I hadn't been to Singapore for about 17 years, and although I have probably been there three times before, they were all fairly brief stays. Maybe 2 to 3 nights each?
It has changed a lot since the 1980's when I first went there.
This time, we stayed down in the Chinatown area, which, stupidly, I don't think I had ever wandered into before. To be perfectly honest, in previous trips, I find it hard remembering going anywhere much further afield than Orchard Road and the area around Raffles. (I did actually spend one night at the famous hotel, alone, in the 1980's, no doubt before the last couple of renovations. The place is yet again under refurbishment, to re-open this year.) Anyhow, given the extent of the MRT system now, staying in any of the districts is convenient, but the streets of Chinatown area are pretty attractive in that old Asian terrace house sort of way:
That large apartment building you can see - here's a better view from our hotel window (the Amara Hotel, which I highly recommend.)
I went for a walk towards that building
and found out, completely fortuitously, that you can go to the end block on the left and get a ticket from a tiny, hidden office to go to the rooftop garden decks for all of $5 (I think). So the next day, I did exactly that, and took some panorama shots which will look a bit crappy here, but good if not compressed to fit inside Blogger. (You can click to make them bigger, though.)
The rooftop gardens are nicely kept and quiet - there is no pool (only a imitation one!)
and the area is really for the residents, as this not exactly promoted as a tourist attraction. The views are very spectacular, though, and I was very happy with the serendipitous discovery that I could get up there:
The thing I had forgotten about Singapore is that, although it's small and now super easy to get around, the reason I had been there a few times before and never got around to doing the tourist hits like the zoo and Sentosa Island is because the ridiculous humidity means you just want to be indoors between 10 am and 6pm, and getting inside good airconditioning makes it difficult to go outside again.
Fortunately, the biggest tourist attraction now - the Gardens by the Bay, behind the Marina Bay Sands Hotel - has air-conditioned conservatories which are spectacular and, of course, very popular:
I didn't realise that Singapore did Christmas with an intensity which I suspect is only surpassed by European countries. In the gardens outside the conservatories:
If you're wondering what the stuff in the air is, it's fake snow (sort of soap foam, I think) that gets blown out at the end of the Christmas music and light show. People find it exciting, making fake snow in 25 degrees and high humidity - who am I to question the logic of it!
And you know what - that was the only big tourist attraction we got to! Still haven't been to the zoo or Sentosa. But we did see more spectacular architecture:
I love the way so many buildings incorporate plants - including this hotel, near ours in Chinatown, nearly completely vine covered.
And, of course, there is the spectacular Marina Bay Sands Hotel with fancy shopping centre below it:
I was interested to read about the engineering of the building - the infinity pools on the top deck presented a special challenge:
Keeping an edge straight and level is hard enough, but let’s make it harder by putting the pools on top of three tall towers. We know a pool this size is going to be heavy. Yes, we know the towers are going to sink over time as their foundation cause the clayey earth and landfill to shift. Each will subside at a different rate, and each tower may rotate. You can’t expect the ground under each tower to be of even density and hardness. Yes, the wind will cause the maximum deflection at the top of the towers, also differently for each tower. But you’re engineers. You’ll figure something out. That infinity pool must work.
The weight of the pool was going to be staggering. When full, the three pools held 380,000 gallons (1.44 million liters) of water. Add to that the 422,000 pounds (191,000 kgs) of stainless steel that formed the bulk of the pool structure, and then the 250.000 ceramic tiles cemented on…
Support of the stationary weight was one thing, and keeping the whole deal flat was another. Arup, the firm hired to complete structural analysis of the towers, could handle stationary weight. Since they were roof top pools, a specialist was brought in: Natare Corp., a pool manufacturer on the other side of the world in Indiana. Natare devised a system of hydraulic jacks, 500 of them, that would level the pool no matter the movement of the towers. Though the lateral movement of the towers could be almost 20 in, the jacks were able to keep the wall to within 4 mm over the entire 478 ft length (146 m).
That ride in the shopping centre looked a bit too "Las Vegas" to me, but its fun to watch the swirling water from above anyway. The public areas outside of the hotel and shopping centre are very attractive, though:
The Cathedral of the Good Shepherd is one of the few old buildings I photographed - mainly because I really don't think it looks particularly Catholic in architectural design. (Looks more like what I imagine would be American Episcopal.) But no, I see from its website that it's always been Catholic. It was full to overflowing on Christmas Day, and I stood outside in the still withering humidity at 6pm listening to a very cloying American style sermon, as it happens. I don't know whether the Singaporean Church stands in terms of the current slow moving crisis between modernisers and conservatives - it would be interesting to know. You would think the Chinese in it would not be eager to normalise gay relationships - but then again, I know of a gay chinese couple (from Singapore originally) in Australia who have been making babies via surrogacy - so who knows.
Oh, here's another old-ish building - the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Chinatown [wait a minute - no it's not - I didn't read carefully about it, obviously - it was only started to be built in 2005! I thought I had read it was an old, refurbished temple, but apparently not.] Anyway, it which has some massive works going on beside it at the moment, detracting a bit from the aesthetics.
We stopped during a rather popular looking service was going on:
Singapore seems keen to promote itself as clean and green - certainly, I was on the look out for the otters that are now famous, but I never spotted them. I did see movement in the bushes beside the water at Gardens by the Bay, and thought it might be one, but it turned out to be a monitor lizard instead:
The cutest wild animal I got to see was a squirrel:
I had never known they were on Singapore, although I had read about an Asian squirrel colony that had set itself up in Perth some years.
There is much more to be said about Singapore and how much I like it, despite the heat. Here's a list of various thoughts:
* on the downside, apart from window shopping, it really is hard to find anything free to do that is in airconditioned comfort. I think every single art gallery and museum has an entry fee: the Singaporean government seem to have no concept of completely funding such facilities, and despite its riches, moneyed Singaporean families don't seem to have spent their money this way either. Anyway, it still means there is much for me to see.
* I'm not entirely sold on it being that great a place to eat - I mean, I do tend to worry about the degree of refrigeration used in the cheaper hawker centre outlets, which are also routinely too hot most of the day to be comfortable; and just before I went on this holiday, a Singaporean couple (not the gay guys mentioned above) recommended I eat in Tangs Department store if I wanted cheap, good food that would be safe to eat. (I did, and it was good.) Hotel food tends to be great, of course, and you can do OK in food court outlets in terms of price too. But overall, I find Japan is the best country to swoon over food, and never worry about its safety.
* It seems to be that, in broad terms, Chinese Singaporeans are always cheery and good to deal with; Indian Singaporeans can be OK, but are sometimes grumpy, and Malayas working there are often not particularly cheery at all. Does this just reflect their general economic standing in the country?
* There are an amazing amount of Australian produce in Singaporean supermarkets now. The country imports 90% of its food - although I was reading the government is trying to increase self sufficiency in some things. I think it takes half of its water from Johor as well, although I saw something about a desalination plant on a Youtube video as well.
* Tiger Beer is still a good, standard beer. Craft beer seems not to have had the same impact there yet as in other countries.
* The MRT is great, although it could do with more ticketing machines in most stations.
* Singapore has heated up much more rapidly than the rest of the world in recent decades, but that is acknowledged as being in large part due to the massive urban heat island effect of the place":
But there is no scepticism at all to be found in Singaporean government websites or media about climate change and the potential threat from it. In fact, there is a video shown at the end of one of the Gardens by the Bay conservatories which is full of warnings about climate change and the need to address it - and I found that the largely Asian audience was paying close attention to it, too.The island is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world - at 0.25 degrees Celsius per decade - according to the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS). It is almost 1 deg C hotter today than in the 1950s.
Climate change scepticism is a mugs game for American Right wing players and their Australian and English sycophants, primarily.
Apart from the humidity, I thought it very noticeable that Singapore doesn't seem to have breezes, despite being surrounded by water. Not sure why that would be, but I see someone else on Reddit saying the same, so it's just not me.
* Channel News Asia is very good for local Asian news and stories. There was one about a popular young Iman in Indonesia who is very influential via social media (and he is a convert from Catholicism!) I must track that down, it was very interesting.
Overall, given that I like stylish urban development, eye popping architecture, fantastic infrastructure, a distinctly pro-environment sentiment about the place, and a mix of cultures that hardly spend any time fighting each other - I really like it. As someone wrote somewhere, it does have a Disneyland vibe - lets build a new city from the ground up and see how cool we can make it look and work.
I want to visit again.
I will do a separate post about the side trip to Malacca: this one is long enough.
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