From: "Pete”<[email protected]>
To: thegang
Subject: Singapore airport, anxious to get home and delayed even before I checked in.
Date: 06 September 2001 10:10
Well hello everyone for what should prove to be the final time from foreign shores. As you may have guessed from the subject header I am currently in Singapore airport awaiting my flight home, and well really looking forward to getting back and seeing those of you who live back in the cold country once again.
But first...Singapore. Well I haven't really had too great a time here but I think that has more to do with me than the place. Things got off to a bad start when on landing at the airport I discovered that the credit card I have been carrying around the world for 'emergency funds' would not get me cash without a PIN which the Midland Bank (sorry HSBC-UK not to confused with HSBC-Singapore who made it quite clear that although the name was the same they could not help me) had neglected to send me. Anyway the conversion of myfinal few aussie dollars bought me a taxi and a night's accomodation and a call to Mum at 5am the next morning (her time) solved the problem - well allowed me to work around it anyway.
So the other thing is that I have been all on my own. Throughout Australia I have always been able to meet people in hostel kitchens, TV rooms and at nearby backpacker pubs. So I reach Singapore to discover myself in a hostel without kitchen, TV room or nearby pub. Hence a lot of wandering the streets alone and putting in some quality cinema time in the evenings.
Enough ranting, now the city itself... Well there's shops, and more shops, and more shops, and some banks where the shopkeepers can put their (or even our) money, and food places where we can refuel before visiting some more shops. Ok, sorry ranting again. It's actually a city of contrasts. Albeit shop related ones. I can't imagine there is another city in the world where there are shops dedicated to selling merchandising for Manchester United and Chairman Mao within walking distance of each other.
The older parts of the city, Little India, Arab Street and to a lesser extent Chinatown, consist of two story buildings painted in bright colours at some point in the last hundred years but now grubby and peeling. The downstairs is always a shop (or occaisionally a restaurant) with an open front and goods spilling out onto the uneven pavement which is covered over by the top floor of the building which I guess are the residences of most of the shop keepers (although there is a bloke I have been walking past everyday that owns a second hand computer shop not far from the hostel who sleeps in his own doorway every night) spice smells drift out in the street propelled by the ceiling fans. There are markets which sell both fresh produce and hot food, and usually cold beer too, covered over by brown tarpaulins or on the ground level of multi-storey carparks. Little India has dozens of Hindu temples with intricate brightly painted carvings of their many deities (and there's also a couple in Chinatown). It also has a couple of Buddist temples. Arab Street is overshadowed by the great golden dome of the biggest mosque in Singapore. Chinatown has some Taoist temples, although these also seem to serve for Muslims, but then religions seem to be interchangable here. The Temple of 1000 Lights (a tacky Buddist place of worship in Little India with a huge but coarse Budda, a heck of a lot of satin and gold paint, and the 1000 electric lights that it is named for) has a shrine to the Hindu god Ganesha. Apparently the worshippers asked for one.
In complete contrast to the older parts of the city, the more modern areas of Orchard Road, the CBD and to a lesser extent Chinatown (it's vast and has old bits and new bits) are hugely built up with vast shopping malls, sanitised and airconditioned, that house international chains, and fast food joints and pristine food courts that occasionally even serve local quisine (but I'm not trying Pig's Organ Soup whether I'm in a scruffy market or a sterile food court - not when there's a curry house or a KFC nearby anyway). There are also the skyscrapers, owned by banks and hotels they are vast towering temples of comerce. Perhaps that's why the religions swap around. The real religion here is money. Everyone trys to sell you something. Whether you are in the old or the new parts of town, people stand proudly outside their premises and ask you in, ask can they help you, ask what exactly you were looking for, and get sort of cross when, after they cornered you for fifteen minutes and interrogated you with all sorts of questions, you then leave without buying anything. (look I just wanted to know the price of a digital camera, not enter into negotiations over a bulk purchase!) Of course the haggling is another thing that as a westerner I can't really get the hang of, I just get annoyed when on asking for a price (because the independent places rarely mark them on) you get a quote which is triple what the guy in the last shop just talked himself down to while you were politly trying to leave, and you then have to stand there, politly trying to leave, while this guy talks himself down to the same price.
I spent a day exploring the Colonial District, an area walking distance from my hostel in Little India, full of grand nineteenth century european style buildings, painted in white. I took a look in the Singapore History Museum, which was a very impressive building, with pretty good displays (but too small - most of the space was taken up by impressive Amphitheatre space and second-rate oil paintings of the colonial leaders) where I learn't more about the history of Singapore than I thought I ever could. I also visited the National Art Gallery (housed in a former catholic boarding school), which has an excellent collection of fine art, almost all from South East Asia. I was particularly impressed with the huge canvases of Chinese calligraphy which flowed so elegantly, done in minutes after twenty years of practise and preparation.
Of course the thing everyone does in Singapore is have a Singapore Sling at the place where it was invented, Raffles Hotel. Raffles is a grand old building, dating back to 1887, and also the most expensive bed in town at $650 a night for a small single room, and $8000 a night for the top suite. The Long Bar, where Ngiam Tong Boon invented the famous cocktail was also where I chose to sample it. It is an impressive drinking hole with wooden paneling, wickerwork furniture, and paper fans seesawing back and forth on the ceiling. The sling itself is a mixture of Gin, Cherry Brandy, Cointreau, Dom Benedictine, Lime, Pineapple Juice, Grenadine and and Angostura Bitters, it comes in a tall glass with plenty of froth on the top, and a slice of pineapple on the side. It is a slighlty offputting shade of luminous pink. Because the sling is what every visitor to the Long Bar Drinks they keep them pre-mixed on the bar and just throw a bit of ice in before they hand it to you. This means that as you reach the bottom of the glass the drink is just about down to a pleasant temperature to consume.
They are disgustingly overpriced at $18+++ (that means + 3% Sales Tax, + 1% Entertainment Tax, + 10% Service Charge) or $28 if you include the beer you'll probably need to take the taste away. Still the surroundings were good and it had to be tried.
Anyway, my day forays into all the different parts of town having now been at least mentioned the only other thing of note that I saw in Singapore was Sentosa Island. Now defying convention (which dictates that you get a bus to the Ferry Terminal amd a ferry to the Island) I took the MRT (that's the subway-tube-underground equivalent here) and then walked about three kilometres up Mount Faber (which has absolutly fantastic views of the city) in order to catch a cable car over the harbour to the island.
The island itself is an extremely commercial tourist attraction. You pay a $5 admission fee in order to leave the cable car station. You then pay $3 to climb the Merlion statue, a steel and concrete structure, Singapore's equivalent to the Big Pineapple. The Merlion is the symbol of the nation. It is (as the sharper witted among you may have worked out from the name) a beast half fish and half lion (like a mermaid, geddit?). The name Singapore apparently means, 'city of the lion' because the city's Malaysian founder in 1399 spotted one on the island. (The fact that there has never been a wild lion on the island, or even in this part of Asia, and that the city was officially founded in 1819, by an executive of the British East India company named Sir Thomas Stamford-Raffles has not been allowed to get in the way of a quality folk tale.) This explains the feline half, I guess (although even the Singapore Museum and the ever reliable Lonley Planet weren't specific about this one) that the aquatic tail represents the fact that, as a small island without natural resources, Singapore owes its existence to its convenient location on a major maritime trade route, and therefore to the sea. Anyway the Merlion Statue on Sentosa is 12 storeys high (well the lift that takes you to the top has two stops level 1 and level 12). It offers some good views of Sentosa and the harbour, but to be perfectly honest it looks more impressive from outside, when you can see it towering at twice the height of the nearest buildings.
The other attraction that I visited on Sentosa (although there's plenty that I didn't see - being pretty sick of the ultra-crass tourist trail by this point in my trip) was Underwater World. The sign outside offering the 'largest tropical aquarium in Asia' was quite promising, as was the the write up in the LP which called it 'spectacular'. After parting with my seventeen singapore dollars to get in, I was I must admit impressed at first. The place seemed to be getting to a good start, the first couple of displays were not bad, the huge glass tunnel underwater tank was pretty good too. Then there was a display on jellyfish, lit in UV so they glowed. And then I found myself in the gift shop surrounded by big signs saying 'exit'. Thinking I had taken a wrong turn I went back the way I came, looking for the rest of the aquarium, what happened to the 'Reef display with live coral'? I did find it in the end. It was in the first gallery that I walked through. I had not anticipated that something deemed poster worthy would be smaller than my parents television. Yep that was that, the largest tropical aquarium in Asia is smaller than 'Seaworld' in Tynemouth. So out the backdoor where I could look at the giant turtles (actually quite good, but had I known that they would be the highlight I might have just walked around the aquarium to look at them without going through the whole parting-with-money thing). There was also a dolphin display but in spite of my natural desire to get my $17 worth I decided that trying to kill another four hours until the next show might just be unbearable. So that was Sentosa Island, lots of things I didn't do but they all looked so artificial and touristy. Even the ruins of the colonial fort, which were adorned with lifesize plastic figures of British troops getting drunk and locals doing all the work. (You could see most of it from the monorail - which took me from place to place).
And that was about that for Singapore. I'm actually sitting back in my parents study in Great Cheverell as I write this conclusion, having run out of Singapore Dollars before I could finish this in Singapore, the flight was, well a flight. The food was bad, the seating was cramped but I grinned inanely the entire thirteen hours, so pleased to be returning home. That was the real reason I didn't enjoy Singapore. Its crass comercialism should by all logic have appealed hugely to my over developed sense of Kitsch but I, having mentally prepared myself to go home, was never in the mood to adjust and explore somewhere new properly. So the Odyssey is over. I'm back in the real world preparing to start a history degree, 10 months older, wiser more confident and definitly ready to settle for a while.
Hope to catch up with the British contingent of this mailing list in the very near future. Hope to see those of you from the rest of the world here to visit very soon.
No Worries
Pete