After another fun week-and-a-half in Tokyo, the time came for me to leave fair Nippon and journey onward to Singapore.
From this vantage, I witnessed urban China's legendary smog, and it was as bad as I'd heard. As the sun rose the brown morass turned it into an angry red ball, dim enough that I could comfortably look directly at it. The only other time I'd seen the sun look like this was near a forest fire in the interior of BC, when a thick plume of black smoke passed in front of it. Later, as my plane lifted off and circled over the city, I could tell the skyscrapers were not far below from their apparent size, but they appeared only as barely visible outlines in the smog. Near the end of the initial ascent, I saw a clear horizontal line cutting across the entire sky - thick brown below, crystal blue above.
My first sight of Singapore as the plane descended was of its futuristic downtown core and the bay just beyond it, where dozens of huge tanker and container ships were idling. This fit with most of what I'd read about Singapore's wealth and its status as major international business hub. Not long after landing, though, my impressions changed dramatically. Beyond the core, much of the city is comprised of residential towers built by the government's Housing and Development Board, most of which resemble Soviet-era apartment blocks with brighter paint jobs. 85% of Singapore's population lives in these "HDBs". It was in one of these that I spent my six days in the city, in the apartment of my friends Anita and Elliot, where they generously provided me a couch to sleep on (if either of you are reading, thanks again!).
Anita and Elliot were my guides around the city, and I wouldn't have had nearly as good a time without them. They showed me around Little India and Arab Street, and a mostly-abandoned Chinese theme park called Haw Par Villa. We went on runs through the jungle that still covers parts of the island, and they brought me to an underground comedy club where comedians from each of the island's sizable ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay, and Indian) showed off their startlingly racially-charged material. Together we went to the Jurong Bird Sanctuary, which was not bad, and the Singapore Zoo, which was great. Most of the zoo's enclosures are designed with no fences or cages. Instead they have dry moats of width and depth calculated to be just beyond the leaping and climbing abilities of the animals within, allowing unobstructed views for visitors.
They also gave me some glimpses of the absurdly-rich parts of the city, such as one weirdly Americanized area filled with newly-constructed restaurants, bars and clubs populated almost exclusively by white people. The most impressively opulent sight of all was the bar in the lobby of the Parkview Hotel. This cavernous, moodily-lit Art Deco space was dominated by a wall of liquor bottles several stories high which stood behind the bar. The bartender, a young woman in an early-20th-century cocktail dress, wore a harness which was connected by cables to a motorized rig that hung from rails embedded in the ceiling. She used a remote control for the rig to fly around the wall's surface retrieving bottles.
Singapore's famous food culture was the highlight of the city for me. Singaporean cuisine includes Chinese, Indian, English, and traditional Malaysian foods, as well as dishes resulting from cross-pollination of some or all of these. The best places to eat were hawker centers, open-air complexes with row upon row of stalls selling a tremendous variety of cheap food. A common breakfast is lightly-toasted white bread spread with kaya (a sweet coconut jam) and sandwiched around slabs of solid butter, served alongside a cup of "kopi", super-strong coffee with pancreas-stomping quantities of sugar and condensed milk. I wouldn't want to eat like this every day, but still, delicious. Some other favorites were laksa (rice noodles and bean sprouts in a spicy coconut-milk broth), chicken rice, and fresh-pressed sugar cane juice.
The hawker centers and HDBs represent a far less affluent side of Singapore. This makes up a much greater part of the city than one might imagine from Western media coverage. The People's Action Party, which has (democratically) been in power since 1959, has been actively fostering the city's role as a nexus of business and a haven for the ultra-rich, pursuing aggressive urban development. There were lots of construction projects underway throughout the city, and I was told that a common joke among Singaporeans is that construction of the city began in the 1800s and is still underway. Certainly life in Singapore is much more expensive than in most of neighboring Malaysia. With the city's future planned so heavily around the influx of foreign capital, and with the local population in decline (Singapore's birth rate is the second-lowest in the world after Japan's*), I can't help but wonder what role the poorer majority will have in this future.
I felt that six days was enough to see everything Singapore had to offer, so while it saddened me to say goodbye once again to my friends (and to leave behind the food), I was content with the time I'd spent in this strange city which is so rapidly being transformed - into what, only time will tell.
And now, photos. Here are those from Singapore and Guangzhou:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152137238810879.1073741841.514945878&type=1&l=4d8aa2b4d9
And here are those from my return to Tokyo:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152137172320879.1073741840.514945878&type=1&l=e0f38231d6
* One last note - the Singaporean government paid the Mentos corporationthis year to put together some propaganda to encourage people to have more kids. The resulting mess of a music video tries simultaneously to stimulate the viewer's libido, to remind them of their duty to procreate, and of course to sell mints to them. Its bizarre blend of crass commercialism and appeals to Confucian values make it a uniquely Singaporean cultural product. If you haven't already, watch and enjoy (or recoil in horror): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxU89x78ac
