Singapore, September 19-21,2008



We landed at Changi airport just before midnight, walking out of the air-conditioned cool of the terminal into the sauna that is Singapore. The temperature here hovers in the mid-80s year round, and it's always humid. This is our fourth visit to Singapore, one of our most favourite modern cities. We love its multi-ethnic character – Chinese, Indian, Arab, Maylay, and of course ex-pats, mostly European and Australian, who make up around 20% of the population. Because of it's rich mix of cultures, the food in Singapore is exceptional. Some come here just to eat. There are restaurants, bars and coffee shops everywhere, as well as markets, and street markets where you can buy fresh produce and drinks made from the most exotic fruit, vegetable, tea and coffee combinations. How about some black currant aloe vera juice, or an iced oreo cookie chocolate coffee?

Singapore is also THE shopping centre of the world – from very high-end fashion houses and boutiques to massive high-rise shopping complexes filled with (mostly Chinese made) goods, to bustling street markets and back alley hustlers. Everyone's got something to sell, and there's no shortage of buyers: Singapore's economy is perhaps the best in all of Asia, and Singaporeans have got money to spend. Singapore's economic success is not accidental. Forty years ago Singapore created a vision of a modern, efficient and economically vibrant community, and Singaporeans have worked hard to achieve it. Singapore's neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, although richer in natural resources, have been less visionary, less organized, and perhaps most significantly more politically corrupt, and their people continue to suffer the consequences: poverty is everywhere evident, and stubbornly entrenched.

When it comes to shopping, we're mostly gawkers, not buyers. Our suitcases are already full and heavy enough. We weave our way through markets filled with fruits and veggies we've seldom seen and cannot name. Things that look like teeny tiny eggplants, giant green beans with a row of large seeds inside, foot-ball sized durians, mangosteins, breadfruits and melons with exotic names. And these cheek by jowl with racks of clothing – shorts and shirts, and boxes and bins of plastic hangers, door-mats, purses, kleenex, hardware, toys and gadgets. The Chinese especially love toys and gadgets. A whole plaza filled with flower-sellers. Orchids, bromeliads, palms and ferns. Guys with push-carts making ice-cream sandwiches – cutting sizable blocks of various colours of ice-cream (one flavour was sweet corn, another green tea), slapping a couple of wafers on either side and wrapping the whole thing in a napkin. My big purchase was a 30 cent cord for my glasses – the kind that loops around the back of your neck and screams 'granny!' I chose a purple one, hoping for some degree of cool, if not chic. Although I don't like the feel of something tickling my neck (mosquito, cock-roach?), I do like being able to whip my glasses off to take a photo without having to think about where to put them, or 'where did I put them?'

On this trip to Singapore our favourite hotel was fully booked, so we stayed in a hostel in a section of town known as 'Little India.' When we came in, by taxi, the main streets were draped with wide swaths of coloured lights. “Happy Deepavali” was written across several of them. As it happens, this is the beginning of the month long festival of Deepavali, which is a little like Christmas, in terms of both lights and gift-giving.

As usual in many parts of Singapore, shops are open until 9 or 10 at night (and in some places all night), and there were lots of people out walking, shopping, eating, talking. Some of the busiest shops we saw in Little India were the ones selling gold jewelry. The customers were mostly men, examining earrings, nose-rings and necklaces with their fingers, then bringing out their calculators to assist them in their negotiations. Untrusting of banks, they buy gold in prodigious quantities – their wives and daughters literally wear their wealth.

We wondered why there seemed to be so many young Indian men, roaming about in little gangs, and so few Indian women. We later learned that the majority of these young Indian men are migrant workers from Bangladesh, most of them doing construction jobs that the better educated and more class conscious Singaporeans eschew. The Bangladeshis work a six-day week. On their one day off, Sunday, they congregate in little clutches on the streets, standing, sitting or lying down, depending on their state of intoxication, chatting and giggling like school-girls. Early the next morning, we watched as pick-up trucks loaded with migrant workers drove through streets littered with the remnants of their previous evening's revelries: empty beer bottles, plastic bags and cigarette packages. A few, passed out on sidewalks or in doorways, missed that day's work. It must be a particularly hard and lonely life for a people who are so family oriented. I wonder how long they stay – months? years? And what the lives of their families back home are like. Interestingly, a young Canadian gal at the hostel is about to do her Master's degree on how middle and upper-class Canadian women control, and are used by their government to control, the lives of other women – specifically migrant domestic workers. It will be a treatise on the victimization and abuse of women by other women. This is unfortunately not a new or unique story: predominantly female professions like nursing and midwifery suffer from similar dynamics. But the despicable way in which women treat other women is definitely worthy of further study. If we can begin to understand the dynamic, we may have a chance of changing it.

One of the things we admire most about Singapore is the interesting and exciting architectural design of so many of its buildings. No two buildings are alike, and very few are 'plain' or dull. Buildings may be curved, or constructed with odd angles, or brightly-coloured. Some are impossibly tall, but many are not, and there are lots of historic buildings, colourful Indian and Chinese temples, and plenty of open space, plazas and parks, to balance the high-rises. Singapore is of course also fortunate in its tropical climate, which enables luxurious greenery, exotic flowers and large shade trees to survive even in the middle of the city. Best of all, despite the number of people who live there, Singapore has somehow managed to both keep traffic flowing and keep the city pedestrian-friendly. So walking around town is a pleasure and a great pastime for those like us who have 'time to kill.'