Ha, updates day after day! You can really tell I’m back to civilisation!
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| Back in the land of tall buildings |
Actually, there couldn’t be a starker contrast than between what I saw in Sumatra and in Singapore. Beautiful, wild nature, small communities, glaring poverty and general mess on one hand, and shiny, polished, rich, and ultra modern city full of smartly dressed people. Singapore isn’t only clean, it’s sterile. There is no rubbish anywhere, all buildings are clean, streets have no holes, in the metro stations you could eat from the floor.
After I arrived yesterday I got to my hostel and got so excited about the civilisation that I spent most of the evening using the internet. Wow did I miss it! I could reply to new messages without waiting five minutes for everything to load, and finally got to upload some pictures. I went to sleep pretty early, being pretty underslept after the nights in Bukit Lawang – weirdly enough now I could sleep just fine, even though all I had was a honeycomb cubicle bed in a room with twenty other people at least three of whom snored. Go figure.
Today I set off to explore Singapore a bit. And frankly, I’m glad I decided to stay here only for a day – it’s pretty boring. I went down to see some of the most famous modern buildings and they were really quite cool, I checked out a couple parks, went to Chinatown, went to the wharf, visited the museum of Asian cultures, a couple temples of various religions and generally strolled about. I have to admit that I saw a few interesting shops with handicrafts and good artisanship, but I’ve not seen much that would count as ‘alternative’, or not painfully nice, combed and mainstream. At some point I had a strange craving – I really felt like some bubble tea! Charlie, you broke me…
There is a lot of really interesting modern architecture here. Sadly, most of those buildings are offices, hotels or shoping centres – only the last can be seen from the inside. But many of them are really funky – you can see the postmodern influences everywhere, but the coolest must be the Marina Bay Sands hotel, shopping complex and Art Science Museum. The hotel consists of three scyscrapers with a ship lying on top of them. Yes. A ship. Well, a viewing terrace resembling a ship. Pretty cool, eh? Inside it was quite interesting as well, thanks to the fact that the walls aren’t straight, but curve up. Still, architecturally more interesting is still the museum – it has a really funky shape.
Singapore is also very different from the big cities in Australia and New Zealand – it grows up, not sideways. While Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland had a downtown with many skyscrapers and then went pretty much instantly into suburbs with family houses (ok, it’s not that simple, but generally it’s like that), in Singapore the change is more gradual – before you get to the houses, there is a layer of multis and blocks of flats. Basically, Melbourne looked like that from a distance:
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Singapore is more like that:
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I also visited several religious buildings. The St Andrews Cathedral was quite boring, but the stupa of the hundred Buddhas and hindu Sri Mariamman temple were new and more interesting.
The most interesting thing was the Asian Cultures Museum. Western museums just don’t have that many artefacts from Asia, and it was good seeing such a good selection.
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| I managed to sneak a photo inside Parkview Square – it’s the bottom floor of the left building from the pic above |
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| Inside the cathedral – not that instead of chandeliers there are ventilators 😀 |
One thing Singapore is meant to be great for is food. And it is – food is sold everywhere from small stalls rather than restaurants, it’s pretty cheap and very very good. I ended up going to a food market in Chinatown and had some fantastic seafood, topped out with a chocolate ice kachang. A kachang turned out to be a very interesting thing – some jellies and tapioka covered with a pile of grated ice, soaked in various sweet syrups, and topped with chocolate syrup, grated peanuts and… sweetcorn and red beans. Yes. Weirdly enough, it tasted really good. For the food, I wish I could stay here for longer, but well, tough.
So here are some assorted observations:
The place feels like a Western city full of Asians. Not much of a cultural experience, to be honest, though I guess that if I got more into it, I’d find something more interesting.
British colonists were not only fucking assholes, but also bloody shortsighted idiots. I’ve seen tons of that in Australia and New Zealand, but here’s another example: there was a holy hill in Singapore, a place where the rulers had their palaces and temples. Colonists came and decided that it’s a perfect site for a fort, so they destroyed everything that was there, leveled the hill and built a fort. Bloody Enlightened fuckers. Go on, British friends, send me as much hatemail as you want for this one, I stand by my opinion.
For such a police state, there is very little policemen around. I don’t think I’ve seen any today, though I still remember the machine guns at the airport. What I did find, though, is a rather interesting sign warning you from trespassing. See picture. Apparently they don’t play games with you here.
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| Top shelf in the hostel. Check out the Polish vodkas |
Moreover, although I’ve been told that Singapore is the land of teatotallers and clean people, alcohol is actually easier to get here than in Australia or NZ – it’s in pretty much in every corner shop, and not only beer, anything you want.
The general impression is that it’s too sterile to live in. I feel bad for passing such opinions after just one day of being here, but that’s how it feels.
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