Of all the places we have visited on our Round the World trip, I think Singapore surprised us the most. Over the years, the things we've seen in the media about Singapore seemed to indicate that it's a small island with a large number of skyscrapers. We weren't even sure where people who worked in Singapore lived - maybe holes in the ground or something.
But starting with the airport and the drive through town to our hotel, we found out very quickly that not only were our preconceptions wrong, they were really, really wrong. Singapore isn't some densely packed, frenetically bustling, somewhat hygienically challenged Far East entrepรดt like Bangkok. As you've probably gathered from media reports (which usually focus on the Singaporean ban on chewing gum) it's incredibly, almost painstakingly clean. But rather than being just a huge collection of office towers, the city is well endowed with lots and lots of green spaces and parks, interesting and varied architecture - in short, just a lot different than we expected. I suppose the tropical greenness can be attributed to the fact that the city is located in an area that gets an impressive amount of rain and the temperature is close to the boiling point of water for most of the year.
We had hoped that our stay in Singapore might be one of the highlights of the trip, so it seemed appropriate to stay at Raffles. I think Raffles might be the premier hotel from the colonial era of the British Empire. Originally opened in 1887, the hotel has been expanded a number of times. The last major renovation restored the hotel to look much like it was during the heyday of the Empire (but with air conditioning). I'm not sure if it sets the record for the most restaurants in a single hotel but it'll do for me.
But I dash ahead heedlessly. Singapore's Changi airport was interesting and not what we envisioned. Unlike the soaring glass and steel edifices that everyone else in Asia seems to be building wherever there's a flat piece of land bigger than a billiards table, the Singapore airport seems like a bit of a throwback to us. The airport it most reminds me of is Honolulu International, probably because of the low, flat floorplan and open air elements. For some reason the terms that come to mind when we think of the Singapore airport are "relaxed" and "informal."
We used a car supplied by the hotel for the ride into town. Our driver gave us a lot of advice as to where and what to eat. He reminded us of the taxi drivers we've had in New Orleans, though unlike a New Orleans driver, our Singaporean driver didn't claim he could cook any dish better than the local restaurants.
Food is probably going to be the most salient feature of Singapore in our memories, even more than the cleanliness, the heat and the humidity, and the vast number of shopping malls. Singapore is comprised of a whole lot of immigrants from here, there and some places I'm not even sure are on the planet. They all brought their own native cuisines with them and then once they all settled down they started mixing their favorite dishes with those from other cultures. The result is bliss. Pure bliss.
One result of the mixture of cuisines that occurs in Singapore is the ubiquitous hawker stand. Hawker stands are roughly the same as food courts, if food courts served really good food and had several dozen different stands instead of ten or so. And none of them serve Sbarro. Or McDonalds. We did try the hawker stands, perhaps not as often as I would have liked, though this was more a matter of Mary placing patently artificial restraints on my behavior such as prohibiting more than five meals and heavy snacks a day. And there was the little matter of puttering around Singapore during the Chinese New Year. For some reason a lot of things were closed, including hawker stands, which is really just incomprehensible. Obviously we'll have to go back at a later time and check out the other 200-300 hawker stands I didn't get a chance to try.
Still, the ones we did try were pretty great. We got the requisite chilli crab which is interesting but expensive and probably not really worth the money or the mess. We also had the Hainanese chicken rice dish which is famous and it was both pretty tasty and remarkably cheap. This is a dish that I'd be happy to subsist on for a few years if I had to live on a budget. Along with a bunch of other things, we also tried a fried noodle dish that I never did catch the name of, but it was simply awesome.
Another standout in the cuisine marathon was the North Indian buffet in Raffles, which was spectacular -- if you like Indian food, that is. And we do. Mary suggested having the buffet for dinner every night of our stay, but even I had to draw the line there. No more than three nights running. I mean, it's Indian food and that's great, but there comes a time when one more spoonful of lime pickle relish will eat a hole in my stomach lining. I'd willingly suffer that, but I couldn't find out if Singapore hospitals served local specialties or the dread bland stuff scientific dieticians dole out. Singapore is one place where you really don't want to miss a meal. And you might be inclined to add a couple like I did - elevenses and midnight noodle madness.
Singapore's public transit system is one of the best we've experienced. It's not as extensive as Tokyo, perhaps, but then again the population of Tokyo is four times that of Singapore, or almost ten times as much if one counts the greater Tokyo/Yokohama area. (Which is probably a little geekier than I need to be.) In Singapore, one can choose from buses that are clean and well run or subways that are clean and well run.
In fact, pretty much everything in Singapore is clean and well run. I am kind of curious what happens to those things and people that are not clean and well run. There might be a little paranoia speaking there. Maybe because I felt fairly conspicuous whenever I found myself a bit sweaty, which in Singapore would probably occur around 364.5 days a year. I wondered if the Singapore Hygienic Corps would pull me over, offer me wet wipes for cleansing my soiled skin, and supply a free, clean dry shirt, compliments of the Better Living Through Cleanliness and Caning Council.
Besides eating, the other national sport seems to be shopping. We thought Hong Kong was a shopper's paradise and it may be - at least if you want fake handbags, goldfish or puppies. But Singapore really hits it out of the park when it comes to shopping malls. We entered one next door to Raffles and after exploring many subterranean passages connecting it to still more malls, we came out somewhere on the other side of the city around ten hours later. So maybe it's most accurate to say that Singapore is one very, very large shopping mall to which they've added a lot of hawker stands. And some office buildings.
I'm sure there are some other touristy things that people do in Singapore. We pretty much didn't - we took the hop-on, hop-off tourist bus, which was a little odd because while it stopped at all the tourist sites, there was no information provided about them. Still, we wandered around and checked out the various neighborhoods and such. One day we went to the botanical garden but we got there around midday and the temperature had already approached 400 degrees. It looked like a fantastic garden but we quickly decided our time could be better spent finding another hawker stand rather then looking at plants and melting.
So, that was Singapore. At least a little taste of Singapore. We really liked it there. We would go back in a flash for another visit, and not just because of the food. (Though that would be a big draw.) It's clean, it's exciting and it just has this air that it's at the cutting edge of the 21st century.
