I visited Singapore from July 19, 2008, through August 1, 2008. Although I was nominally there for a conference, which took up most of my first week, the rest of the time was purely for exploring the city/country.
Aside from the heat, I liked Singapore. But the heat is a big caveat. After two nights in Singapore, I wrote in my notes: "hot, but not the kind of hot that makes you want to sit in the shade and sip a cool drink; rather, the hot that makes you want to escape. muggy." Later, I got slightly more used to it, though the general sentiment of preferring escape rather than shade and liquids still hold. Although the first week I was there was generally overcast, the second week was sunny, causing me to write in my notes: "now I see the point of sun umbrellas. Hats are too warm." My biggest issue with the heat and humidity was that I had to consciously walk slower, otherwise I'd sweat, and the sweat wouldn't evaporate. I kept forgetting to slow down. It was a hard habit to start.
[Somehow I lost my copy of the last half of this paragraph and the beginning of the next one. I've reconstructed it as best as I could from memory.]
One of my guidebooks described Singapore as Asia 101. I think that's accurate. It's a melting pot of Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian. Indeed, I say melting pot in the strictest sense: interesting things have evolved as these cultures and people have mixed. Sure, Singapore feels a bit foreign, with temples in a variety of Asian styles, unusual Asian dishes, and languages other than English commonly spoken, but it's a fully-developed country that's very friendly to visitors. Most people speak English, at least in some form. (Mandarin is the language heard most often.) All signs are in English. The city is clean, cleaner than most American cities. The tap water is safe to drink. The bathrooms certainly meet Western levels of cleanliness. The public transportation system is easy-to-use and efficient. People obey traffic laws and there's no honking downtown. There are many modern skyscrapers and snazzy shopping malls (nice places to retreat to in the heat). Indeed, given all the above, especially because language isn't much of a hurdle, the city is easy to navigate.
There are two caveats to this Singapore-is-Asia-101 claim. One, Singapore lacks history whereas most other Asian nations have it: very little in Singapore dates to more than two centuries ago. Two, being white in Singapore doesn't attract attention. This is a sharp contrast with my experience in India. With the exception of popular tourist attractions, there were very few white people in sight. (By the way, most tourists were Chinese.) Nevertheless, I seemed only to attract attention--tourist destination or not--at the same times I attract attention in the states: when I do something strange like photograph my food or a road sign.
Singapore, as a major Asian financial center, is devoted to capitalism. Everything within the country reflects the philosophy that if you put the right incentives in front of people, everything will work out. For example, parts of the city use congestion pricing (it costs money to enter/exit) that change dynamically. Taxis, in addition to changing congestion costs, charge more during rush hour and during the wee hours of the morning. The public transit system charges more if you use a card, not a reusable token, and more if you ride a bus with air conditioning versus one without.
These fees are enforced and processed electronically, making the transportation network easy to use. Electronic subway cards are mostly refundable. (Why don't American cities use refundable cards?) As another example of the smoothness of this system, as I learned when traveling with a local friend of mine, parking fees are enforced by card. One buys a booklet of cards and, when one wants to park, one simply punches out holes corresponding to the day and time. Each card is worth an hour of parking. No more trying to figure out strange parking meters.
I did run into minor difficulties finding my way around. One, although shopping malls and tourist sights were well covered on most maps, hawker centres / food courts were not (too low class?). Most maps have only a couple, and even then they're sometimes out of date as centres often get temporarily moved as part of a capital improvement plan. I'm glad I carried five maps with me--sometimes only one had the location of the hawker centre I was looking for, despite all maps covering that area. Of course, if you don't care as much as I about where you eat, this isn't an issue.
Two, the two times I needed to use a bus (as opposed to the subway) over my two-week trip, I found it hard to determine the appropriate route. I didn't find a good map that contained all the bus routes.
My strongest memory of Singapore is the food. Singapore, as a major metropolitan hub, attracted people from a number of Chinese provinces, in addition to Malaysians, Indonesians, and Indians. As they mixed, these groups' cuisines combined to produce a veritable smorgasbord of novel dishes. Singapore is obsessed with food. As evidence, consider that not only does the government produce a lengthy guide describing the highlights of Singaporean cuisine, but also that many people make their living by directing people where to find the best rendition of particular dishes. The Makansutra is hands-down the most authoritative and comprehensive of these guidebooks. (I didn't buy it, but I printed out many of their recommendations from the web.) Though hard to use at times because they assume a local's knowledge of Singapore and where particular food courts and roads are located, I generally used it to guide my selections, helping me choose which food court to visit and which of the dozens upon dozens of stalls therein to get food from. In addition to going out and trying things, the guide people also run competitions and have even set up a new food court where they invite a selection of chefs they like.
Many Singaporean specialties are traditionally street food, produced by one person who specializes in only that dish. Singapore took the enlightened approach decades ago to round up all the street vendors, put them in food courts that they call hawker centres, and give them regular health inspections. This is great! Not only could I find a huge variety of street food in one place, I could have faith that it's clean and safe to eat. In addition, putting all the vendors in one place ensures that competition keeps the quality high.
(And, though I enjoyed food centres, I also liked walking on Singapore's many restaurant-lined promenades along the river.)
Furthermore, most hawkers allow you to select the size of the dish you want. I wish cafes and restaurants in the states allowed you to do so. Finally, best of all, whereas Singapore as a whole is an expensive city, food at hawker centres is cheap! Meals would top out at US$5. Many of mine were $3 dinner plus $2 dessert. Restaurants, meanwhile, are not cheap compared with the U.S.
Also, I liked that the food centres' drink stands juice the fresh fruit right in front you. You can't ask for better.
But how was the food? I liked pretty much everything I tried. Except at the conference, pretty much every dish I bought was a local specialty, and I'd selected the place to buy it because that place supposedly had one of the top renditions of the dish in the country. Nevertheless, despite being in Singapore for roughly two weeks and without ever repeating a dish, I'm still left with a sizable list of acclaimed dishes I never got a chance to try. For my future reference, these include, in some order of distinctiveness/preference: laksa (and katong laksa), hokkien prawn mee (while in Singapore, I only tried the soup version, not the fried version), pepper crab (I only tried chilli crab, not pepper crab), popiah, bak kut teh, nonya kueh, mee siam, mee goreng, mee rebus, and yong tau foo. I also missed trying roti john and roti murtabak (though I have eaten roti canai/roti parata countless times before), and missed trying nasi goreng (though again I've had a few renditions of nasi lemak before).
I do, however, have one complaint. About two-thirds of the way through the trip, I wrote in my notes: "what do Singaporeans have against vegetables? Main dishes are solely meat with rice or noodles. Drinks and desserts are fruits." In retrospect, I'm not sure how true this observation is--I think it's a consequence of ordering for only one--and whether it's that big a deal. Nevertheless, it must've bothered me at some point, so I feel I should mention it.
Incidentally, it turned out the Singapore Food Festival slightly overlapped my trip. Most of the cooking classes were completed before I arrived, and I didn't go out of my way for the general eating events, partially because I could already find such a wide selection of good food at any neighborhood hawker centre. (Technically, one day I unintentionally ran into a street festival that was sponsored by the food festival.) Nevertheless, I was pleased the festival exists, and impressed that they gave tourists free coupons to use to try certain specialties at selected food stands.
Returning to the city's costs, I'll mention my sleeping accommodations, as I don't think I'll bother mentioning them again in future posts. To get a decent hotel, depending on the day of the week I paid between $110 and $220 (U.S.) dollars. All three places I stayed were good. I stayed in:
- Grand Plaza Park Hotel - nights of July 25 (S$150), 26 (S$150), 28 (S$260), 29 (S$260), July 30 (S$198), 31 (S$160).
- Copthorne King's - nights of July 19, 29, 21, 22, 23 (S$250 then S$290 or so).
- Pan Pacific - night of July 24 (S$300?).
I don't know where to put this, so I'll drop in this paragraph right here: At times, I got hints of the government's power. I learned eight percent of the population lives in government-provided housing. I noticed the government generally prohibits other random groups from producing tourist maps, instead preferring to design their own maps and guidebooks. (Incidentally, these are uniformly high quality.) Third, another example of limiting speech: public speech is generally prohibited except at a particular spot in a kind of grungy park. A person can speak there if he or she registers beforehand. As a final example, in a newspaper one day I saw a "notice of exhumation of graves," with an accompanying list of the names which were legible on tombstones. If a body isn't claimed before or during exhumation, the government will cremate it. It'll be held with a plaque in a crematorium for three years waiting for claimant, then disposed of. The reason I mention this as an example of government power is because I've never heard of the United States government digging up graves and, even if they did, I doubt they'd manage to do it in such a matter of fact way--this is the way it is--and not run into protests or lawsuits.
Incidentally, in the middle of the trip, I took a two-day trip to Melaka (a town in Malaysia). I'll discuss my impressions of it on the blog post for the first day of that excursion. Before my trip to Singapore, I read about Singapore attractions and figured I'd want to / need to spend time elsewhere so as not to run out of sights and get bored. I considered many places: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and even Taiwan and Hong Kong. I ended up deciding on Malaysia mainly because it was so convenient and, after getting the feel for how much there was to see in Singapore, was only willing to spare two days for travel elsewhere.
For my future reference: Even though I probably spent ten days more or less in Singapore, there are places I didn't get around to visiting:
- Singapore Flyer (the world's largest ferris wheel). I have some pictures of it because it's visible from many places in Singapore.
- Sentosa. I visited this beach-resort island for a conference banquet, but never bothered returning to see its amusement park, aquarium, butterfly park, or even its famous beaches and resorts.
- Jurong Bird Park.
- Singapore Zoo.
- Singapore Botanic Gardens. Although I got to see some of its biggest attractions when I visited on the 29th, there are more parts to explore.
- Katong district/Joo Chiat Road. The next district on my list to visit, and the only district that I didn't go to for which the government provides walking tour booklets. Also, the nearby East Coast Park is supposedly a pleasant beach-front park.
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