Singapore was high on our bucket list of places to visit someday. I’m happy that we had the opportunity to spend a few hours in this amazing city.
Even before we docked, the daybreak sight of myriad ships in the harbor gave us a hint of the level of activity we might expect in the city. When we entered the arrivals hall at the port, I laughed at the sound of numerous immigration agents making a big show out of stamping each passport and entry/exit card multiple times. “Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!” resounded from all over the cavernous room.
Our Singaporean guide (Andrew) was of Chinese descent; his grandparents came to the island to work back in the early 1900s. He was a real hoot and was an excellent representative for the country. “We have mandatory military service for two years starting when you are 18. Then every year for the next 10 years, you must report for military training and must stay in good physical condition. Your guide is a trained assassin!”
We’d heard about Singapore’s pride in its lush gardens and vegetation. Andrew said, “Singapore is not a garden city; it’s a city in a garden.” Even the rooftops have gardens.
Bright colors were everywhere!
The neighborhoods in the old part of the city still carry the strong flavor of the primary nationalities that settled the city – Old India, Chinatown, Arab Street. We started our tour in the old Arab section of town, which the British East India Company built in consideration for the local Sultan to allow the Company to use the port. The Sultan’s palace is now a tourist center.
The mosque that was originally built for the Sultan was replaced in recent years by a larger and more elaborate structure.
Inside, the mosque was spacious, airy, and bright.
Across from the mosque are beautiful two-story shophouses that were occupied by British traders in the early 20th century. These are heritage buildings that are required to be preserved.
Andrew explained the feng shui practices that shaped the design and placement of buildings. When there are four buildings at the corners of an intersection, the corners of the buildings are not at right angles; there is a diagonal added so that there are no sharp edges. “I don’t cut you; you don’t cut me.” Even with the modern high-rise office buildings, feng shui is very important. For example, one building faces toward a hospital, so it was very important for the designers to keep bad spirits from getting into the office building. At ground level, they added statues of powerful men (Churchill, Gandhi, Socrates, etc.) who would repulse the bad energy. One financial building has hexagonal designs on it. “Like a beehive…busy as a bee. Lots of activity means you’re doing lots of business and making lots of money.”
One of the things that most impressed me about both Singapore and Malaysia was how the governments build ethnic diversity and religious tolerance into their cultures at all levels. For example, there are quotas for each ethnic group in public housing, based on the overall percentage of each ethnicity in the population. This prevents religious or ethnic enclaves from developing. (The building in the photo below is a low-income, subsidized apartment building in Chinatown.)
Andrew said he wasn’t able to get a government-subsidized flat in the first three buildings of his choice, because those buildings already had the maximum number of Chinese permitted. So in every government-financed apartment building, you have Chinese (Buddhist), Malay (Moslem), Tamil (Hindu), and Eurasian (Christian) families.
Religious places of worship coexist in the old neighborhoods, too. For example, within a couple of blocks in the historic Chinatown area, there was a Chinese Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, a mosque, a Protestant church, and a Catholic church.
And in voting for the government, you do not vote for individual candidates in your district. Instead, you vote for a party’s bloc of 5 candidates, who must represent all of the major ethnic groups. Thus all minorities are assured representation in the government. It’s a remarkable system, and the Singaporeans are very proud of it.
There were celebrations underway or planned all over the city. There was a Formula 1 race here last week, and some of the stands and decorations were still in place for that. In Chinatown, preparations were underway for the Moon Cake Festival.
In Little India, everyone was getting ready for Diwali.
Andrew took us into the Chinatown Heritage Centre. It’s composed of three former shophouses that have been partially preserved and restored to tell the story of the living conditions of the Chinese immigrants who helped build the city. (There is a similar museum in Little India to talk about the Tamil immigrants.) It was similar to the Tenement Museum in New York City, to give visitors an idea what life was like not all that long ago in these narrow shophouses. The shops and owner’s kitchen were usually on the first level.
The second and third levels housed 30 to 50 people living in 6 to 8 rooms, one family per room. The bathroom facilities consisted of two buckets in stalls in the communal kitchen. It was claustrophobic enough in there with just our busload of tourists. I can’t imagine what it was like to live there. Yet Andrew said that his grandmother had come to from mainland China to live in one of these houses. Amazingly, the last families were vacated only in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Shown below is the communal cooking area on one floor of the shophouse, shared by six families.)
I would be remiss if I did not talk about our amazing 8-course lunch at Chuan Xiang. We started with fried dough rolled in sesame seeds, served with fruit, followed by fabulously fresh prawns.
Next came salt and pepper chicken…
…which was followed by sweet and sour fish, buns, chili soft shell crab, and Singapore fried rice.
Incredible. It was exactly the kind of meal I’d been craving for weeks!
We loved our very short stay in Singapore. We definitely want to find an excuse to come back again. Now we have one sea day to rest up before the final week of our journey.