Singapore

I wanted to stop through the small country/city of Singapore on my way south, and was fortunate enough to have a friend from Seattle that was moving there! So she was able to lend me her newfound accommodation – which was quite helpful for such an expensive country. Thanks Sonja!

Singapore doesn’t even seem like it belongs in SE Asia – it’s so different from the rest of Asia that you have to wonder if you got on the wrong flight! Everything is very Western, but still has the Asian vibe, albeit a rich one. Everyone speaks English, and there are proper restaurants, toilets and sinks with potable water etc. It was very much like a quick trip back to America – but on steroids. Seriously, these Singaporeans don’t mess around with the limited land they have. They have some of the most interesting/wild architecture I’ve ever seen – I mean who just decides to put a giant boat on top of three skyscrapers???

That’s the Marina Bay Sands hotel, apparently the most expensive building in the world, at $4.7 billion.

Sonja and I decided the best way to describe Singapore was to compare it to a video game. It’s like someone sat down with a game of Sim City, planned out an immaculate metro system, drudged out some canals, raised up some islands and then started adding buildings that would use the most money and look the coolest. It literally seems like each building is trying to outdo the last one – an architects dream I’m sure. It’s funny because after walking around the city for a while, you walk back to the suburbs and pass by some impressive statues/buildings without even looking or admiring them, because what you’ve seen earlier totally blows them out of the water – the little things that would be amazing by themselves back home are just “normal,” expected occurrences here.

The city is seems like it was just built – and it’s clean. Soooo clean – which makes it stand out from the rest of SE Asia even more. They actually outlaw chewing gum here so that it doesn’t end up all over the ground!

I arrived a bit early and Sonja wasn’t home yet, so I decided to walk around for a bit and eventually decided to get a haircut at a nearby “mall”. There is literally shopping everywhere you go here, with malls scattered everywhere – it’s ridiculous.

It was a Japanese haircutting place, I believe – and I had no idea what a haircut there consisted of. They cut my hair very precisely, and then asked if I wanted a shampoo. I nodded in agreement. Then the hairdresser proceeded to shampoo my hair, whilst giving me a head massage – for 15 minutes! I thought it would never end, until she moved on to massaging my neck, back and arms! Then, after I was slouched over and about half asleep, she finally rinsed the shampoo in her fancy foldout sink and went on to give me a 10-minute conditioner massage… Best haircut ever!

Sonja had just arrived a couple days before I did, so I stole most of her first weekend and we played tourists together, exploring the city on foot. The first day we walked towards Chinatown and found a restaurant to eat at there, seeing building like this:

It’s interesting because the country is so expensive to live in and many business people work here, yet there are still areas of deep poverty, where locals can still get by somehow, like Chinatown.

We walked by a street where was named something like the “street of the dead” where a sign stated that this is where all the old people used to go to live their last days and die… outside a temple there we saw this statue of a seriously ripped dude. I mean, this guy was rocking at least a 24-pack.

We then walked towards the waterfront, passing by Sonja’s workplace with an amazing view of the waterfront. Here is me laughing at the ridiculousness of the boat building:

To add even more to the “video game” aspect of Singapore, their country’s animal isn’t even a real animal – it’s a MerLion

As the sun went down we say that night’s laser show – of course they have lasers on their boat building, why not right?

The next day we decided we wanted to see some gardens, and we had two choices, the botanical gardens or the “Gardens by the Bay” gardens, behind the boat building (Marina Bay Sands.) I decided that if the boat building was that crazy, what lies behind it must be worth looking at – so we went there – expectations exceeded, once again.

They had “Supertrees” which were part of a whole ecosystem/sustainable cycle, with solar cells on top, rain capturing devices inside, as well as plants growing up them. Pretty wild. They seem to be very eco-friendly here, or at least on the surface.

I didn’t take enough pictures, since I was taking it all in with Sonja, but we sat and watched the bay for a long while and just took in the madness this city is.

Walked by some good hedges:

And a weird baby statue being supported just from its hand:

Just walking around the city and seeing the picture-perfect buildings/streets/shops was quite the experience. Seeing Sonja was nice, and felt like a short trip back home.

On the way to the airport, I was talking to my taxi driver who says that in order to own a car they have to pay upwards of $50,000 just to have a PERMIT for the car (depending on the car could be more). They must really be trying to push the public transit, which seems to work. They all serve in the military when they are 18. I think there’s something we can all learn from Singapore, they got their own thing going on.

All pictures are here