Thursday
Before getting on the cab I had already noticed that they were very organized and efficient assigning cabs and sending people off for an international airport. The road away from the airport is beautiful, trees to each side that are very well taken care off, and a median made out of pots abundant with pink and purple flowers, the highway looked perfectly clean, and our cab driver told us that is a priority here.
As we got closer to the city the impression only became more intense, the buildings, streetlights, sidewalks, gardens, everything absolutely clean, and this is in the heart of the financial district of the city.
We headed to the Taiwan Embassy to get our visas for Taiwan.
Our driver was really funny, his English was decent and he really wanted to help us by telling us about the city, things to do and what we were seeing. He repeated himself a lot and made sure he was very clear. “there is a 1-hour difference between here and Thailand, so now it’s 11:45 there, which means here it is 12:45, because there is a one hour difference, between where you come from which is Thailand and where you are now which is here, Singapore” “if you have problems you can call the police, it’s 999, so you take your phone, you dial 9 (motion) 9 (motion) 9 (motion) then you press send or call (motion) and you talk to the police”…he was really nice though, cool dude.
Part of the reason, he told us, the city is really clean and the country works the way it does, is very strict police, there is a 30 dollar fine for jaywalking, and 300 for throwing a cigarette butt in the street. People, more than respecting authority, are afraid of it.
We got to the Taiwanese embassy where we were treated incredibly nice and they within a half hour they gave us our visas, it’s crazy how different things are when you know the right people :-) :-/ :-?
We went for lunch at this mall-ish area where a lot of businesspeople usually go for lunch, there was some good food but mostly delicious desserts and drinks. I had kiwi juice for the first time in my life, it was delicious.
Getting a cab here is different too as far as I can tell, we’ve taken one twice, coming out of shopping malls of touristy areas, and both times there has been a line where everyone is very organized and respectful and there’s a button that calls a cab for you when you push it. It seems to work really well, since there is usually about 20 people in line but it takes about 3-5 mins for you to get in your cab.
We got to our friend’s house, Kristine was outside waiting and playing with her two daughters, who “couldn’t wait to play with their friend Maria”; they didn’t waste any time. The house was a small 2 story house, they had just moved there a few weeks before. After settling down my parents and Kristine went out for some shopping while the girls, their father and I went to a neighborhood park. Alex, the eldest (4) built a castle, and BB the youngest (3) ran around, maria worked hard on the monkey bars and build a support platform for the see-saw. The girl’s father is from south Africa and he has a very dry (british?) way of dealing with and talking to the girls, I was a little shocked but I guess it’s just his way of doing things.
Our hostess made a delicious curry (?) dish and we got the opportunity to talk about a lot of things over dinner.
• Singapore is unofficially a “benevolent dictatorship” as Paul, Kristine’s husband, described it. Officially it’s a democracy, but the same party has been in power for a really long time. So they generally can do what they want.
• At some point the opposition party started gaining some strength and the main party stopped running the schools and taking care of the roads as a way to show their discontent. The key thing here is that people may have been unhappy with some things but not unhappy enough to make those sacrifices to make those changes happen. In general, he said the government does things well, and the people are happy.
• The general feeling about it seems to be that democracy is not that good anyway, they compare Singapore to England and the US and say, “they have a real democracy and they’re not doing that well, so what’s the big deal?”
• The press is all controlled by the state, which at the very least looks like a bad thing.
• There is no minimum wage, which allows for a big gap to exist in society; construction workers earn 300-400 singapore dollars per month (1 singapore $ = 0.8 US $) while ex-pat’s can afford living in places where rent is 25000 a month.
• Even tough some people live with really low wages, it’s hard to find poverty; Chinatown is supposed to be one of the poorest communities but, again, it looked very clean and decent. Part of the reason for this is that in their culture it is very important to take care of the elderly and of your neighbor.
• As for the construction workers, they “enjoy” some exceptions, I was told they tend to live in big buildings in which you will find 20 people per bathroom, and they travel in the back of pickup trucks right next to bricks or other building materials. Apparently the government just looks the other way and decides not to implement laws to prevent this because it would hurt the construction industry too much.
• We compared the country to a company in which a CEO has a lot of freedom to do things his way, but really cares and watches over how things are and where ultimately things are run well and people are happy.
• It seems to be, however a “plastic” society, in which a lot of things were created and are designed in the optimal way, and in which there is not a lot of culture, history or national identity. People spend most of their time working or shopping.
• THERE ARE A LOT OF SHOPPING MALLS
• We learned about the merlion, which was an icon designed to be a mascot of the country, it seemed to be an attempt by the government to create that national identity.
Friday
We woke up to the delicious smell of banana pancakes, ate breakfast with everyone and watched our hosts leave to take care of their respective daily responsibilities. After a little bit of planning we decided to go to Sentosa island. We took the subway and got there quickly. Once again, we were impressed by how clean and efficient everything was. Then we were supposed to go to Vivo city mall and get on the cable cars, or the monorail to go to the island.
Sigh…People in Singapore are VERY bad at giving directions, we looked for the cable cars for about a half hour and everyone kept sending us in different directions, then we found out the cable cars were really expensive so we went back got lost a few more times and found the monorail.
We got to Sentosa, it is an island designed to have a lot of attractions for tourist kind of like a theme park but you pay for the rides and not for the park ticket, although universal studios Singapore is there. Lunch was at chili’s because our stomachs needed a break from spicy asian food, but it was really expensive, the standard $12-15 fajita was 32 here (about 25 american dollars) food in general was very expensive in Singapore.
We went up the Merlion statue for a really cool view of the city and a show about the Merlion and the legend of Singapore. Then, again because of bad direction giving, my mom had to take a 30 min excursion to “the nearest” bathroom (there were 2 others right next to us, we later found out). And we headed back home.
We took a taxi that took us through Chinatown, and arrived at our hostess house, where BB and Alex were anxious to see Maria. They played and watched Gnomeo and Juliet, and I decided to go to this high tech center...Sim Lim square I think.
I was a little disappointed, I was expecting to see either really cool new things that I haven’t seen anywhere else, or pretty normal things at really low prices. It was neither, there was nothing you couldn’t find on ebay for similar prices the only semi-interesting thing was smart TVs with internet and “apps” were starting to get pretty popular.
That night we ate dinner at a little pizza place near our hostess house, and went to bed early.
Saturday
Flight to Taiwan
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