s'pore

Singapore is so clean it's unreal... it feels like Disneyland or something. There's NO trash anywhere on the street, even in Little India! And everyone is SO concerned about hygiene it's a matter of city/national pride, even obsession. I read in the paper the other morning about this World Toilet Organization that was going around S'pore and judging the cleanliness of the public toilets... there was a picture of a guy leaning over a urinal sniffing the bowl. Ugh. Some recent Chinese immigrant woman won for cleanest shopping mall toilet. They interviewed her and she was proud. Not that I'm complaining or anything... I love a good clean public toilet, and I certainly appreciate the amenity after India where it isn't so much of an additional service as just the roadside or an alley way or the sidewalk sewage ditch. There was also an article about the newest, youngest (32?) and extremely well educated... Yale, Cambridge, Stanford... police chief. And also a report about some 22 and 23 year old brothers who received 24 lashings each with a cane in addition to 6-year prison sentences for robbery. Order, discipline, and cleanliness... they are obsessed. I need dirt. There's hardly any bird poop anywhere, no pigeons!, no gum on the sidewalk, no cigarette butts (definitely a good thing), nothing. It's lacking grit and maybe even spirit. However, apparently S'pore was actually really dirty and stinky in the early '80's and they cleaned it up by the end of the decade, so the whole order discipline thing isn't so much cultural as it is a matter of imposed law. There's Malay and Indians and Arabs and Chinese and Europeans and Hindu and Muslim and Christian all together... this is definitely one of the world's great historic and current trading city-states. I can't say I like it but it's interesting from a cultural anthropological point of view.

I walked along the historic river quay's where all manner of import, export, trading, drinking, opium dens, fighting, and dirty living used to occur with the coolies working the docks. Now it's been turned into a tourist drinking and eating spot with a thin band of old warehouses restored and painted in pastels, backed up by the main financial business high-rise towers. I wandered down to the new theater buildings (I think the locals call it the Durian after the spiky Southeast Asian fruit of similar appearance) and the Merlion park for a photo-op along with every other tourist, and then found refuge in the chic Fullerton Hotel Post Bar with a trough of vodka and some bar snacks... my first cocktail in three months, hooray! The next morning I spent a few hours at the Asian Civilizations Museum looking at amazingly intricate metalwork, jewelry, and textiles, learning about this part of the world and Singapore's founding by the British East India Company, as well as following Buddhism's influence throughout the region. Then I meandered through Chinatown's cheap nic-nac's, old men playing checkers (both Chinese of course), saw a Hindu temple, a Chinese Buddhist temple, and had some great noodles and a sweet red bean bun at an outdoor eatery before heading out to take a cable car ride over the sea port to an island of resort-ride make-believe and then swinging back around to a little "mountain" overlooking the cityscape. It was cloudy and rainy but a good view nonetheless. It's raining every day... winter monsoons from the northeast.