On What Shenanigans Pass for Decency in Asia

Singapore:

I went to Singapore to take a break from Bangkok: from the chaos of it, the smell of trash and poo when you pass a street corner, the lack of visibility, the tall buildings with nothing in them, traffic-blocking protesters who are not quite sure what they’re protesting about, good laws that aren’t enforced and bad laws that make you boil, dirty windows, the charcoal and dust that brown the sweat on your forehead, the constant certainty that nothing is certain, the omnipresent language barrier — all that attracts me to this place normally. But one needs a vacation.

Our start was shaky. My plane, a small machine of tin and hydraulics and porthole windows, had not even taken off and the airport had already thrown away my toothpaste. I wrote in my notebook: “6:30 a.m. Tooth paste trash canned. Not an auspicious sign.”

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I understand the reasons for the aggressive action taken against liquids in quantity in a dangerous world. It is still funny to think of my 170 milliliter tube of toothpaste with dread. On one hand the plane was abstractly safer; on the other, my teeth and the olfactory centers of those around me would be made to actually suffer. The sacrifices we make for the greater good…

Terrorism awareness continued its lonely braying inside Singapore’s heralded subway system, the MRT. Cameras perched on walls and atop subway maps like cyclops gargoyles. PSAs looping on plasma screens encouraged MRT travelers to be wary of solitary bags or people that look suspicious. One particularly stark PSA shows a man with a baseball cap pulled low over his brow leaving a very square bag under his seat. He exits the train and casts a malevolent look over his shoulder, before clandestinely pulling a cellphone from his jacket. The train carries the rest of its unwitting passengers into a tunnel, and a moment later a fireball blooms from the tunnel’s mouth. Only you can prevent terrorism. Report suspicious bags or individuals. I miss the days when I was only responsible for forest fires.
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Signs auspicious or not, my time in Singapore was wonderful. Singapore is clean, organized, efficient…expensive. I spent about as much in a weekend in Singapore as I did on my entire trip in October. A U.S. dollar is about $1.50 Singapore dollars. A guesthouse for one night is SG $85. A meal runs your anywhere from SG $7 to $12. Two dollars buys you a small dollar of water. Let’s not talk about beer. For one beer you could see a movie in New York City with enough left over to buy a packet of Dentine. Living on the Thai baht is satisfactory enough in Bangkok, but in Singapore the exchange rate becomes suffocating.

I stayed in Little India, away from which you had to walk a mile to escape the menace of curry and the all the energetic ampage of Bollywood bounced from store fronts into the wee hours of the morning making your hips dance in your sleep, because most of the budget places were located there. From there the MRT took you most of the places you wanted to be within twenty minutes. Trains arrived every 6 minutes. There were maps showing the blue, green, red, purple, and orange routes clearly in every train car. To pay you simply told a machine where you wanted to go and it issued you a card which you could reuse on the return trip.

Indeed, in every way that Bangkok is chaotic, Singapore is controlled; and in every sense that my city seems to have been designed by urban developers with Jackson Pollock aspirations, Singapore boasts a DaVinci-esque grace in its simplicity and efficiency that makes you stop and wonder, who did this? Let’s place the exciting fact that English is spoken everywhere in a drawer for the moment, additionally that most signs display three other languages besides English, including Hindi, Chinese, and Malawi can stay temporarily in the same drawer. Besides the ample display of languages, signs exist in such floral magnitude that it makes losing your way a difficult feat even for a l’incompetent such as myself.

Honestly, I don’t feel like continuing on about Singapore. Friday found us settling in a hotel and exploring our surroundings, Saturday was spent at the Singapore Zoo (easily the best zoo in Asia, if not the best I’ve been to, period) and that evening we took in “Avenue Q.” Peed myself, folks. That’s right. I urinated in my trousers. Sunday was a visual art exhibition at an art museum. Flew home, opened my wallet and listened with some consternation to the echos within. Ate noodles for dinner. Pay day is tomorrow. So no worries on that front.