department, which also has a large exhibition area showing Singapore’s future development. Given Singapore’s small land mass, basically they have to fill in the ocean for new development. And so this is what they will be doing. The existing harbor will be half filled in to create a new downtown, complete with a super skyscraper. The mouth of the harbor will be closed to create a new freshwater body. I am not sure anything like this has been done in human history, at least not at this scale. I look forward to seeing the completion of this undertaking, though I also wonder if they have considered the environmental impacts. I suppose there is not much choice. But when that is done, what would be next?
Next I strolled over to the Muslim/Malay quarter for lunch. The mosque was quite nice, though I could not go in. I bought a can of soda and looked for a place to eat. When I walked into a Muslim restaurant across from the mosque, I noticed there were no other obviously non-Muslims there. The servers there were staring at me. When I finally sat down, my server came over to check out the soda can. Turns out they were worried that I was having beer. Alcohol is strictly forbidden. After that, they became much more friendly. The food, which was a type of halal Malay fare, was good too, though quite a bit on the spicy side.
After lunch I wandered over to the Indian quarter. From a documentary I have seen before, I learned that often the Indian migrant workers only had enough money to make a weekly call back to their loved ones in India. So I looked for the public phone booth and watched the expressions of the people making the calls. Though I could not understand whatever language they were speaking (I believe it was Tamil or one of the other dialects from southern India), I could see that some of them were quite happy on the phone. One of the other things I noticed was a Tamil Christian church. For some reason, I have never considered that fact that there would be Christians in India. In fact, there are quite a number of them, particularly along the southwestern coast where the Portuguese had their trading colonies so long ago. Today the Indian community in Singapore is a microcosm of India, with various groups from the subcontinent, both new migrants and those who families have been on the Malay Peninsular for generations, coexisting in the Indian quarter.
After all the cultural experiences in the short few hours, I needed a break. So I went to the Orchard and sat myself down at a book store to read and listen to CDs. The next few hours consisted of more of the same, in part to escape the tropical rain that was coming down quite heavily. I ended my trip to Singapore by checking my emails and going on a late-night stroll. After I had thoroughly soaked in the tropical heat, I headed back to the airport to take the long flight to South Africa. The southern hemisphere, and the winter season, awaited me.
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