Advertisement
Published: August 23rd 2009
Edit Blog Post
In Singapore, Day 3
Singapore is a good place to start a trip to Asia. It’s Asian without any chaos. There are many things I like and appreciate about Singapore:
• The streets are clean.
o It is illegal to litter.
• English is the common language.
o Chinese, Malay and a variety of Indian languages are the other main languages.
o A 6 year old at a playground asked Ella what her mother tongue was. Ella had no clue what a mother tongue was, so I said English, not bothering to explain that it was Ella’s only tongue. The 6 year old’s mother tongue was Filipino but she was also conversant in Chinese and English.
• Cars obey all traffic laws, wait for pedestrians at crosswalks and I have yet to hear a horn honking.
• There is abundant, cheap delicious food at food courts that seem to be everywhere. The food is noodle soups and curries and rice dishes. Very yummy.
• There is a ton to do… waterfronts, malls, museums, malls, zoos, and even more malls.
• There are no signs of any economic downturn. Construction sites are everywhere, people are
shopping at malls and there are no empty store fronts that we have seen.
Jordan and Ella are doing well here. We are still recovering from jet lag which is hard, (Singpore is exactly 12 hours ahead of North Carolina), but we manage to go out in the morning on the very lovely metro, come back for an afternoon nap and then go out again around 5pm for an evening outing.
It’s very, very hot here. Hot and humid and we sweat a lot. When some of us eat spicy food we sweat even more. We take cold showers and enjoy our little room’s air conditioning. Evening is the nicest, the sun is down and there’s a breeze to blow away the heat.
The plane trip was hard just because it’s a long way. We flew over 9000 miles! Our longest leg was from Chicago to HongKong- 15 hours of being hurtled through space, sleepy and packed into rows like sardines. Everything went well; it was just not very fun. The plane trip was hard but Singpore is not.
By May
August 14, 2009
More about Singapore, by Paul
We've enjoyed Singapore very
much. It's ultra-modern and fancy. The whole city looks like Disney World. Literally. And yet it also has a culturally rich mix of Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Europeans.
Here are a few interesting factoids about Singapore:
• The "Please Mind the Gap" signs on the door of the ultra-nice subway system is written in 8 languages: English, Chinese, 2 South Indian scripts, Malay, Indonesian (I think), and a couple of more I’m forgetting.
• In the 2 blocks or so around our hostel there are 2 South Indian temples, a Sikh temple, a Chinese / Confucian temple, a couple of Christian churches, and Tibetan Buddhist temple.
• There are also a gazillion fancy malls in Singapore. There is one main mall road, Orchard Rd. I counted 42 malls on a map, just along this one stretch. There are fancy malls everywhere. Huge ones. I don’t understand how they all stay in business.
Local neighborhoods. Our hostel was way away from the tourist zone, and yet we could get anywhere very quickly on the subway. The area around our hostel is actually very interesting, in an everyday Singapore sort of way.
Singapore has invested in
public housing, but it's really, really, really nice - with playgrounds and fantastic swimming pools and community centers and elder exercise centers. Our hostel is right near a huge housing development block. It's fun to eat at the hawker center there, and the McDonald's.
Delicious food. A hawker center is an outdoor, covered area with 20-50 really small restaurants, each owned by a different family and each serving 4-8 different dishes. You wander around and get whatever you like. We've enjoyed chicken and rice (just what it sounds like, but soooo good), fried rice noodles, coconut milk noodle soup, and these Indian crepe things. None of this stuff is stuff you can get in the US, and it's all delicious. And cheap - around US $1.50 for a chicken and rice meal.
The local McDonald's is fun too. After school all the schoolkids go and get a drink and sit and chat and get on their computers and cell phones. It's like Richie and the Fonz at Arnold's or something. It's really fun to watch. Ella plays on the playground, which is exactly like the playground at her school.
Indian temples. We've done lots of tourist stuff,
and it's been fun. I think the most fun has been just wandering around - Little India and Chinatown particularly. In Chinatown we stumbled into a South Indian temple where there was a ceremony going on. It was fascinating, very Indian. Little India too is very Indian. Lots of very strong smells, packed with Indian humanity, and Bollywood music blaring from every stall.
Chinatown. Chinatown is very redone - it looks like Disney World. But it was good fun, and we saw an excellent museum that showed what it was like to live in Chinatown in the mid-50s, when it was still poor. It was some tough living, and the museum made you feel like you were there.
Other fun tourist stuff. We also went to an excellent Asian Civilizations Museum, a world class museum with cultural artifacts and excellent explanations (in English, which is the main language here). It was superb.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.081s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0311s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Doris
non-member comment
Singapore
Loved your messages...I almost feel as if I'm there, and I wish I were. You are so very fortunate.....have a wonderful time. Love to all, Doris