Sweet Praise for Singapore

Singapore was the one place that Shadie and I have both traveled to before on our itinerary. We decided to go back because we'd both enjoyed it during very short layovers in the past and because it’s such a transport hub in this part of the world. Based on flight logistics we ended up staying this time for almost a whole week. And despite having a bit of cold while I was there, I absolutely loved our time and have an inkling it may be my favorite city on the trip.

In some ways I'm a little sheepish about that declaration. Given how westernized and wealthy a place it is, the love for Singapore feels a little....basic bitch. But I just can't help it. If I were to grade this city state on all available scores as a city planner, they'd be top of the class across the board. One of the first things I did in Singapore was visit the City Gallery, a free interactive museum attached to the main offices of the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority. The Gallery showcases many aspects of urban planning for the city (and country) and Singapore’s development story, through over 50 interactive and immersive exhibits that detail planning challenges and the innovative solutions that tackle them. First off, I was impressed they even have a urban planning oriented museum, let alone one so well curated and free. Second, I was impressed by the stats, policies and approaches they shared. Singapore performs well across many metrics: transportation efficiency, open space access, clean air, healthcare, education, safety, and even (despite the exorbitantly high prices), housing. Urban planning is a whole different playing field than the US due to their approach to land use and property rights, which I would describe as approaching communist. I hope to write a whole separate post on this topic later.

For now, a few highlights from our experience there. We arrived quite late from a long flight from Kuala Lumpur, and emerging from immigration felt like we may have entered some kind of dreamland as we stumbled across Jewel Changi Airport. Jewel Changi is a nature-themed entertainment and retail complex attached to one of the passenger terminals. Its centrepiece is the world's tallest indoor waterfall, the Rain Vortex, that is surrounded by a terraced forest of thousands of live trees and plants, soothing music, and mood lighting. After gaping at the waterfall for a few minutes, we took a speedy train into town, which still took an hour given the airport is located on a far point from the main city, to arrive at our hotel after midnight. Our hotel (by far the most expensive on our trip thus far), was in a prime location in the heart of trendy Chinatown, where historic shophouses have been converted to Michelin star restaurants, next to the largest Buddhist and Hindu temples in the city. It was also fairly comfy (even if the shower was quite literally over the toilet [still way better than sleeping in a pod]) but its one downside was terrible soundproofing. We heard all the revelers enjoying the posh bars and high end restaurants until late into the night, the before-dawn trash pickup truck, and dawn call-to-prayer every morning.

After a spate of locations without free walking tours, we were excited to find several available here, and signed up for two. The first was of Kampong Glam. Kampong refers to distinct neighborhoods, usually public housing. We learned a lot of about how the government set up and run these housing complexes, as we walked through Glam on the tour. We also passed by famous Lavender Street, so named not for growing lavender but as joking misnomer moniker used to describe the street over the canal where all human waste was dumped for many years, before the government launched an enormous waterway cleanup campaign in the 1970s1. We visited two mosques. The first was the Hajjah Fatimah Mosque, which (unusually) was built by a successful businesswoman and included architectural features meant to honor the many cultures of Singapore. The second, the Sultan Mosque, is one of the largest in town, as it is a major stop-off for folks on pilgrimage to Mecca. We went inside this one, and enjoyed the lush carpeted and beautifully decorated interior, while our guide, Angel (a bubbly lady in her late forties) spent a little time explaining how Islam is practiced in Singapore (hint, less conservatively than many other Muslim countries).

So, you might imagine, we were quite sleepy our first day in town, as we headed off to the Singapore Google campus to meet up with some of Shadie's colleagues there. We had a lovely tour of the campus and very elaborate and yummy Google lunch and ended up napping before heading out to savor Singapore's famous hawker centers. The hawker centers have been Singapore's way of modernizing and organizing street hawker food stalls. Basically, we are talking semi-indoor food courts, but with some of the best and cheapest food you've ever had. It helps that the cuisines most on offer are my very favorite in the world: Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Middle Eastern. Not to mention Malay, as Singapore is part of the Malay Archipelago. It blew our minds that you could get a giant plate of mouth-watering chinese in a hawker center, and a block away find a Michelin dinner and pay more than $300 (we did not do this, but we did glance in their door). While we visited several hawker centers, our favorite was Telok Ayer, which is housed in a beautifully renovated Victorian era structure of peaked domes and green rod iron lattice work.

Footnotes:

1) the great clean up was mentioned several times on our tours and in museums. The clean-up was launched in 1977 and took almost 10 years to accomplish. Besides the physical cleaning of the heavily polluted rivers, the massive exercise also involved the removal of various sources of pollution, the provision of proper sewage infrastructure and new facilities for resettled residents and businesses, and the implementation of anti-pollution measures to minimize future pollution. Development had boomed over the last 50 years without modern city facilities. Without proper sewage facilities, much of the manufacturing and commercial setup dumped waste into the rivers as well as cluttered them with commercial boats. And squatters also discharged their bodily waste into the river, contributing to the stench. The rivers near Kallang Basin were similarly polluted, with shipyards, duck farms and pig farms adding to the problem. The effort was started by Prime Minister Lee Kuan and sounds like it might have been as unequitable as it was efficient, with squatters, hawkers and industries, unceremoniously removed from the banks. Today, the water, land and air of Singapore is impeccably clean. Littering comes with a hefty fine and trash removal is taken very seriously (as we painfully learned through the prompt and very loud trash pick-up that woke us up every single morning). There's a fuller summary of the Clean-up campaign here: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2019-05-21_104327.html

As our next free walking tour was in Little India, we had to get Indian for breakfast. I was happy as a clam to find idli and sambar, a common breakfast dish I was served up daily while studying aboard in India but rarely am able to find in the US. Our Chinese guide, spent time showing us the Indian market (colorful and sparkly) and explained that Indians, historically and today, are often in construction and responsible for much of the built infrastructure of Singapore. We visited a major Hindu temple dedicated to the Goddess Parvati, wife of the destroyer and witnessed pujah (Indian priests blessing patrons with fire and ash to bring their prayers to the god/dess represented at that spot. Patrons also smash coconuts here--a practice that is supposed to demonstrate humbleness and opening of the mind.

We enjoyed several hikes in Singapore as well. One in the lovely Botanic Gardens, which are beautifully curated and signed and mostly free. The orchid garden is gorgeous. We saw hundreds of types of orchids (some natural and some hybrids) before getting caught in the afternoon monsoon downpour and hiding out under a small shelter for half an hour. A second hike, in Southern Ridges park, took us through beautiful seconday forest, raised high above the ground on canopy trail that extended for several miles. Finally, we walked up Fort Canning Hill, a park at the very heart of the old city that true to its name was once a British fort and featured many small themed gardens in addition impressive Victorian era buildings. Afterward, Shadie surprised me with a meal he knew I'd love: dumplings and bottomless artisan tea at Dumpling Darlings!

Perhaps the most memorable site of all was the glamorous Gardens by the Bay, a nature oriented theme park. Some of the most classic pictures of Singapore are taken here, and not without reason. We bypassed the incredibly expensive ticket into a dome containing a recreated mountain forest habitat with Avatar special exhibit and headed straight for the SuperTrees. The SuperTrees are works of art, but are also meant to replicate many of the systems of rainforest trees like water purification and oxygen and harvest solar energy. Each "tree" is around 50 meters tall with a metal frame structure and vertical garden, of bromeliads, ferns, orchids and tropical climbers. There are apparently 162,900 plants of over 200 species across the full grove. By pure luck, we happened to walk into the grove just before the nightly music and light show. We asked a lovely Australian mother-daughter duo what was going on and they invited us to sit by them for the show. The daughter had lived in Singapore previously, and we greatly enjoyed chatting with them before the music kicked off. In Disney-esque grandeur (and using many Disney movie songs), the trees played well-known soundtracks that elicited applause with timed lights that varied from tree to tree across the grove. It was quite a spectacular (and free!) show. It actually wasn't the only free light show we saw in Singapore though, as we also enjoyed a nightly fountain show in front the other iconic Singapore image, the Marina Bay Sands hotel and convention center.

By happenstance, we were visiting when Singapore opened a new section of subway line, right through Chinatown that extended to Gardens by the Bay. The government had a soft opening party, where riding the the line was free and there were a ton cute games hosted in the station. There were also signs about critical aspects of how the line was built; apparently they used a technique that involved freezing the ground around the tunnel to stabilize it before construction! There were a ton people, especially parents with kids, there and it felt like a celebratory party for sure! Nothing makes me happier than people joyous over transit. :p

We were a little reluctant to leave behind the incredibly planned city at the end of the week, with much we still hadn't done. But we had a date with Indonesia to keep, and so we were whisked back to the airport on the first morning train.

We were bemused by the incredible indoor waterfall and forest at the airport. The historic two-story shops that make up trendy chinatown. And, who doesn't love a shower over their toilet??

Shadie's colleagues gave us a great tour of Google Singapore.

The grand architecture of Telok Ayer hawker center.

Angel explaining about the "leaning tower of Singapore" at Hjjah Fatimah Mosque.

Parvati is the goddess of fertility, love and devotion. She's the mother of more famous (in the west) Ganesah, elephant god.

Singapore's parks are beautiful and immaculate. The Botanic Gardens develops unique orchid hybrids when famous dignitaries come to visit. These purple orchids are named after Joe and Jill Biden.

The SuperTrees were more than 150 feet tall, and the vertical gardens growing up them are hard to even capture properly on camera. If were less cheapskate than us, you could pay to walk on a raised path that took up higher into the grove's "canopy".

Signs explaining how the new TEL line was constructed were wonderfully nerdy.

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