May 02, 2010 - Singapore Vacation - Dan Krill's BLOG on BinaryBedlam

Singapore Vacation
May 2, 2010 05:42:39 PM

     I Just got back from an amazing trip to the Far East. There were so many new experiences and differences from life in the States. And it’s so clean and well maintained. I guess the harsh spitting, littering, flower picking, and gum chewing laws really are having an effect. And not just that, people are so nice to each other. I’ve witnessed a few accounts where complete strangers would go out of their way to help random people. Also, from what I can tell, people smoke, drink, and curse a whole lot less than here in the US, so maybe I wouldn’t want to live there after all, I mean I gotta have a few bad habits :-/ Plus if you’ve never been to Asia before, this is the perfect place to break the ice. It’s got a lot of the surrounding country’s cultural influences, but the national language is English, so just about everyone there can speak it, so as a tourist, you won’t be completely lost. Any way, here are some of my observations.

     Singapore drives on the left side of the street, so I was confused everywhere we went. I mean it sounds like such an easy concept to adjust to, but until you actually experience it, you don’t realize how many of our driving habits are almost instinctive. From what I’ve heard, people that started off on the right, have an average of 2 accidents in their first year after switching.
     Vehicles have to post their maximum number of passengers and their maximum speed as big round stickers on their rear for every one to see, so that if either is exceeded, it is plainly visible and easier to report to the authorities.
     Traffic lights are made by Tyco and make all sorts of sci-fi like sounds and beeps. Doors just like Star Trek, thin yet big and heavy and still slide open rapidly and effortlessly. Normally noisy things are all so quite. Cars, subways, sliding doors, and even construction equipment, all run practically silent. While riding on the metro, and turning corners at what seemed like 100 mph, it was still quite! It was like riding on air. The country in general just seems so efficient. Even little things seem to make a huge difference. Like the escalators move about twice as fast as the ones in the US, so very crowded places are quickly dispersed. And everyone even follows the escalator etiquette; everyone always stands left, leaving the right open for people walking. I mean we sort of have that here, but how many times have you actually seen people all standing precisely single file allowing others to pass by?

     Very safe, crime is practically non-existent and yet there is hardly any visible police or military presence, in fact during my week long stay I may have only seen 1 police car! Just about all law enforcement is done remotely. There are cameras everywhere, down every corridor, at every intersection; it’s basically a Big Brother scenario. People won’t do anything wrong if they know they are constantly being watched. Also, because of the laxed mentality on urban safety, there are just as many kids walking all round the city during the day as adults. School-uniformed kids as young as 7 years old are using the metros and buses all on their own to get around between classes. Singapore’s school system, unlike the US, is based on ranking, not location. In the US, you typically go to school based on where you live. In SG, you go based on how you did on a nationalized placement test. So kids, both young and old, may spend up to 1.5 hours a day trying to get to school!

     For food we actually rarely went to restaurants. Instead, it is more common to eat at street side markets, food courts, and Hawker Centers (which are effectively out door non air conditioned food courts under big pavilions.) The food is good no matter where you go, and its so cheep! The cuisine selections are typically Malay, Chinese, and Indian and you can fill yourself up for as little as $3. The one most annoying thing about eating traditions over here, however, was that you don’t get drinks or napkins with your food. Now I am a very messy eater, so this was very frustrating. Apparently you are supposed to bring your own tissue pack with you when you go out to eat. For drinks you have to go to some place that specializes in drinks. Now Restaurants will have these things, but you have to ask for them, you don’t get them by default. What they do have, though, are these storage baskets for women to put their purses into while they eat to prevent passer byers from plucking things from your bags. So after you’ve taken your seat, they will bring over this canvas and wicker collapsible storage device and sit it beside you. Once you put your belongings into it, they cover it with a towel .

     Holy freaken hot! It’s about 93 degrees with about 75% humidity all day, everyday, all year. You sweat buckets just walking around, but this makes sense, SG is tropical, in fact it’s only 1 degree above the equator. And because the sun light is so intense, I had to put sun block on every morning. I got used to the heat pretty quickly though, after about a day I was fine, Khine hated it the whole trip, though. She said she doesn’t know how she managed back when she was actually living there.
     If I had to speculate, I would think that the elaborate underground shopping centers and shear number of huge malls are an indirect product of the heat. Sometimes SG feels like one giant shopping mall in that all these places are interconnected underground. And places like these with their AC blasting on high provide excellent refuse from the heat outside.
     Singapore has a small island just south of it called Sentosa Island. The whole thing is effectively one giant resort. It’s covered with hotels, theme parks, a casino, it’s own metro system, and the famous white sandy beach, Siloso. This island is also where you can find the largest Merlion statue in all of SG. And in case you weren’t sure, a Merlion is a creature with the head of a lion and the body of a mermaid, it’s sort of a national symbol much like how the Statue of Liberty is to the US.

     While the rate of exchange was in my favor (1 US$ gets you 1.4 SG$), the price of electronics are actually a lot higher than here in the US. Here you can get netbooks for around 300 and laptops around 600, there it’s like 600 and 1300 respectively. So I ended up not getting myself any new gadgets. Even at Sim-Lim square, an 8 level electronics boutique filled with tons of the same type of dealers selling effectively all the same things, where you can even exercise your level-10 bargaining skills, things were way too expensive.
     There are, however, a lot of other items and services available for better than the US. There’s a huge 7 level department store above Little India called, Mustafa. They have everything walmart has times 1000, and then each of those items in 1000 different makes and varieties. I got myself a nice backpack for $15US, and a travel tripod for my camera for 10. As far as services, Khine wanted us to do a couples photo shoot because there is nothing in the US anything like what they offer in Asia. At a place in the Bugis mall, Jean Yip, a hair salon / photo studio, they offer a package including hair styling, makeup, eyebrow plucking, in house outfits, (all for each of us), 40+ pictures (we keep 12 different ones ranging from wallets to 8x10s), and photo enhancements, all for only $170US. (And yes, I had makeup and my eyebrows plucked, but hey! It was a good deal!) Another good example is massages. You can get a 1.5 hour full body massage for about $50US, including tip. We did this too, but in Malaysia, it’s even cheaper there, about 40.

     To conclude, an awesome experience, very neat stuff, and meeting all of Khine’s old friends was really fun too, I can’t thank them enough for everything they’ve done for us from getting us food to showing us around and everything else in between. If it weren’t for the ridiculously long 23 hours of flying or mad expensive tickets, I would deff go back more often.

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