Singapore Sling
We’ve arrived in Singapore after a long set of flights half way around the world. We are sixteen hours ahead of our hilltop (it is 8:30am Thursday here and 4:30pm Wednesday at home). Time zones here in Asia are even more unusual than my favorite weirdo time zone state of Arizona. Take a look at an Asian time zone map and you’ll realize it has more to do with geopolitical groupings than east/west geography. Singapore and Malaysia prefer to hang out with China and the eastern half of Indonesia than the much more logical eastern half of Indonesia, where capital Jakarta sits, and the rest of SE Asia.
My first impression of Singapore is pretty much unchanged from my prior business travels here. It is a very urban, very clean, very modern city of 5.4 million where everything seems very well organized and global. For one reason or another, I think of Singapore as the same as Dubai, except without the surrounding desert wadis and yet with lots of extra tropical humidity. The big difference between the two is that Dubai has a much more lax outlook on regulation than do the governance gnomes of Singapore. Perhaps Singapore is more like a blend of Dubai and Zurich, if that is even conceivable.
The mugginess is making me choose to go out and about in shorts and t-shirt even though I know Singapore is a serious business city. For whatever formality of the general attire here, the tropical air and distinct lack of religious attractions compared to the rest of SE Asia somehow seems to make shorts an OK choice. I will be playing the attire game as we go, seeing what seems appropriate and hoping for as much daytime touring in shorts as possible. I’m covered if I need to cover up more than that, but am hoping that comfort will prevail.
The airport at 6:30am was a pleasure and was both uncrowded and very efficient and civilized, as you might imagine. The 20 minute ride in from the airport to our central city hotel actually took us through the area we will be touring later today and tomorrow. I will add that the S$60 cost of an oversized taxi for the four of us plus luggage was a bargain by today’s standards. The jazzy buildings around the Marina are recognizable by everyone around the world, especially the Marina Bay Sands that looks decidedly like a George Jetson building with its three vertical towers and boat-shaped connected upper level that has lots of greenspace in evidence. We tried to reserve for lunch tomorrow atop this architectural icon, but no such luck. We will just have to join the great unwashed who dine on satay street food, I suppose.
We had organized a tour with a local, which is usually a wonderful choice based on our experience, but which was not so much today. Our guide showed up with a car that was barely big enough for the four of us. The first place she took us was to Raffles Hotel to invoke that old British colonial feeling of Singapore. The only problem is that the hotel has kept that exclusionary feel of the British Empire and will not let day-tourists into the lobby, so we had to satisfy ourselves with a tour of the veranda, which was nice and all, but not nearly as nice as the old-world insides of the place from what we could glimpse. From there we were dropped off at Haji Lane, a quaint shopping street that is probably more quaint when it isn’t pouring rain. Singapore is a big modern city that tries to keep some of its heritage in the form of the various culturally-centered areas like little India, little Malaysia, Chinatown, and other various cultural ghettos from the peoples that melted into the pot that has become Singapore. Their cultural blend has Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist underpinnings, but nothing holds the place together more than commerce and it has clearly become the dominant financial center for Asia as Hong Kong has given up that throne thanks to China. That’s weird since Chinese is the dominant culture of Singapore, more so that Malay or Indian, with 75% of the population being of Chinese descent.
We spent a few hours touring the city in the heavy rain from behind the windshield of our driver’s car. She probably knew a lot about the city, but her ability to communicate that to us effectively was completely missing. I finally just nodded at everything she said since I could barely understand a word of it. The rain let up by the time we got to the Marina area, which is sort of the Central Park of Singapore. The first mandatory stop was at the spouting white granite lion fountain that feeds into the Bay. Its clearly an important photo opportunity so we did not disappoint. From that spot we could also take nice photos of the skyline in several directions including the Marina Bay Sands complex and, in the distance, the Singapore Flyer, the only giant observation wheel in the world that I have not previously ridden. The Flyer was operating, so we decided to make it our last tour stop.
I had already bored Faraj and Yasuko with stories of the trauma of spending six years trying to build the New York Wheel, so I was careful about asking if they really wanted to go ride the Flyer. Even Kim, who has heard and lived the Wheel stories repeatedly, was interested to ride the Flyer with me. Faraj and Yasuko played along and we went for a spin. The worst nightmare for any wheel builder is the classic, “if we build it will they come?” quandary. So, getting a 28-person capsule all to ourselves invoked a certain sense of that inevitability. The two sensations that this 28-minute ride could not avoid in me were that the physics, engineering and metallurgy of it all is amazing, and the second is that the experience is not really all that special for all that it’s cracked up to be. Sitting or standing in a glass tube for a very slow ride is neither enthralling nor all that special. I’m not sure I was prepared to admit that while I was in the grip of the project, but I certainly feel that way today.
It was time for our tour to end and the 32 hours of travel had caught up to us all, so we decided to pack it in and head back to the hotel, which is a place called The Clan. It is a fantastic boutique hotel right in the heart of everything Singapore has to offer, so there are worse places to hang out waiting for Mike and Melisa to catch up with us. They are arriving right about now and once they have found their way to The Clan, we plan to gather for dinner and plot out our next full day in this fast-paced urban center. The Clan has an Asian metal gong that they hit as you pass through the front entrance, and that seems an appropriate announcement that we have officially arrived in the heart of SE Asia. We went to Lau Pa Sat, which is a central sort of street food vendor compendium. If the Asian Tiger is going to get us gastronomically, the sooner the better we figure. Maybe Mike and Melisa will want to see Raffles and go the the Long Bar tomorrow and get one of the signature Singapore Sling drinks that made the town famous. At $37, it may be the only thing in Singapore that isn’t a bargain.