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Everyone has heard of Singapore but how
many know where it is? It’s somewhere down there in Southeast Asia
near China, past India, near Thailand or Viet Nam maybe, somewhere
down there. If you look at a globe that’s, say, a foot in diameter,
Singapore is about the size of a pinhead. A small pinhead. It’s at
the tip of the Malaysian peninsula that extends down from Thailand,
just north of Indonesia, and northwest of Australia.
We have an
American friend who lived in Singapore for three years who told us
that this is a good stop for a first visit to Asia. He described it
as "Asia for beginners." That hit the nail on the head. See
this and
this.
The first thing we noticed upon arrival at 6 a.m.
on a Sunday morning was that everything was in English. This
included not just signs in the airport but street signs, newspapers,
everything. Most volumes in the National Library are in English.
Singapore has a strong British influence as it was a colony for a
long time. They have afternoon tea, drive on the left side, and even
use British style plugs (which was a mild problem because I had come
prepared with Asian and Australian converters).
The second thing we noticed several hours later
as it approached noon was that it was hot. Really hot. Really,
really hot. At a little more than one degree, about 85 miles, north
of the equator, Singapore is in the tropics. The humidity is almost
over-powering. Think about Philadelphia in July when it’s 97 degrees
and 97% relative humidity. Now you’re getting close. However, during
most of our stay, the skies were clear and it was beautiful. But it
was really hot.
So just what is
Singapore? A
country? A city? What? It’s both. Singapore became a self-governing
state in 1959. There was a tie to Malaysia for a short while after
that but it eventually became its own country in 1963. Singapore is an island,
actually one large and several small islands. The main island is
kind of diamond shaped and is 26 miles wide by 14 miles high at the
maximum points. The country is about twice the geographic size of
Philadelphia and is home to 4.5 million people. The city sits pretty
much at the southern tip of the main island. The airport is in the
northeastern part of the country, about 12 miles from the city. We
took a taxi from the airport along something called the East Coast
Parkway to get into the city. It traversed almost the whole east
coast kind of like I95 only shorter.
One day while Lynn was at work, I thought I’d see
the whole country using some of the extensive rail networks. The
cars are like subway cars and in the city they run underground. For
S$1.90, about US$1.20, I crossed the country to the north side. I
picked this place because it was maybe a mile and a half from the
causeway at the border. I was going to walk to Malaysia, something I
could tell my grandkids about one day – not that they’d care because
kids never care about stories their grandparents tell them. Besides,
I don’t have any grandkids yet. I walked about half mile when I
decided the oppressive heat was going to get in the way so no story
for the grandkids. Fortunately, I have other stories for them. From
the train I observed that most of the country looks like suburbs but
with almost no single homes and high-rises everywhere. Almost
everyone lives in a high-rise.
There’s a river that runs through Singapore, so
on our first morning there we went down to take a look. One can take
a "bumboat" for about S$6, less than US$4. A bumboat is small
vessel seating about ten that is used mostly for moving cargo or for
local fishing. The one we were on appeared to still function as a
working boat as it wasn’t at all dressed up for tourists. The banks
of the river are developed on both sides. There are outdoor
restaurants one after another in this city that’s always warm and
behind them are serious skyscrapers, some 70 stories high.
As we drove into the city on the first day, we
passed a building called the
Raffles Hotel. (Look at the
ebrochure). It’s world famous. That’s what they told us. That
information seems to have skipped our old neighborhood in
Montgomeryville but what do I know? The taxi driver said that some
rooms in there go for S$4500 (US$2840) a night and even more. From
the outside the structure looked imposing. Each of the five or six
floors had a walkway around the outside so that rooms didn’t look
directly outside to the street. When we walked in to take a look,
the center of the building was broken into about four different
courtyards, each with an outdoor bar and restaurant seating. When it
rains, and it can rain hard in the tropics, they’re out of business
and we saw that happen. There is an indoor bar there called "The
Long Bar" which is the home of the Singapore Sling, a drink that
is known in Montgomeryville but that I’ve never tried.
There are a lot of things in Singapore named
Raffles. For instance, Singapore Airlines has economy class, first
class, and Raffles class. In the beginning of the 19th
century, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, an official with the British
East India Company, established Singapore as a settlement and
trading post. He was the first Westerner to discover Singapore and
is regarded as the founder of the modern country. Exports in
chemicals, electronics, and services, along with tourism, provide
the most of the revenue for the economy.
Before arriving, I had heard stories about people
being whacked with a cane for some offenses. Many of these stories
are very possibly
true and caning was even mentioned as a punishment for some
crime that was in the newspaper that day. I was worried about going
to jail for 25 years for inadvertently dropping a tissue on the
ground. It’s not that bad; there aren’t people watching every move
you make. But the place really is pretty much free of litter, at
least in the central business district and the tourist areas.
However, it isn’t that way in some of the ethnic areas. Raffles laid
out the city to segregate different ethnicities, so that there’s a
Chinatown, Little India, and the Arab Quarter. These have a very
distinct ethnic charm but they are not nearly as clean and tidy as
other areas, and the parts we saw were significantly run-down.
Americans sometimes complain that the government
is too involved in their personal lives. There’s nowhere in the U.S.
that is as intrusive in personal lives as some of the things we
heard about here. A Singaporean woman told us that some years ago,
the government decided the population was growing too fast so they
"encouraged" families to have no more than two (I think) children.
The "encouragement" came in the form of denying maternity benefits
to families for any kids beyond the second. Women less than 30 years
of age and with less than two kids were given about S$6000 and a
down payment for a low-cost government apartment if they agreed to
be sterilized. Not only that, tuition rates in school were
substantially higher for the third and later kids. This limit led to
some disastrous consequences. For reasons which I will never
understand, on a macro or micro level, families decided that male
children are superior to female children. This led to gender
selection by parents and female fetuses were aborted because of
their femaleness. When I hear stories like this, I often wonder how
people think there will be a subsequent generation after the one
with no females in it. Evidently the government realized that
telling families that there was a maximum number of kids they could
have didn’t work, so they began to encourage larger families. I was
led to believe that that’s where things are now.
I’ve mentioned before that I like to watch the
sun, moon, and stars. In Singapore, practically on the equator, the
sun is very high in the sky. I’m about average height and around
noon, my shadow was barely six inches long, so the sun is almost
directly overhead. Also, the variation in the length of days here
from summer to winter is negligible. The sun rises around 7 a.m. and
sets around 7 p.m. all year. When the sun does set, it’s going
straight down, so very shortly after sunset, it’s "lights out."
There’s no long lingering sunset like there is in Delft where the
sun sets on a steep angle. Does anyone other than me ever think
about this stuff?
One night, Lynn and I were going out for dinner.
She was wearing a very colorful dress; she looked smashing. As we
got on the elevator, there was another man there who evidently
thought so also, and said so. He was apparently an American and when
Lynn thanked him, he recognized her as an American, too. I asked him
where he was from. Philadelphia. I told him I knew of the place and
he said he lived in New Hope. As we got out of the elevator and he
started to walk away, I called after him. "Hey! How ‘bout them
Birds?!?!" He came
back and said, "I’m so glad they got rid of
Owens and I’m expecting
another big year." My kind of guy. I left him with a high-five.
See all my pictures of Singapore.
See a video from Singapore |
