Day 76 – 80 : Singapore – The only shopping mall to have a seat on the UN council
After another brief dabble with madness and the space/time continuum (Darwin is a half an hour before Cairns – go figure), we land at Singapore Changi International airport, a veritable nexus for flights that traverse the east-west divide.
Changi is a monster, with breathing parts and endless tunnels around every corridor populated with denizens scurrying around, the life-force of this indomitable machine. We eventually escape into its bowels and locate the metro system, praying we’re not too far from Mosque Street and where our hostel is located.
We emerge from the catacombs of sub-Sinagpore and into Chinatown, the hustle and bustle of a million restaurants and other forms of commerce a maelstrom around us. Sheila’s hastily scribbled directions prove fruitless as we simply can’t discern any of the street names. Not because we can’t speak Chinese, it’s literally because we can’t find any. After a brief walkabout, I gain my bearings and we stroll the few metres around the corner and locate Mosque Street.
I should note that, at this point in our trans-global adventure, we’ve probably stayed in a few dozen hostels of varying conditions ranging from luxurious to downright shambolic. Most are forgettable; austere cubicles to rest your head and hide your wares until the following morning. At which point you flee from the stifled starkness of your surroundings and soak up as much of the local curiosities as possible.
We’ve stayed in rooms with no paint. Rooms with no bathrooms and rooms with TVs that only show Malcolm in the Middle. In French. Putting this gamut of dodgy accommodation under scrutiny, however, I have to say that our Singaporean accommodation takes the fucking biscuit.
Tucked discretely into the wall of a long line of open-aired local restaurants, the (at least now, I may have involuntarily regressed it) nameless hostel is discovered by pressing some high-tech liquid-esque buttons on a control panel. It’s all very Bladerunner-ish, and I’m half expecting some sort of mechanised minion to open the door when it finally does show movement. Instead we get a slightly spaced hostel worker who seems to have trouble registering the fact that we have a reservation and, the bags on our backs a dead giveaway, would like to stay the night.
He takes us on a winding tour which includes going inside the adjoining karaoke bar. It’s a surreal environment, and one I’m unlikely to forget. Places that could be the location of my very own death-scene tend to have that affect. Smokey (despite numerous signs banning the practice) and replete with half-pissed Asians of every variation I can think of yelping and, in the case of two crooners, serenading each other across a bar to rumpus applause, the place is like something out of another world. Like the cantina scene from Star War: exotic, likely dangerous for an outsider, and undoubtedly a haven for more than one illegal alien.
The lackey finds the key and shows us to our room. When I see it, I almost wish we were down in the bar getting blasted by bad Asian pop classics or attacked with stick-knives. The windowless cell literally consists of just a bed and a wardrobe. As it measures merely six foot by about nine, there is literally no space around the bed itself, so in many ways we’re not renting a room for four nights. We’re renting a bed. That’s it. There is an air-con appliance, thankfully, which, some time later, I realise is a given if you want to live in Sizzlepore.
Being a mere 1.5 degrees (or about 100 kilometres) north of the equator, Singapore is quite literally in the firing line of the sun’s apathetic and perpetual wrath. And, considering we’re heading into the summer period, it can only mean one thing: we’re going to fry. Luckily, it appears Singaporeans of yore also twigged that, somehow – blame the cheap beer if you must – they’ve managed to build their city in one of the hottest locations on the planet. It’s therefore of little surprise to learn that, in reality, Singaporeans spend as little as time above ground as possible, and all abodes, no matter how dingy, come with an obligatory air-con device. It’s as if it has become one of their mandatory essentials. While Irish people viewing a potential new home might ask about schools, traffic and local crime rates, I’m willing to bet that Singaporeans ask but two questions: 1) How far am I from the nearest meat stand? and 2) Where is the air-con, and, if I turn it up, can I blast myself into the Antarctica?
This first question relates to the prevalence – to our eyes at least – of the city’s never ending fixation with meat and assorted meat products. On the corner of Mosque Street there is a successful shop (now a chain I believe) which only sells meat. We’re talking about meat by the truckload. Whenever we pass the establishment there is always someone endlessly cooking some sort of meat medallion over a stove by the window.
Everything in the above photo is made out of meat. Even the women. Near the shop-front and contained behind clear glass so as to cruelly tempt passing Singaporeans, there are literally kilo upon kilo of small, strangely shaped meat discs stacked high for the locals to glimpse and salivate over. The strangest thing is that, for the entire time we are there, I never see one person buy any of this meat. Not once. But they never stop cooking mound upon mound of it! Where does it go? Is this meat stockpile the answer to why Singapore has so many wild cats roaming the streets? I’ll never know it seems.
Maybe the natives do leave their gelid lairs at times to feast upon this sickly clarion. If they did, it would probably be only one of the very few times they actually endure a non-artificially controlled environment. Singaporeans live in air-conditioned homes. They travel to work in their climate-controlled cars or trains, and they work in similarly pleasant and almost frosty offices. And when free-time comes, they shop in malls that, in direct contrast to the blistering streets that house them, are cooled to such a degree they’re almost chilly.
Which leads us to the obvious: the shopping. Considering Singapore is a tiny island on the foot of Asia, with five million commercialism obsessed people milling about a place the size of County Dublin, it’s of little shock to hear that the city comprises of nearly nothing but shopping malls. I’m pretty sure that one could walk the length and breadth of Singapore simply by utilising the vast and labyrinthine network of tunnels, walkways and verandas that connect its malls like a giant mercantile web. You could likely even do it totally underground. We visit many of these multi-storey temples of trade, one in particular catching my eye as its entrance literally looks like the Tower of Orthanc – its escalator situated at the corner like a long tongue that leads up into its modern and chic belly where endless stores are stacked into the heavens.
Singapore is an epicentre for commerce, the range and abundance of products on offer nearly as diverse and eclectic as its population. Probably due to its strategic location as an aviation gateway from the west into the region, the city has flourished and become a microcosm of Asia; a melting pot where people from every corner of the Asian world have congregated and thrived. It’s as if some sort of all-powerful knell has allured them to this very spot, the promise of riches and freedom ingrained somewhere in the very fabric of the tiny island itself, forever within reach to any who answers its call.
It’s a multi-cultural city beyond any level I’ve seen before. Having dallied with membership of Malaysia for a mere two years, the island-state were kicked out (someone probably found its prodigious meat mountain) in 1965, since then promoting an open attitude to trade and work, managing to entice like-minded citizens from its surrounding countries to come, and work, and shop, and sweat.
Despite its historical connections with Malaysia, only about one fifth of the population are actually of Malay descent, with the majority of the inhabitants made up of a sizeable Chinese contingent. About 10% have an Indian background with the rest an assorted motley of Arabs, Eurasians and a smattering of other exotic nationalities that all merge together so seamlessly that it’s hard to think of them as, collectively, anything but Singaporean.
It’s a progressive town, with a travel network that puts Ireland to shame. (No shock there, the transport infrastructure of every single city we’re visited so far has surpassed the shambles of trying to get from A to B back home.) It’s not just the frequent and clean trains, it’s the attitude toward progress and investment that is refreshing. On a trip out to Little India I read an advertisement on the metro in relation to Singapore’s ongoing fibre optic cable upgrade. Want to know when the fibre is passing your business/apartment? Ring this number and we’ll tell you when it’s swinging by so we can hook you up with ultra high-speed internet. Not if it will be coming. When. And, trust us, it’s coming soon.
In contrast, look at Ireland’s antiquated system of monopolistic skulduggery perpetuated by the main vendor in the country, blocking IPs and suffering coverage blackouts willy-nilly. That’s even if you can get internet in your area. Live outside of Dublin and it’s a complete crap shoot.
It’s easy to say that, considering Singapore’s diminutive size, it’s easy to get a small country right. This couldn’t be further from the truth. This is an island-state that has fought tooth and nail to be a hub for the larger and ultra-competitive area, enticing investors into the market and providing world-class services for its increasingly affluent inhabitants. Ireland, on the other hand, stutters from one bad business decision to the next, tarnishing its international reputation and crippling its citizens with bad banks and worse morals from the people in charge.
But back to Singapore. If I’m being honest, I knew very little about the island nation before I went there. For example, I wasn’t even sure if it was even a real country. I know, I know. How embarrassing. More accurately, I wasn’t sure if it was merely a city, and if not, if this country was still a member of Malaysia or where in the smattering of islands in that neck of the woods above Australia it actually was. I’m educated now and I feel all the better for it.
Singapore is not for me, however. Apart from the ubiquitous shopping, public services that work and a cultural crucible guaranteeing that things will always be at least interesting, there are, however, a few negatives to the place. Compared to the rest of Asia, it’s not cheap. It’s still cheaper than Dublin, of course. But where isn’t? Living in Ireland is like living in Harrods, a Harrods that’s on fire with you stuck inside, trapped and unable to leave. Still, there are other more attractive places in Asia to live in and, let’s face it, despite the large amount of Westerns walking/shuffling about the place in the heat, it’s not a city that caters or panders to Western tastes.
In other words, Singapore is not somewhere that is completely “foreigner-friendly” per se. Not in the “we’ll kill you if you call a teddy bear a religious name” kind of way (though I’ll get to that later) but more how the commercialism has ballooned into a beast; an esurient monster which is not too amiable toward those of us not from the area. The biggest issue I can see is how Singapore has embraced Laissez-faire economics, a system with apparently no morals, no boundaries, and almost no regulation against rampant price-gouging, and run with it. I’m all for capitalism and chancing your arm to see what you can get for your product or service, but the practice has blossomed in Singapore beyond the usual and acceptable “fleece the foreigner” shenanigans. Call it entrepreneurialism if you will, but there is definitely a case in Singapore of one price for the locals, and one super-inflated price for the tourists. Of course, this sneaky inflationary trait happens all around the world. It’s just exceptionally devious in Singapore.
Wishing to pick up a new lens for her camera, Sheila and I walk through endless sterile shopping complexes in search of a particular optical device. When we do finally find a store that has it in stock – a respectable FujiFilm stockist no less – we’re confronted by a pushy individual who rolls out the red-with-the-blood-of-past-chumped-foreigners carpet. He opens with a price of S$285 which is roughly €135. Scandalous, considering we’re seen it online for US$60 (plus shipping).
We show no signs of interest and I tell him what I can get the exact same lens for back home. “Sixty dollars? Not possible,” he says incredulously. We still don’t seem like we believe his bullshit price. So he halves it. “For you? S$180. I can do no more.” I literally chuckle, in part because he’s just wiped roughly S$100 off the opening price in a matter of seconds, but also because I know what’s going on here and I want him to realise that I’m not going to fall for the banana in the tailpipe routine.
“No way,” I tell him with a shake of my head. Sheila is laughing along and uttering words like “rip-off” and “sixty?” to which his eyes nearly squirt out of his thieving head. He offers another price I can’t remember but I’m pretty sure it consists of another sizeable drop. We’re still not budging. Sheila tells him we’re going to go away and think about it, virtual sales death to the ears of any sales-man. He spins the calculator on the desk to face us. “How much you give me?”
Sheila looks at me with an expression somewhere between smugness and spitefulness. I say “one hundred”, trying to gauge the guy’s reaction from behind the counter. Before I can work out if he’s stopped breathing or not, Sheila asks, as coolly as you like, “Sixty?”
We settle on eighty and submit our counter-offer. He balks, probably curses our names in some ancient tongue and retorts with “eighty-five”, obviously feeling like he needs to have the final say or be eternally shamed when turning up at the weekly “We scam tourists for fun” poker game.
Later on, Sheila does some research on the web and finds out that we actually got a good deal. I’m sure he still made his mark-up – just not to the extent some other less informed people online were subjected to. We find testimonies from a range of enraged people claiming to have been charged anything up to S$500 for the same piece of equipment. In a way I think “more fool them”, but at the same time, it’s this practice of trying to gouge as much money out of someone that I just don’t agree with. I guess it’s the discrimination factor. We’re being discriminated against because we’re not local. At least back home everyone gets ripped off equally.
This treatment of tourists can be seen further in Singapore’s facetious self-christened title of “City of Fines.” You can get a fine for jaywalking, for spitting, for feeding wild animals, even for scratching your arse in the presence of the President. I don’t even want to mention what happens if you’re caught with chewing gum on your person. Some of the amounts of these fines will take your breath away, and if you’re stupid enough to try and import narcotics into this idyllic land of meat and frigid shopping complexes, I mean that quite literally. The death penalty is enforced in these parts, a terminal solution for the stupid and the naive. William Gibson, whom I mentioned previously on this blog, once wrote a famous article about Singapore entitled “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” It’s an accurate portrayal of the city, and one that got the magazine it was published in, Wired, banned forever in the micro-state.
The fact is, Singapore is a lot more liberal and open-minded than the illusion of strict, hardcore police-state it sometimes likes to purport. It’s a flavour of hypocrisy in a way as, though visitors to the island must be on their best behaviour, the locals can do whatever they please it seems. We see jaywalking, we see spitting, we don’t see anyone insult the President (and chewing gum is actually available to buy, albeit in a pharmacy) but, in general, there’s one rule for them and another for you. Which is OK in a way as I believe visitors to any land should respect the local culture and obey all rules and regulations – even if they appear a little backward. It’s just a little difficult to understand what is a law and what is one of those “we passed it because we had to” type enforcements. Of course, best bet is to just treat everything as risky, but it’s a gray area that is a little confusing at times and one that will have you sweating when you innocently step off a path, technically on to a road, and a cop is looking straight at you.
Case in point. At one point as we saunter around the city, around Clarke’s Quay in fact, a man walks towards us, crossing one of the many bridges over the brown and slow river. I only catch a snippet of the conversation being held between him and an unseen person at other end of his phone, but I easily pick up the sentence: “Yes, the escort must be no older than 35.” Singapore is many things: modern, vibrant, opulent yet with equal amounts of poverty alongside the sky-scrapers and frozen malls. It’s also apparently leading a double life.
Apart from our incessant ducking in and out of shopping malls mostly to stay cool, we decide one day to take a walk over what is probably the one part of the island that lacks any buildings, a micro-rainforest right in the centre of downtown. Our vantage point is assisted by a 9km walkway constructed over the foliage, numerous sections with their own quirks, names and qualities connecting one another to form a long and pleasurable forest walk – without actually setting foot on the forest floor. It’s hot and sticky, and we encounter numerous peculiarities during the two hour long preamble. Such as a troop of Chinese half-naked joggers who race along the tree-tops, sweating and swearing profusely in equal measure. What we don’t see are any monkeys, despite the numerous signs informing us of a S$1000 fine if we dare partake in the practice of feeding them.
Singapore is a strange collision of themes, sights and sounds. It’s an experience I would recommend to anyone – as long as they knew that there isn’t a great deal to see (or do) on the island other than shop, sweat and fret about committing some arcane crime that might lose you your hands, though more likely the contents of your wallet.
It was memorable, sometimes not for the right reasons but, as an experience, it was a intriguing part of our trip.
Note: Apologies for the lack of entries in this series of late. I’m back home after the trip, and though all of my travel logs were written before I left Asia (well, all but the final one), I’ve been so busy with settling back in and looking for work that I’ve neglected my blog. I have roughly six posts to finish the series out. Expect them all to go live this week.
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