Dave Laird: Travel: Singapore

F I R S T I M P R E S S I O N S
Besides the hassle with customs to get a shower (as mentioned in the Flight section) I was quite impressed with the airport in Singapore. Very efficient. There was even a free 'Net dialup area for people with notebooks. Nice touch! Once out of the airport I snagged a taxi to downtown. I had 12 hours in Singapore, and I wanted to check out the city I've heard so much about. One cool thing: the taxi driver pointed out all of the large potted plants and trees on the middle of the road to the city. He explained that the plants could all be quickly removed from the road if there was an emergency plane landing required, or if the airport got bombed or something. Reminds me of the Eisenhower (sp?) Interstate system where every 5 miles of interstate must have at least 1 straight mile to be used for emergency landing strips. The taxi driver dropped me downtown. About 2 minutes after stepping out of the air conditioned taxi, the heat really hit me. Bloody hell it was hot here! Well, more humid than hot. I was wearing my GoreTex jacket and my zip-off shorts, so I quickly converted to Summer mode: pant legs off and jacket around the waist. Much better! Now if only I'd have worn a white shirt instead of a black one.... Later in the day I noticed something else about the heat: once I'd gotten over the shock, it didn't really seem much worse than Toronto on a really hot summer day. Singapore is almost exactly on the equator, where I thought things were oppressively hot. Maybe it was just the season, but another cab driver I asked said the temperature didn't really change much throughout the year. The ocean probably moderates the heat. Darwin is supposed to have some bitchin' hot weather (45+ degrees celcius). I'll find out when I get there.
I've been told several times that Singapore is the cleanest city on earth. Being from Canada where we've got some pretty clean cities ourselves, it's not the cleanliness that really hit me. What really amazed me was how LUSH the city is! Every major street was just row after row of foliage. Tons of tropical plants and trees. The photo here is pretty typical for a Singapore intersection downtown. Incredible!
A R C H I T E C T U R E
Singapore is a fairly modern-looking city with nice big shiny glass buildings. The first picture here is a pretty good example of Singapore architecture. Twin trapezoids, nice and crisp with sharp angles etc.
The second picture is...I can't really explain it. Kind of a break from the standard modern style. I'm not really sure what happens at this place. The look of it disturbed me enough to take a picture.
A R T G A L L E R Y
I went to the Singapore National Art Gallery early in the afternoon. One exhibition I checked out was just stunning: a group of approximately 500 paintings of a sheep's head by this one guy. Each painting was of the exact same concept (the sheep's head), but of very different styles. It was incredible! They had all of the canvases just standing up on the floor stacked in front of each other, and you walked through a path between them. The group was appropriately called "The Herd". Another exhibition was on mechanical musical instruments like player pianos etc. Pretty cool. Most of the stuff was in great condition and could still play, but nothing was running. It's amazing to think that we started with recorded music like this (a full band with automated drums, organ, saxophones, etc.) and now have solid-state mp3 players to throw in our pockets. It definitely gave me a better appreciation of what we have for music now. I saw something particularly disturbing in the last exhibition I was checking out. Not a disturbing piece of art, but a disturbing security guard. He and a bunch of his security guard friends were standing around a piece of art hanging from the wall, critiquing it or something. At one point, he stepped forward ad started picking at the piece with his fingernail! I was stunned enough to tell him to stop. He just looked at me for a bit like he hadn't done anything and then went on chatting with his friends (who earlier told me I wasn't allowed to take photos in the gallery even though they didn't sell any). Artists of the world: think twice before displaying your art "unsupervised" in Singapore's National Art Gallery.
R A F F L E S
Raffles is a hotel that was set up by the guy who started Singapore or something like that. My dad explained it to me before I left, but I've forgotten the story since then. Several streets in Singapore are called Raffles Ave. or Raffles St., etc. Anyways, it's really famous, and has a bar called the Long Bar where the Singapore Sling (the drink) was invented. I decided to be touristy and have one. It was interesting, but it was a bit of a "girlie" drink: a dark pink concoction with foam on top, a skewered cherry, and a slice of pineapple. Kind of sweet with lots of gin in it. I bought a Tiger Lager to wash it down. The bill: yikes! $30 for 2 drinks! The Sling was $16 and the Tiger, tax and tip did the rest. That takes the cake for the most expensive drink I've ever had. (Previous record was a $7 U.S. Heineken I had at a club called Webster Hall in Manhattan.) So, the Long Bar turns out to be a bit of a tourist trap. There were several other touristy people there (also drinking Slings) and I'm sure the bar knows that they have kind of a captive audience. They could charge whatever they want and people would still walk in and say "Hey man! Get me a Singapore Sling! I am in Singapore, after all! Where's my gum...." or something to that effect, without asking what the price is. Oh well. I can say I've done it, and I guess that was the point.
S H O P P I N G

Singapore has tons of shopping malls. Many of them are kind of specialized for specific products like computer equipment and home stereo equipment. The first mall I went to was fairly general-purpose though. It was called the Sun-Tec City Mall. Prices seemed about the same as in Canada, but the Singapore Dollar is worth less than a Canadian dollar (about 87.6 cents Canadian), so things were effectively a bit cheaper. I also got the impression that golf is really big here -- every sports equipment store had golf displays taking up the entire front displays. Later in the day I went to a much more impressive mall that the taxi driver said was the best place in Singapore to buy computer or stereo equipment. Dig the photos: tons of neon signs with every brand of consumer electronics you could ever imagine.
One thing that truly amazed me about this mall was the software stores. I'm sure Singapore is every single software developers absolute nightmare. Apparently, software piracy is absolutely totally legal here. There were a number of stores that sold software installation CD's at incredible prices: one program: $8. Three programs: $20. That's for any software in the store (Photoshop, Microsoft Office, or whatever) except for games which were even cheaper: one for $6, four for $20. Absolute flat-out software copyright violations in plain view, and no one cares!!! Another interesting thing very much related to this fact is that there were a number of large advertisements up for companies like Seagate, Quantum, Iomega, etc. The key thing here is that all the ads were for companies that are solely hardware manufacturers. Software companies would be pretty stupid to advertise here.
So that pretty much sums up my time in Singapore! It's a pretty cool place, and I wouldn't mind going back some time to hang for a while longer (like for a couple of weeks or so). I'll just have to remember to bring my spraypaint next time :)