Singapore Sling
Trip Start
Feb 05, 2008
1
42
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Singapore,
Singapore
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Singapore. Culture shock. Clean and orderly. You can set your watch by the metro. How strange it was to get off at the station to find nobody there trying to sell me a taxi ride or a hotel room or 'boom-boom'. Instead, within seconds of pulling out my guide book so I could check the map, a lady asked me if I needed help. That would happen three more times in the next six hours.
Turns out Vanessa was in town on a visa run. How convenient. It's always great to have a travel buddy. We got a room at the Prince of Wales Backpacker Hostel in Little India, shared bath, no hot water, $33 a night! Heinekens in the attached pub, about $7.50
Singapore
. Take me back to Thailand please. Well at least breakfast was included, although we had to cook our own eggs. Otherwise the food elsewhere about town was generally reasonable in price and very, very good. Best Indian food anywhere. Vanessa figures it's better than what you get in India. Set meals were usually in the five dollar range. These places would sell a 640 bottle of Heiny for $S 7.00. Coffee at Starfucks was another matter at nearly $2.50 for a tall. There's as many as there are in Vancouver, I think and often no other choice. It was my first one since leaving Canada. The first day we spent walking around and site seeing. The streets were strangely deserted. I thought a newly mutated form of the Andromeda strain, affecting everyone who wasn't either in a motor vehicle or a tourist must have hit town. At one point I stopped to ask a parking attendant if it was a bank holiday or something. He looked at me funny and when I explained my question he said the people were in the buildings. By the time we got to the downtown core we spotted a few well dressed pedestrians.
We went to Chinatown. Oddly, Edmonton's is better, if you can imagine. I mean two thirds of Singapore's population is Chinese. Also checked out Singapore's version of the Miracle Mile, Orchard Street
Raffles Long Bar
. I've never seen so many malls. Apparently these people love to shop. Prices are high, except for perhaps on electronic goods. Little India is on. At one stop we met a local Indian fellow who was spending his thirtieth birthday by himself drinking a beer and cursing his country and the Chinese gangster who runs the place. He is of the impression that in western countries you really don't have to work if you don't want to and you get paid in the event that you choose not to work, EI I think it's called. I'm with him on the draconian nature of his country's drug laws anyway. Singaporeans aren't particularly friendly. There's plenty of english spoken. The city has a kind of plasticness feel to it, fake-like. There's not a lot of street life, despite the accommodating climate. There are no street vendors. There appears to be a large expat community. At first I thought I might like to move here but by the end of my three days I am not so sure.
We went for the requisite Singapore Sling at the supposed home of the famous cocktail, Raffles Hotel. You can't get into the lobby unless you are wearing shoes and no jeans either please. They'll let you into the courtyard though. It was the best Singapore Sling I've ever had. It ought to have been at $S 26!!! Okay, so it was only about 20.80 CAD.
We also went out the Plastic Island. Its real name escapes me now and I mailed my guidebook home from here too, so I can't look it up. The one I've come up with is more fitting anyway. This place looks like a Disney Land set up, complete with fake beaches, a resort hotel and a luge run
Singapore
. We paid about 10 bucks for a ride up the Tiger Tower, or is it the Carlsberg Tower, for great views of the city, the harbour, the ocean and the oil refineries that populate other nearby islands. Did Tiger outbid Carlsberg, it's their town after all, or did Carlsberg buy Tiger? I managed to book a $578 ticket, all in, to Tokyo, leaving on the night of the 19th. I wasn't happy spending somewhere around $75 a day in Singapore and wanted to see if I could up it to around a hundred a day. I figured Tokyo was the best place to make that happen. Besides, I was in the neighbourhood and I've always wanted to see the place.
