Well, it’s been a tidy two weeks since I’ve been back from vacation, so I suppose it’s time to remove the shroud of mystery surrounding my trip to Singapore and try to recall some of the sights and sounds for the delight of my three readers. Some of you may try to argue with me that I have more than three readers, but I don’t have time to go into that right now, so you can just chime in during the Comments section.
Seiwei and Steph picked me up from the airport. I was pretty embarrassed over how late my flight arrived. After an hour of mechanical problems in Hong Kong, I arrived in Changi International Airport after midnight on a Thursday night. Changi International is an *amazing* airport, a true paragon of excellence when it comes to entertaining the weary traveler. But I did not know this at the time, since my main thought at 12:30 in the morning was, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of here.” More details about the fabulous airport later.
I had a great time staying with Seiwei’s family in Ang Mo Kio. When he initially told me he lived in a “flat” I had an image of something considerably smaller, so I was pleasantly surprised by the accommodations. Probably the most interesting item of interest was the toilet that did not have a toilet seat. This apparently is not so much the way of the Western toilet nor the way of the squat toilet nor the Singaporean way nor anything categorizable like that, but merely the Way of Seiwei’s mom, who found cleaning the toilet seat to be a hassle, and so merely did away with the whole thing. I should have taken a picture, but really, you can just imagine a Western toilet with the toilet seat permanently removed. (C’mon, everybody try this at home.) What took more imagination was what I was supposed to do that first morning to, uh, interact with said toilet of seatlessness. I’m happy to report that I did not fall in, as much as that may have enriched my Singaporean experience.
I found my way to Singapore’s “island resort”, Sentosa, on Friday and walked around by myself, while Seiwei worked in his Opulent Office and Steph recovered from her untimely illness by sleeping for 20 hours. It was somewhat uncharacteristic of me to bumble around the island with no particular goal or destination in mind, and I spent most of the time in silence amidst the scattered groups of rowdy fob-like high schoolers. (They were only “fob-like” and not actual fobs for obvious reasons.) A bunch of attractions were closed for renovations, including the one thing I really really wanted to see, the “Images of Singapore” exhibit. However, I was still entertained by the dragon fountains, the monorail ride, the “other” Merlion, and the “Southernmost Point of Continental Asia.” Sure, it was gimmicky and purposely excluded all these little micro islands out there by use of clever wording, but that is to be expected from an island resort that I only paid S$3 to enter.
There was a lot of good eatin’ while I was in the company of Seiwei and Steph. (July was the “Food Festival” month, though somehow I’m skeptical that every month isn’t a Food Festival month.) We made sure to visit a number of the hawker centers and while a couple of places could probably stand to appear less grimy, my digestive system remained agreeable with our plans for my entire stay. We never managed to dine on “Glutton Street”, which was just as well, as the mere name of it made me a tad queasy. It was fun to try to get our friend Jarrett to try some of the more adventurous dishes. Some of my favorite new dishes included popiah spring rolls, fried stingray, roti prata with mutton, laksa, char kway teow (is that what that greasy dish was? ack, I forgot), and the barley drink. It was sad that I missed out on one hawker stall’s “wanton noodles”, and I even missed out on my free Chili Crab compliments of Singapore’s tourism board.
At just about every hawker center, it was rather disconcerting at first to be addressed by the person in front of each food stall we walked by as if it was assumed that we were going to eat there, a not-so-subtle application of the power of suggestion. Probably the most aggressive encounter was the one in front of the Chocolate Bar where the girls standing outside followed us a couple of steps and insisted that Seiwei and I really wanted to buy them drinks inside. “Oh yeah… so that’s why I was walking down the street… AHH! Warning! Jedi mind tricks in progress!!”
I had to feed my inner nerd too, so I went with Jarrett, Gwenda, and Hi-C to the Asian Civilizations Museum and the Chinatown Heritage Center. Hi-C impressed me with his encyclopedic knowledge of Southeast Asian history, being able to rattle off curator-quality descriptions of many of the exhibits faster than I could even read the content off the signboards. Sigh, history was never my forte. Some people just have the gift. I went with just Gwenda to the Chinatown Heritage Center, which oddly enough none of my Singaporean friends had ever been to. I had fun taking photos there of life-size replicas of scenes and items from the 1950s, so that I could come back and show my friends “Seiwei’s outhouse”, “Seiwei’s sweatshop”, and “Seiwei’s ghetto kitchen” (which is in fact right next to the outhouse).
Anyway, this is near the end of this entry, but I did want to make a plug for the incredibly cool Changi International Airport. They really do everything to encourage travelers to pass through its lush gates: 200+ free Internet stations, free wireless access, free Xbox gaming on 42″ plasma screens, free “movie room” for those long waits, prayer room, sleeping room, gym, showers, massage clinics… (hmm… these laters ones aren’t free…) Wow, all they need now is a waterslide.
Of course, no trip would be complete without its share of bloopers, such as taking Seiwei’s house keys back to California with me, as well as his mass rapid transit card. Well, hopefully they are back in his possession now, courtesy of Waiyan and Larissa, who are working hard to get me an excuse to revisit Singapore next August… =]
More photos at http://niftyken.stanford.edu/gallery/Singapore2004
By the way, does any fellow Xangan have a clever way to make the images clickable (i.e. with a link to a larger image)? I’ve been adding that by hand, and this madness must come to an end. In fact, it’s so crazy, I had to remove them.
reader number one.
reader number two. it sounds like you had a good time-la. did everybody speak like this-la?