Down Town shows the start of China Town next to massive bank­ing headquarters

**New** A new sec­tion in the blog is going to be called “Details” and will list all the places we went and stayed.  We hope this will help those inter­ested in doing sim­ilar things!

One of the first things that hits you on arrival to Singa­pore air­port is the intense cold.  Litres of Icy cold air is blas­ted at you from almost all dir­ec­tions from a myriad of air-conditioning machines the size of sky­scrapers and it is quite nice to get out­side and exper­i­ence a little heat for a while.  Air-conditioning has been taken to new heights by the Singa­por­eans, indeed the entire Tube sys­tem is frosty cold con­di­tioned, as is every single mall and many of the pave­ment steps sur­round­ing them.  To walk around Singa­pore is to be blas­ted by heat and cold at such extremes you won­der if you have wandered into a new form of torture.

Speak­ing of tor­ture.  One pos­sible defin­i­tion of tor­ture, albeit not a very use­ful one, is that tor­ture is the feel­ing that hap­pens when Quantas have lost your lug­gage in the hottest/coldest city on the planet and you don’t have any clean under­wear.  This is not a par­tic­u­larly use­ful defin­i­tion because A) it could be dread you’re exper­i­en­cing and not tor­ture and that B) it doesn’t allow for the chance that Quantas will reunite you with your lug­gage so quickly that you almost don’t real­ise that it is gone.  The first objec­tion here is an accus­a­tion of sloppy think­ing but the second is under­stand­able as it is quite clearly, utterly ludicrous…

{Phone rings}

James:  Hello?

Quantas:  Hello, Mr Bell?

James:  Yes?

Quantas:  Quantas lost prop­erty here sir, we have found your bag in Lon­don sir.

James:  I was on a Sydney to Singa­pore flight last night…

Quantas:  I know that sir, but we apo­lo­gise and will have the bag delivered to your hotel first thing in the morning.

… and they did!

Our first day in the city was spent try­ing to accli­mat­ise to the heat by walk­ing around the stand­ard tour­ist fair of the Raffles hotel and the China Town dis­trict.  Raffles is now so fam­ous that it is great danger of under­go­ing some sort of total real­ity fail­ure and being bought up by Dis­ney and turned into a theme park.  It is uni­formly packed with tour­ists all order­ing the same drink and leav­ing once they see the cost of the bill.  Next to that the some­what pre­served charms of China town (once the worlds fore­most whore dis­trict) is quite a relief.  Like all China Towns every­where it is stuffed to the gills with small side streets, lined with masses of one room stores and has a mar­ket selling only “ori­ginal” Chinese fair at knock­down prices.  Just walk­ing around such places can become a fraught exper­i­ence, but I find it fun for a few hours.  At one end sits one of the largest and most impress­ive Buddhist temples I have ever seen.  5 floors with a café, lib­rary, shops and a giant golden statue of the great man him­self sit­ting and smil­ing away.  It is also the only temple I have been to with armed police guards patrolling and warn­ing those who haven’t read how to behave in such places to cover up, or pre­vent pho­to­graphy of the cere­mon­ies in progress. 

A full on Buddhist cere­mony is quite a sight with priests singing, bonging metal bowls and flick­ing holy water at all and sundry.

The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple & Museum

Another fam­ous sight in China town is found later at night.  Singa­pore is a cham­pion of street food.  Hawkers sell every pos­sible type of dish, all cooked up imme­di­ately in front of you, and all fresh as the daisy.  The choice is baff­ling, but we finally settled on a clas­sic Hong Kong style meal that boas­ted all the major food groups and came to only £7 for both of us.  I thought such a street was a one-off, but the next night we went to a old Vic­torian build­ing that had been con­ver­ted into 300+ hawker stalls organ­ised into 10 “streets” around a cent­ral hub filled with tables.  That was a sight. 

Hawker food on Smith Street

I imme­di­ately made tracks to a Japan­ese stall and bought some noodles, but Cesca (who takes a life­time to chose any­thing) was wan­der­ing around for half the night before set­tling on one dish.  She brought it back to the table and I looked at it.  Cesca, given almost infin­ite choice, had selec­ted the dish com­prised mainly of squid.  That she is very aller­gic to.  I poin­ted this out to her and she went off in search of a less ter­minal meal.

One thing about Singa­pore that nobody could mis­take is that it is very tech­no­logy advanced.  For a start the entire city is blanketed in free WIFI, some­thing of which the people here take full advant­age of.  I walked into Star­bucks and saw at least twenty laptops of vari­ous designs being used to surf the net over cof­fee.  The tube is also packed the gills with young people using advanced elec­tron­ics like an advert for glob­al­isa­tion.  Amongst the switched on throng I spot­ted one guy wear­ing an Apple hat, listen­ing to a iPhone and play­ing a PlayStationPortable. 

A nice bar near Raffles serves European beers to those taken with the heat

Such wealth sep­ar­ates the haves from the have-nots.  Singa­pore has a very long his­tory of money mak­ing and being a city where you “can make it”, but I found plenty of those who had been trampled by such exper­i­ence.  The glit­ter and glam may hide it, but it is there.  For example, vis­it­ing a pro­vin­cial post office intro­duced a num­ber of local char­ac­ters all not liv­ing the dream.  In many respects Singa­pore is like Lon­don, which it apes.  There is a massive col­lec­tion of Brit­ish archi­tec­ture around the city and not just Raffles.

City Hall

To get away and get a bit of per­spect­ive we paid a visit to the art gal­lery and museum.  Here a spe­cial exhib­i­tion had been setup dis­play­ing some amaz­ing pieces from the Tran­scend­ence: Mod­ern­ity and Bey­ond in Korean Art col­lec­tion.  This mighty mouth­ful of a title was well deserved as the col­lec­tion covered all sorts of ground.  It included anim­ated paint­ings (prob­ably done in Flash), which changed slowly to reflect sea­sons.  So, one minute the paint­ing is of a Chinese land­scape in sum­mer, the next it is in winter with snow fall­ing.  Very beau­ti­ful.  All in all we loved the experience. 

Next came the Asian Civil­isa­tions museum, which show­cases not only the his­tory of Singa­pore (very inter­est­ing – with lots of video) but the his­tory of the entire SE Asia.  This fant­ast­ic­ally well put together museum covered Tao­ism (Dao­ism), Buddhism’s spread through the lands, the rise of Red in China (spooky) and a few good videos about Islamic art (I.E. writ­ing art).  Both are well worth a visit.

That night we went to the bright col­ours of Little India and had a great curry before mak­ing our plans to get out of the city. 

Little India – Big dinner!

The best way to enter Malay­sia is over the bridge join­ing it to Singa­pore.  This is accom­plished by catch­ing a bus that drops you off at the bor­der and waits for you as you nego­ti­ate the cus­toms men.  Luck­ily the bus left from nearby to our hostel and we got up early in the morn­ing to catch it.  A quick break­fast of Mc Don­alds (yuk) and we were on our way.

Singa­pore is a very inter­est­ing city, but not for me.  Not any­more.  After the large open spaces of New Zea­l­and I didn’t handle the bright lights too well and thus I eagerly watched the bridge to Malay­sia come closer into view.

More to come! 

Basho

DETAILS:  

Basho and Cesca stayed at One Florence Close  (MRT: Kovan)  See http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g294265-d938939-Reviews-One_Florence_Close-Singapore.html

Travel around Singa­pore is best by the tube ser­vice (MRT) that takes a few Singa­pore Dol­lars as a deposit and gives you a plastic rechargeable card for your jour­neys.  Remem­ber to get your deposit back!

The Tran­scend­ence: Mod­ern­ity and Bey­ond in Korean Art col­lec­tion is on until March 2009.  Nearest tube is Raffles.   See http://www.nhb.gov.sg/SAM/

The Asian Civil­isa­tions Museum is near the river.  Nearest MRT is City Hall.  See http://www.acm.org.sg/home/home.asp

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