Singapore

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November 4-7: Singapore

This day we took a morning flight out to Singapore. It was quite a pleasant flight and I managed to watch three (awful) movies. We took the super clean and efficient (and air-conditioned) MRT subway from the airport to Chinatown and walked to our little budget hotel from there. Emboldened by several colleagues and friends who told us that it's safe to eat food from ANYWHERE in Singapore, we walked around Chinatown and had some dinner from food hawker stalls, consisting of friend and steamed wontons in soup or with noodles. Our first day there we went downtown and saw a movie that was basically the German interpretation of Spaceballs/Galaxy Quest, with a lot of unfunny gay jokes thrown in (well, it seemed like it might have been funny at the time). Then I met up with my colleague John who works in the Singapore office at a rugby 7's tournament. Watching 7's was fun because the games are really short (about 20 minutes) and because there are fewer people on the field, there is more of the exciting running-around part of rugby which more or less makes sense if you understand American football, and less of the weird scrum part of rugby which only makes sense if you were born in England, Australia or New Zealand. After the rugby I wandered around for a while and got invited to have coffee with some Bangladeshi welders, who alternate between working at home and various bits overseas. They had come to Singapore together but had also worked in Dubai. We also met up with John and other expatriate and non-expatriate friends of his for dinner at a decent Mexican place (that is, better than any such place in Europe, but still not as good as the US) on their main riverfront entertainment drag, which was pretty lively. Talking to these folks gave us a little bit of a sense of what it is like to live in Singapore long term. One tourist attraction which seemed a little funny at first but turned out to be really excellent was the Night Safari. Night Safari is right next door to, but entirely separate from the Singapore Zoo (which is itself supposedly great). Night Safari is basically a night zoo. Maybe it was thought up because it's so hot in Singapore during the day, but what they've done is built a zoo where the animals are set back from the walking path and illuminated with kind of a half light which allows you to see them but prevents them from really being able to see you. They have most of the ordinary zoo animals (like rhinos, elephants, hippos, zebras, giraffes, etc) as well as some more random ones like the capybara (which is basically a hamster the size of a golden retriever) and the mousedeer (basically a deer the size of a kitten with a really cute snausage shaped body). The tigers and leopards were visible incredibly close up, pacing their enclosures a foot or two away through some plexiglass. At that distance, a tiger looks really really big. The lions did more roaring than I've ever heard at normal daytime zoos. There were also some otters that went nuts when we walked by with some nachos. After swimming across the moat toward the fence, the tried to climb out and then, when they failed, started wrestling with each other. Also, the night safari seems to have a theory that if the animals isn't dangerous, there's no need to separate them from the people. The tapirs and gazelles were just wandering around, not separated from the little tram that takes you around to the major animals. The creepiest examples of this were the two nocturnal flying mammals enclosures, which you basically enter through a door on one side and walk down a hundred feet to the other end with the relevant creepy animals all around . One contains flying squirrels which are about the size of a cat. They mostly perched themselves on the tops of their trees and chewed on corn cobs, but we saw one glide from one end of the enclosure to the other (maybe about 80 feet) and it's kind of surreal to see something so big move so silently and horizontally (they really don't lose much altitude as they glide). Even creepier was the huge fruit bat enclosure (I'm sure they have official names but I was too scared to ask). In this one, they have bats that are bigger then cats. When they land on a branch, it usually bends under their weight and they just hang on and hang upside down underneath it. Sometimes you can see them hauling themselves up a branch hand over hand. When they fly, they make a loud swooping sound every time they flap their wings and have at least a 2-3 foot wingspan. There were about 20 in the enclosure and it too us a couple of tries to work up the nerve to walk past the big bunch that was hanging out about 10 feet from the exit. The night safari generally is laid out as two tram rides (with narration provided with varying degrees of overenthusiam) with a number of side walks and trails with the animals on either side. It's really well done in that it's just easy enough to get around that it's not a pain, but trail-like enough and dark enough that it feels a bit like exploring, especially once the crowds have started to thin towards closing time. We arrived just after opening and stayed until they were closing. At that point, we took a final wander through the last area and passed the hyena enclosure. There wasn't anyone else around, and the hyenas were eyeing us as they paced around their little yard. They were on the other side of a moat, but they were higher so their feet were about at our head level. We were sure that the people who designed the enclosure were experts and all that, but still it didn't feel like there was enough separating us from them, as we couldn't see what other than hyena psychology would stop them from jumping the moat and coming after us. There was also a semi-interesting show featuring some of the more crowd pleasing animals, including a biturong (sp?) which climbed on a rope over the heads of the audience and an owl which flew around the amphitheater a few times. A biturong seems to be a big partially carnivorous raccoon or badger with prehensile tail. Anyway, the moral of the show was don't capture pythons in the reservoir and bring them back into Singapore where they can eat your pets. Oh well. We also went out to the waterfront to have chili crab, a local favorite dish, which I thought was so-so as a way of preparing crab (with a sweet and sour chili glaze sauce). I still prefer your traditional crab boil flavour. We also visited a temple of Kali in Little India, which was a working temple with people praying in it, not some kind of ruin. Anyway, as you might expect, some of the sculptures of Kali were a little on the icky side (Kali axing people in half, Kali wearing a garland of skulls, Kali eating the intestines of people), which kind of makes you wonder why ordinary middle class looking Indian folks would want to pray to her. Never figured that one out. Sometimes in Singapore they helpfully put up signs that tell you what you can do, not what you can't. For example, in a food court, they put up a sign saying you can sit in any chair you like. In fact, we found there were so many rules that your conscience isn't necessarily a guide (like there are lots of restrictions on where you can eat, etc). Also, no one jaywalks. In Chinatown, we saw people wait for a full minute in the blazing sun for the lights to change rather than walk across a two lane road in broad daylight with no cars coming either way. In terms of ethnicity, people seemed largely Chinese and Indian in the areas we visited. There might have been lots of ethnic Malays around but we didn't see all that many that we could identify as Malay instead of Chinese. Singlish, the local take on English, is pretty understandable, but has a few quirks. First, kids as old as 16 will refer to any adult (even total strangers) as aunty and uncle. Also, in their imagination, adding "or not" at the end of a question softens it and makes it more polite or deferential. It's the equivalent of the annoying Anglicism popular with the English of adding "at all" to questions to make them more deferential, even when nonsensical because the thing in question is a binary state (i.e. "Are you pregnant at all?") "You want the chilli crab or not?" sounds terribly polite to them, so I'm glad I read this before hearing it for the first time and getting all offended.

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Photos

Singapore shot
Down the street from our hotel, old shophouses and new highrises.

Kali
Charming, eh?