Well this is hard to take! Blogging poolside below the apartment in Singapore. no gin sling in hand yet, that is later today in The Long Bar of Raffles Hotel. if I am going to explore ritual and cliche I shall do it completely, maybe this morning I can find myself a pith helmet and swagger stick, goodness knows I left my swagger behind a rubbish bin after realising age twelve, that playing schoolboy rugby was life threatening.
We are staying with Susan's cousins who are working here on contract, they live on the twenty seventh floor of a tower over a shopping centre. The apartment is bigger than their Melbourne house, but there is no backyard for their two boys to run around in.
Getting here was remarkably smooth, the departure process from Melbourne much smoother than I remember it three years ago, entry to Singapore was virtually transparent. It probably helped that we spent time in toilets changing from Melbourne winter layers into Singapore flimsies that we were the only ones in the room at passport control. We had a chatty taxi driver from the airport who recommended local cuisine and things to do, it's interesting that of all the taxi drivers we have been with since arriving, his taste is the only that has matched ours, the others have been far more "international" rather than local.
The thing that you you notice of course about Singapore is that at least a third of the population are in uniform. Not just police, or security, but shopping centre cleaners, taxi corallers, slushy makers, all have a definite official feel, not officious, everyone is very friendly and helpful, everyone just wants to appear as an official.
Lucy has fallen in love with Hainan chicken rice as well as dim sum dumplings. The shopping centre below our apartment has a food court that is hawker style cooking with Gordon Ramsey cooking school franchise at one end and a "fresh food people" supermarket at the other. The food is wonderful in range, price, presentation and taste. We may well have been able to eat better elsewhere but this was good, so we couldn't be arsed.
The old warehouses along the river are now trendy bars, the river traffic has vanished and most of the city is vertical. There are places wher you can see clusters of the old city holding on, apparently there is beginning to be an appreciation for heritage. I observed myself being a cultural curmudgeon, sniffing at the temples of shopping that surrounded me, hectares of superbrands...
The Botanic Gardens are vast, well laid out and well serviced with fresh water bubblers, which you need to use walking around in the heat. We focused on the Orchid Garden, which delighted at every glance. It also had a cool room with mist sprays that we didn't want to leave. In the orchid garden is the former garden director's house a fine example of colonial tropical mock Tudor.
Lucy has now taken over the blog ... "The next garden that we went to was the ginger garden. It was full of different ginger plants and some other plants that weren't gingers but were related to them like the bananas. What we came to next in the ginger garden was the lily pond. Next to the lily pond were two wooden totems, I liked them because of the funny paintings on them. The lily pond looked a bit like Monet's pond. I took a photo of one of the water lilies
On the other side of the path was a waterfall.Next to the water fall was a bridge.I walked onto the bridge and was shocked ,I was behind the waterfall. Mum took a photo of me behind the waterfall.While mum was taking the photo I was getting hypnotised by the water falling down from the waterfall."
Thank you Lucy.
I hit the wall halfway around Singapore Zoo, stuck panting in the jaguar enclosure with all these other wild tourists, while Susan and Lucy viewed the Naked Mole Rat. Nothing would revive me but a
Singapore Sling in the Long Bar of the
Raffles Hotel. A bad mistake, Raffles is elegant, but it's "cost plus plus" tourist not a real pub anymore. The Sling was ok but not at $26 plus an unannounced 17%, an unpleasant taste after what started as fun...
The last day we walked from Chinatown to the
Gardens By the Bay, four and a half hours in the midday sun, mad dogs and an Englishwoman...
Palaces of excess proudly showing the skill of Singapore's ability to buy what it wants, everybody reduced to the size of insignificance, whether in the shopping vaults, the hotel with the cruise liner on top, the sustainability gardens.
I think this is my departing impression of Singapore, pleasant and helpful people in a space that daily reduces them.
Posted from deepest mobility....
