For the third time this trip, I feel like I’ve come home. Singapore and I lived together on and off for two years. For 1.5 I went back and forth between Singapore and Bali – recruiting nurses in Singapore for U.S. hospitals and skilled nursing facilities, and then enjoying my beloved house in Bali whenever it wasn’t necessary to be in Singapore.
As anyone who read the last four posts can tell, I love Singapore. Not in the wholehearted adoration and bewitched love affair way I love Bali, but in a sense of deep friendship and admiration. Singapore was helpful and good to me. It remains a place I find fascinating and strangely wonderful. It has always seemed to me that a place like Singapore shouldn’t be possible.
So many things make Singapore unique, but what most impacts me is the feeling of safety and trust. It may be like living in “The Truman Show,” but Singapore is the only place I know that lacks darkness and malevolence. The idea that someone could be lurking or attempting harm is almost unimaginable. Despite being busy in places, it has a strange calmness – almost a stillness to the environment. This, in a very vertical city-state of almost six million people is almost unimaginable. Yet there it is.
After Bali and Penang, Singapore feels like the center of the world. It’s a country, it’s a city, it’s a capitol. It has all embassies behind shopping malls which line up on both sides of the Prime Minister and President’s official residence. Parliament sits along the river and across the street from some retail shops – just down the street from one of the big computer malls.
The convenience and modernity is refreshing. We’ve used the post office a few times because it costs about half the price of Indonesia and mail reaches home in about three days. We can use our Visa debit cards as easily as at home. Unlike Bali, ATMs give respectable amounts of money. We can go to the movies. We haven’t had Internet this good since Istanbul. In fact, I would say, I haven’t seen Internet this good since France – which was possibly the best of the trip. Best yet, there’s free WiFI in every public place imaginable. We can work anywhere and everywhere.
Although there are cultural differences, they’re sort of faint and barely noticeable. The thing about Singaporeans is that their similar enough that you mostly don’t notice the differences until you get to know them well enough and see their Asian family structures. But in the course of everyday conversations and total conceptual outlook, there’s really nothing we can ask, say or explain that they don’t get – or have context to accept. They’re like Southeast Asian us.
Shopping and food abound in Singapore – which makes it fun and interesting for a short-term stay. On every block there’s some piece of clothing that turns Emily’s head or some tasty treat that might turn either or both of our heads.
I have rekindled my love of the Singaporean ice cream sandwich – a rectangular hunk of ice cream literally hacked off a block with a meat cleaver put inside either two wafers, or a special green, pink and white swirled sweet piece of sandwich bread. They take the sandwich part of ice cream sandwich very literally – and I love it. In addition to the standard flavors we have at home, they add a few very Singaporean twists including sweet corn, taro, durian, red bean and my standard order – mango. All for S$1
I have also rekindled my love of enjoying refreshing chinese iced teas while walking down the street on a hot, humid Singapore day.
Best yet, by its very nature, Singapore likes to mitigate problems. The power cord to Emily’s computer quit two days ago. I’m not sure if it was fed up with all the travel or was just tired out, but it flickered out and died. In Bali, we would have had perhaps a day or two of calls and driving around to try to replace it. In Penang, we would have had to go on a mission. In Singapore, we walked to the computer mall at the corner, went up the escalator, asked the first store we spotted and they had an entire case of choices. We were up and running in no more than 15 minutes.
On Sunday, I realized we needed visas for Vietnam. Embassies can be painful. In Bangkok, it took several trips to the Indonesian Embassy to get everything in the order they wanted to get our visa processed – including getting the right amount of US dollars, since they wouldn’t accept Thai baht or anything else.
I have spent longer in the express lane of Trader Joe’s than I did at the Embassy of Vietnam in Singapore. The paperwork was simple, the people friendly, there was no line and when I didn’t have the right amount of cash on me (because Vietnam is an expensive visa), the Singaporean consular staff said, “No problem, you can bring it with you when you pick up your visa, sir.” It was like the Four Seasons was running their embassy.
Thank you, Singapore.
Emily and I arrived in Singapore this past Saturday morning and spent our weekend wandering various parts of the city-state. We wandered the neighborhoods, took a boat tour on the river and harbor, walked the malls and the Esplanade and absorbed the texture of Singapore. In truth, Singapore has few sites of cultural and historical significance. It’s all about appreciating the Singapore of today and its unusual nature.
In the course of a year of travel, it’s sometimes nice to have a little piece of “normal” where everything works the way you expect it would. Singapore is that – and so it has a touch of home with its strange stability.
There’s one other element of home that has made our visit great. My/our friend Tony Cohen lives here. Tony – who I’ve known since seventh grade – arrived in Singapore during my final two months here and we had a pleasant overlap. Happy and successful in his job, Tony has remained in Singapore all this time.
We saw him briefly in Kathmandu when he was passing through to go on a trek around the Annapurna circuit. Then we saw him during our one-day stopover in Singapore almost two weeks ago. But being here for a week, we’ve had the pleasure of seeing him several times – including going over to his place for a dinner he made for us. That was a real piece of home.
We have had no great adventures in Singapore. There’s no amazing discovery or calamity to report. We’ve been able to work smoothly – and Emily has a few more classes than usual, so the high-functioning technology helps her. We’re enjoying the ease Singapore offers and its interesting society.
The only downside has been our rather lame hotel room. In 2004, when I first came here, hotels were a fantastic deal. A four star hotel cost about $70 a night. Today, the hotels I used to frequent cost $175-$250 a night – beyond our budget. For more money than I used to pay, we get a rather lame hotel room. Not disgusting, not horrible – just shockingly small and blah for the money. Our highest cost hotel room of the entire trip is one of the most disappointing. At least it has a good location.
Although hotel rates – and apartment rental rates and real estate prices in general – have risen in Singapore during the five years since I left, I blame the US Dollar. In 2004, I got $1.72 SGD Sing Dollars for $1 USD. When I left Singapore in 2006, it was $1.67 SGD. Today, it’s $1.23 SGD.
Why don’t I blame the Sing Dollar? Because it’s held at an abstract constant. Singapore is one of a very few countries in the world without a central bank. It decided that central banks are dangerous and lead to currency inflation. Therefore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore that issues the currency is charged with making the necessary trades to maintain a basket of foreign currencies that can keep the Sing Dollar at a constant abstract value.
In other words, the Sing Dollar doesn’t fluctuate – everyone else’s currency does. Another Singapore innovation and curiosity.
As expected, we have little curiosity left. I know Singapore very well and Emily finds it enjoyable, but not a place with much that she needs to see. A week has been ample time to experience and enjoy.
Still, it’s good to be back where the people pine for the good old days when things went better when everyone did what they were told, no one questioned, everyone worked hard, and people had values. Singapore’s motto could easily be: “Who needs the existential crisis?”
Well, not us. Not this week, at least.
Sent from my iPad
