Singapore, Again
The first time I went to Singapore I was completely enamoured with the place. It was really hard to leave. I mean, all the memories… The streets I had walked, my favourite restaurants. I really felt like Singapore had becomes a part of me, and I, Singapore.
Maybe this was an extreme reaction to a twelve hour layover. The point is though, Singapore’s been on this pedestal for years, and I was really excited to go back and see if it could meet the ridiculously high expectations I had.
Here was Singapore’s first challenge: hostel accommodation. So this surprises some people who know me, but I’ve never stayed in a hostel/dorm/backpackers’. Not once have I shared accommodation with strangers. Mostly this is because travelling around most of Southeast Asia is so cheap that there’s no need to share a room with anyone, and because when I travel around New Zealand I bring a tent. It’s just never been a necessity.
Also, I’ve not been really smitten with the idea. I don’t feel the need to share a room with strange people. I think other people are weird and they probably smell.
Accommodation in Singapore’s expensive though, and hostels were pretty much all that were in the budget. Fortunately, as a birthday/Christmas present last year, my parents very kindly offered to put us up in a hotel in Singapore. Unfortunately, we arrived in Singapore late in the evening, the night before our hotel reservation and thus had to stay in a hostel. My first hostel stay! It did not meet expectations. Namely, I was not expecting this:
Empty bed upon empty bed. We were the only ones there. So I guess I have to change my stance on hostels. They’re fine. A lot like having your own room, but with bunk beds.
Anyway, we got there around 10pm and were starving. The hostel was in Little India so after we checked in, we walked around until we found an Indian restaurant with a patio. And then we ate too much curry and drank giant beers. It had been a long day of buses.
We meandered back to the hostel, and I decided right then that Singapore, after two hours, had already met my ridiculously high expectations. That, or I was a little bit drunk.
Anyway, it was warm and humid out at night, which is a weather quirk that never fails to make me really nostalgic and happy–it feels too much like fireflies and Waffle House at 2am, which is about the only thing Knoxville was ever good for. So the weather pleased me. Also, all the glittery lights and the food and the people sitting under the glittery lights and eating the food. Also, all the crosswalk lights worked, which really cheered me. Stupid KL and their broken traffic lights.
Anyway, Singapore was great those first two hours, and I decided that I would gladly live there forever and ever. Just so long as I didn’t have to work or pay rent and could spend all my time eating and walking around. I’m actively working on developing this as a career path, so you never know. I mean, Anthony Bourdain does it. I’m just trying to figure out how to do it without any work on the back end. Producing a TV show looks hard.
I’m digressing. Here’s the gist: go to Singapore. It’s the best place in the world. And when you go, please take me with you.
Actually, one of the reasons I’m so keen on living in Singapore (I was serious about that) is that I think there must be something dark underneath it all. I mean, a certain level of control goes into maintaining such a Disney-perfect kind of city. At what point do you start to notice it? It can’t be tax time, since that Facebook guy wouldn’t be headed there if that was the case. So what kind of oppression are we dealing with? Fascinating, right?
I met a guy there last time, who asked me if I was Singaporean. I said no and he told me that he was. He then proceeded to tell me about how awful it is that everyone in Singapore gets fined for things like jaywalking and spitting on the street, and it’s totally controlling and terrible.
All I was thinking, throughout the whole conversation, wasA place with no jaywalking or spitting on the street? Yes please! I do love boundaries. So I think it would be an interesting place to get to know better.
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s shiny and glittery and delicious all the way through.
Tioman Island, Part 2
We got to Tioman Island eventually. There are about seven towns the ferry stops at, all along the west coat of the island. It’s where almost all of the accommodation is. But I discovered that there’s a really inconvenient beach on the other side of the island, and I wanted to go there: Juara Beach. Because nothing easy is every worth it.
Getting there is a matter of getting off the ferry and either hiking for three hours, or taking a jeep ride over the mountain range that runs up and down the island like a spine. We were originally going to walk, because I like my vacations to be work. But because of all the delays with the ferry, it was already too late in the day–too close to the peak heat of afternoon to allow for a big hike. So we took a jeep.
The kid who drive us over was about thirteen years old, but I figure he’d probably been driving that narrow, winding road for years. It was fine. Only mildly harrowing.
We got to Juara and found a hotel. We had read that pre-booking reservations there is tricky, since Internet is iffy. Though I’m not sure about that information, now that I’ve been there. Our hotel had wifi, though no computers. Still, the iPod Touch worked. So there’s clearly Internet, and I’m sure the hotel-owners have a computer or something for their own use… But whatever, it’s not hard to walk up and get a room.
Specifically, we got a colourful little chalet by the beach
Ours was the blue one in the middle
$20/night. It was hard to complain.
The view from our porch
Anyway, the beach was really beautiful, and the water was warm and clear. We rented snorkels from the hotel for a few dollars and paddled around one morning.
We also took a hike to a waterfall, which was sub-par as far as waterfalls go. Never try to impress a New Zealander with a waterfall. They’ll just scoff and ask if you’ve ever been to Milford Sound.
There were heaps of monitor lizards all over the place though, just trudging along the roadside. They’re super slow, so we sometimes didn’t even notice them until we had sidled up right next to one. But they were exciting. Wildlife! Ooooh!
Speaking of wildlife… I mentioned something last post about feral cats being everywhere. That wasn’t a joke. Malaysia is crawling with feral cats. The weird thing? They are remarkably healthy-looking. I mean, maybe don’t touch them, but you don’t have to cross the street when you see one coming. I didn’t expect to find them all over Tioman though, because it’s an island. The massive body of water makes it hard for feral cats to migrate over from the mainland.
Also, I’m pretty sure cats hate the beach. Turns out I was wrong though. Cats love the beach. Feral beach cats everywhere.
So that’s pretty much Juara. Cheap, beachside accommodation. Cheap snorkel rental. Cheap food in open air restaurants up and down the beach. Sitting on the front porch reading when the sun’s too hot. Giant fruit bats swooping in and out of coconut trees at dusk. Beach cats. Wet water… Sand…
Wait. What about that stupid 1970′s Time magazine article decreeing that this be one of the ten most beautiful islands in the world, henceforth and from now on? There is no way this place made it onto a ‘best of’ list and stayed like this. Not a chance. Were we on the wrong island?
Fortunately, there were some Canadians handy to answer my question. (Yes, everyone in Malaysia is Canadian) They had just come from the other side of the island.
“How was it?” we asked. We wanted to know what kind of treasures we were missing out on.
“Depends,” said the guy. “Do you like traffic and crowds and dead coral?”
“It’s awful,” said the girl. “I wish we hadn’t wasted our time with it.”
And there we have it. The secret of Tioman: the west coast sucks. The east coast remains an affordable tropical paradise for now.
So I guess the accessible west bore the brunt of sudden popularity. It makes sense, since the kind of people who get travel advice from Time magazine are probably not the kind of people who want to go somewhere with a prepubescent boy and rickety 4×4 between them and the beach. And so one side of the island got to reap the bulk of the tourist traffic. And so one side of the island came to be full of cars and people and sunburned tourists and litter.
I told you nothing easy is ever worth it.
Tioman Island, Part 1
Way, way back in the 1970′s, Time magazine identified Tioman Island as one of the world’s ten most beautiful islands. Now, the world is full of islands and I imagine a lot of them are pretty beautiful so to be in the top ten is pretty impressive.
And pretty discouraging for present day travellers. When I hear ‘ten most beautiful islands’ and ’1970s’, my mind immediately goes to a supply and demand curve that had forty years to move the island from ‘tropical paradise’ to ‘dirty, sunburned, visor-selling, golf-coursed, pricey, feral-cat-infested nightmare’. Still, we went there.
It was a matter of proximity (Tioman’s not far from Singapore, just a few hours up the east coast of the Malay peninsula) and wanting to balance out the trip’s urban bookends with a few days in the middle of jungle and beach. It seemed like a good idea. Or at least an idea.
Getting there was sort of an adventure. We left from Kuala Lumpur, taking an overnight bus to Mersing, the coastal town from which one catches the ferry to Tioman. The bus left at 11pm, and arrived just before 5am which is, of course, the best time to arrive in a strange town.
We were greeted at the bus station by a mob of feral kittens and also this guy that picked out the four white people that were on the bus and predicted our itinerary. “Tioman?” he guessed. “Tioman? Follow me!”
He led us to this woman who was sitting behind a school desk, in front of rows of closed up ticket counters. She had lots of pamphlets and papers and apparently was the gatekeeper to Tioman Island. She had some bad news though: the earliest ferry left at 10:30 am. So look forward to six hours of… We weren’t really sure. The town seemed pretty dead in a pre-dawn port town kind of way.
I had actually done a wee bit of research prior to this, and was under the impression that ferries left around 7am. There was another couple with us, and they were under the same impression. When pressed, the woman gave us a lot of patter about changing tides and this ferry that crashed and killed a bunch of Singaporeans a few years ago. It was all a little suspect.
Since we had a least six hours to make a decision, we walked off towards the harbour. The other couple with us were two random white people who also happened to be on our bus. We became united in cause, because that’s kind of what happens when you backpack around Asia.
I wasn’t sure about them though, since the guy had a Canadian flag patch stitched to his backpack. As far as I knew, there are two kinds of people that stitch Canadian flag patches onto their backpacks: Canadians that don’t want to be mistaken for Americans, and Americans who don’t want to be taken for Americans. Either way, I was pretty sure that being American did not play in our favour.
However, and this was the epiphany of tolerance and understanding that marked the moral high point of the trip, I was wrong. There is a third kind of person that bandies around Canadian flag patches. Apparently there are people who come from Canada, and who like Canada, and who subsequently sew their flag onto their backpacks. Sometimes this has nothing to do at all with the United States. Who knew?
Of course, we only found this out after trying to pass as New Zealanders. “We’re from New Zealand,” we told them gleefully. We had been gleefully telling people this all trip as an easy way to both avoid conversations about politics and to lend ourselves authority when speaking of rugby and dairy products. It had been going well so far.
“But you’re not really from New Zealand?” the Canadian asked, hesitantly. There is probably only one kind of person that claims to be a kiwi and yet clearly enunciates all their vowels.
We got on well though. En route to the harbour, the shining lights of the-only-thing-open-at-5-am-in-Mersing beckoned, and we parted ways: Jake and I to suss out the harbour situation, and the other two to eat at the glittering cafe.
The port was dark, and full of unopened ticket counters. There were a few teenage boys sitting around, playing pop music on a laptop. Jake asked them when the first ferry came. 10:30, they told us. Something about tides. So maybe the lady had been right.
We capitulated, and headed back towards the town. We were just leaving the waterfront area, lamenting about how we were going to have to sit in this port town for hours, doing nothing but watching the sun rise, when a voice called out from the darkness.
“You go to Tioman?” it called. White people are so predictable.
We looked over, and a man sitting with some papers, in front of one of the closed down ticket counters, beckoned us over. We went, as you do when a shadowy stranger requests as much.
“Sure, but the ferry doesn’t come until 10:30?” we asked, hoping he’d tell us otherwise.
“No,” he said. “The ferry leaves Mersing at 10:30. But it leaves from here,” he pointed to a dot on a paper map in front of him. “It leaves from here at 7. Just a twenty minute taxi ride. 40 ringets. Do you have some friends? You could share a taxi.” He was good.
We said we’d go find our friends and see if they were into the cab share. Then we’d be back.
The Canadians were keen on the whole operation. But we still had over an hour to kill, so we settled in for some fruit shakes, pratha (Indian flat bread made by stretching out the dough paper thin and then folding it over itself) and vegetable curry.
While we were eating and describing the scene in which we found the mysterious taxi man, we noticed that he was right there. In the restaurant. Eating pratha and drinking coffee with a friend. He waved at us and reminded us to come back to see him in a little bit. It really was a small town.
Booking the taxi and the ferry was easy, and all went according to plan. We got to the other ferry terminal on time and checked in, wrote our names in the log book, the whole bit. Then we asked how much time we had before the ferry took off, and the man in charge shook his head.
“Later,” he told us. Maybe an hour or two later than scheduled. Something about tides.
And so we came to be sitting in a small port town in Malaysia, with nothing to do but watch the sun rise and wait for hours.
Batu Caves
Instead of a Wellington Wednesday themed post this week, I’m just going to show you some photos from Malaysia. Fact: I started blogging as a way to force people into looking at my vacation photos.
Part of the KL adventure was a trip out to the Batu Caves, reachable via train. It’s an impressive cave system in a hill that’s become home to Hindu temples. Wikipedia says it’s one of the most popular Hindu sites outside of India. Fact: nothing’s worth visiting if it’s not got a superlative attached to it.
Nah, superlative notwithstanding, it was cool. Giant, golden statues are always cool.
There it is, glimpsed through the foliage. That’s actually a way misleading photo, since the whole thing had about as much natural foliage as a miniature golf course.
That’s better. Anyway, to get to the cave part, we had to climb about a million stairs. Incidentally, this is also how I describe my average day in Wellington (hint: it’s a hilly city covered in secret, pedestrian staircases), so I was emotionally and physically prepared for the ascent. My quads are powerful strong.
And then we arrived! My photos from the top are all a little lacking, so I apologise. Apparently you need to spend more than $40 on a camera if you want it to take decent pictures in a cave. Spelunkers, take note.
If you squint at the photos below, it kind of gives you an idea of how the Batu Caves look if you’re inside of them. And squinting.
Return to Kuala Lumpur
I know you’re all dying to know what I thought of Kuala Lumpur on the second go round. Since I was not exactly smitten with the place the first time, I thought it might be worthwhile to give the city another shot at impressing me. So I arrived with an open mind and…
Meh. No, I really don’t care for KL.
I’m absolutely positive about this verdict, since I had a really good time there. I probably had the best time one can have in KL and still… meh.
I’ll start with the highlight of the city which is, easily, the food. Malaysian food is painfully good.
So good that uneaten plates of it are elusive to photographers.
A nice mix of Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisines. It’s really hard to complain. Also, food can be consumed on plastic tables on the sidewalk, which is where all eating should be done, as far as I’m concerned. Seriously though, you can tell a lot about a country’s food by the quality of its cheapest meals.
So that was fine. The problems began when confronted with the need to fill the empty time between meals. Because you can’t just eat Malaysian food all day long. Trust me, it’s physically impossible.
I think maybe if I didn’t hate shopping so much, filling the time would have been fine. There are SO many shopping malls in KL. As it is though, I’m not really seduced by shopping malls. Also, the novelty of finding pants that fit and books written in English was non-existent this time, making me a much tougher customer than I was in 2008.
So instead of shopping, we tried indulging in other hobbies. Like having fish eat our feet. Yeah, that’s a thing. It’s called a fish spa.
You sit there while little fish exfoliate you. It’s about the tickliest thing you can imagine. Like a vibrating sock. Not wholly unpleasant once you get used to it though.
On another between-meals adventure, we tried sightseeing. We went to Merdeka Square, which is where the flag of independence was raised in 1957. Also, there are some pretty government buildings. It’s cultural in a take-a-photo-and-go-see-the-next-thing kind of way.
Neeeeext
The next thing was a cold drink, since KL is hot and sticky and generally awful to walk around. Naturally, there was not a cafe/bar in a three block radius, so we walked around in a giant circle before ending up at a Burger King, which we walked past twice before deciding it was the best option, given BK’s marriage of air conditioning and iced beverages.
What else… We met up with some friends from Christchurch and went on a day trip to the Batu Caves, which will get posted about soon. That was fun, though the fun was somewhat tempered by how unfun it was catching a train out of KL Sentral.
The train platform was housed in a dank and humid basement level, which would have been totally fine for the twelve minute wait it was supposed to be til the train came. Twelve minutes turned into an hour, which turned into forever, due to some train malfunction down the line.
Normally, wouldn’t hold this against the city, normally I would assume a fluke. But listening to the other delayed train announcements from other tracks led us to believe that this was pretty much par for the course. Plus, when Jake and I tried to catch a train there later, the exact same thing happened.
Anyway, the train eventually came, and we went off to the Batu Caves, but like I said: that’s another adventure.
The thing with the trains is that it finally helped me figure out why I don’t like KL. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, since I love Singapore and therefore am not totally anti-air conditioned malls and humidity. And I love Saigon, so I’m not anti-chaos and train malfunctions. The problem is that KL slides in between the two, claiming the worst of both worlds.
Take the traffic. In Singapore, walking down the street can be accomplished without much thought. The traffic signals all work fluidly, there’s nothing obstructing the sidewalk, and when there is a construction-related detour, they tell you where to go and then let you know through cartoon that they feel bad about it.
This construction worker has clearly brought great shame upon his country
I’m not really sure what they do about road construction in Saigon, since I’m not sure I ever saw any. I think you’d probably just motorbike on through it anyway. That’s really the beauty of the traffic there, just a do-what-you-feel kind of ethos. Did you make a turn the wrong way down a one-way street? No worries! Drive on the sidewalk. That’s what it’s for.
Have have to watch yourself as a pedestrian, sure, but why on earth would you bother walking when you can drive on the sidewalk?
In KL, the system is some unsavoury mix of the two, where everyone zips around in cars down the correct side of the road, but none of the pedestrian crossing lights work and there’s invariably holes in the sidewalk wherever you’re trying to walk. And did I mention everyone drives cars? These are much harder to dodge than motorbikes and also go a lot faster, which is sort of a lethal combination when, you know, none of your pedestrian lights work. So basically you’re bearing all the negatives of underfunded infrastructure, without benefiting from any of the fun parts. It’s awful.
The same with the trains. It wouldn’t have been such a psychological mind flip if it weren’t for the high tech digital signs that told you when the next train was supposed to come. They don’t even have those signs in the New York subway stations, so way to go KL for being so up on the commuter-friendly technology.
Or so you’d think. Turns out the digital signs are only programmed to update to the scheduled times. So when the nice lady on the announcement lets you know that the train is going to come possibly sometime in the future maybe, the high tech digital sign continues to broadcast the original, scheduled time. And then when that time passes and no train comes? The next scheduled time pops up, even though this is also not the actual time the train is going to come.
You know what else can do that? Can tell people the next time a train is scheduled to arrive? A piece of paper. And it’s way cheaper.
And that’s what bothers me. If your trains aren’t going to run on time, then lets drop the facade and do it the Vietnamese way where no one has any idea when the next train will come, but doesn’t want to disappoint you and so will placate you with lies of ‘very soon’. Because at least that’s a little interesting. There’s nothing interesting about being lied to by a digital sign.
Maybe it’s just the puberty stage of economic development that I really don’t get, but it just felt too in-betweeny. Not my thing, I guess.
So the verdict is this: I had a great time in KL, doing things that had very little to do with KL. We saw friends, swam in a hotel pool, ate amazing food, saw some cool stuff… And yet none of that was really thanks to the city. Which is how I know I’m not so keen on it. If you can have a great time somewhere and still be completely disinterested in returning to it, then I think it’s a fair call.
Next time I’ll Declare my Dirty Laundry
Aaaaand… back!
It’s a gloriously sunny day in Wellington and it’s nice to be home. The washing machine is violently thumping (I think that’s normal for budget appliances) downstairs, and I just threw away all the piled-up junk mail (plus three bank statements. Three! How? We were only gone ten days), and now Jake and I are catching up on homework.
Or he is. I’m typing furiously so as to seem busy and important, but really I’m writing about all the wrinkled envelopes that were scavenged from our not-water-tight letterbox.
Actually, the mail thing is but a small detail related to the main theme here: coming home. Coming home is nice. I think everyone likes it. It’s like a warm puppy. Happiness is a familiar kitchen full of non-perishable items and a thirsty potted plant.
And while coming home is nice, coming home to New Zealand, specifically, is really nice. Happiness is a ‘Haere Mai’ sign at an arrival gate.
I’ve already written about how I feel about the ‘Welcome to America’ experience, and I touched a little on how New Zealand makes you feel right at home pretty much as soon as you board the plane and have to choose between Marlborough Sauv Blancs and Wairarapa Pinot Noirs for your welcome drink. But I had only touched upon the glory of arriving in New Zealand. If only I had known.
This past trip with the first time I have ever travelled as a New Zealander, since I’m usually coming of going from the US. Plus, when I was wandering around remote border outposts in Asia, it seemed prudent to use a passport from a country people had heard of.
That said, I may have underestimated the reach of kiwi cultural imperialism. Most people we met in Malaysia and Singapore had heard of New Zealand. Like this guy in Singapore’s Chinatown, selling us souvenirs, asked us where we were from. ‘New Zealand’ said we, and he nodded. “Ah yes,” he said, “Your country is milk.”
This, for the record, is way preferable to the array of responses I’ve gotten from explaining that I’m an American. These range from ‘Your country is an evil empire’ (English), ‘Your country is full of ignoramuses who only speak one language’ (Swiss) and ‘Your country is totally irresponsible with its power and deserves its eminent decline’ (English again? I was a little drunk and don’t really remember). I paraphrased all of these, but those were the general sentiments. So yes, my country is milk is fine by me. The dairy industry can define me. As long as I don’t have to talk about politics on vacation.
Anyway, back to the homecoming–I have this shiny, new, spy-proof New Zealand passport I got a few months ago and I was quite excited to use it. I didn’t realise how slick the process would be though. See, instead of having to stand in line forever and answer questions about how many chickens I touched in Asia, I got to go through the Customs Checkpoint of the Future! Honestly, it felt like something speculative you’d find at a 1950′s World’s Fair Expo. I stuck my passport into this machine and pressed some buttons about what I had to declare, and then got a printed out ticket. I moved to the next electronic kiosk and put my ticket in. It took a scan of my face, matched to to my passport photo and set me free.
All up, it took maybe a minute. The future’s great.
I was already pretty happy about the streamlined entry process, and about how nobody had yelled at me yet. There was one final step though: see, I had muddied my hiking boots in Malaysia and forgotten to rinse them off afterwards. New Zealand’s really concerned with bio-security, and muddy hiking boots are huge faux-pas. I might as well have shoved a live monitor lizard into my carry-on. I was bound to get yelled at for this. I felt it would be a good test of my theory re:New Zealand airports being rage-free zones.
So I declared my boots (New Zealand entry forms have a check box for declaring muddied equipment) and brought them over to the woman at a big metal table. She looked at them and decided that they were, indeed muddy. A bio-hazard. She called over another customs worker and gave her my boots, perhaps for incineration. Then she told me to go get my bags x-rayed and wait in a corner for a few minutes.
I thought they might have been testing the mud for ebola or whatever, before deciding whether they’d have to be destroyed, but I was wrong. It had never occurred to me that customs would offer a shoe shine service. My boots were returned clean and wrapped in a plastic bag. They washed my shoes. I’m pretty sure this would never happen at LAX.
The moral of the story is clearly to bring more shoes next time I travel. Because now the rest of them look kind of dingy in comparison.
A Brief History of Singapore
::More blasts from the past. So the first time I went to Singapore I got really, unexpectedly taken with everything about it. I loved Singapore. This is based on the full twelve hours I spent there. Anyway, I was so smitten that I started cyber-stalking my country crush. You know, checking out its past just to make sure that we really were compatible.
What I uncovered was actually a really fascinating history. Yes, fascinating. So much so that it deserved its own write-up as interpreted by Singapore’s biggest fan aka me.
I swear, this will be more interesting than the title suggests::
I’m going to start from the 1800’s, because otherwise it’s way too much to learn about. Basically the history of Singapore before 1819 is inextricable from the history of Malaya. Read about that for more background.
Anyway. In 1819, a certain Thomas Stamford Raffles (namesake of the famous hotel) landed in swampy Singapore and decided the quaint little spot would make for a kick-ass port. And so, like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, he defied all common sense and followed his gut. He built it, and they came. ‘They’ being the Chinese, Malays and Indonesians that were attracted by Singapore’s free port status and open immigration policy.
Singapore became a major trade center and it boomed. This is when the city really took off, and also when pirates ran amok. Sir Raffles was in and out of Singapore all the time, but he had a heavy hand in its urban planning. And because no colonial story is without its brush of racism, he had organized the city so all its ethnic groups could live in their own little enclaves and never actually have to see each other. This may be why Singapore has such a defined Chinatown, Little India and Little Arabia. In general though, it was an exciting and dynamic time in Singapore and the city saw explosive growth.
But so much awesomeness can only last so long. And just like everywhere else in the world, Singapore felt the sting of WW2. Singapore had defenses. Every major port back then did, what with the pirates and all. Unfortunately, Singapore was prepared for a sea-based attack, and the Japanese came through Malaysia. It was a military strategy based on the Looney Tunes gimmick where Elmer Fudd lays in wait, pointing his gun at the rabbit hole while Bugs Bunny tiptoes up behind him, taps him on the shoulder and then blows his head off with an Acme brand rifle. Winston Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.
The Japanese lived up to their reputation as being kind of mean as far as occupying forces go. Especially since Singapore had a huge educated Chinese population, whom the Japanese were not wildly fond of. Off with their heads! It was brutal for a while, and lasted until the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (they had invaded Singapore about a month after Pearl Harbor). The British took Singapore back, but it was pretty obvious it wouldn’t last long seeing as how the Japanese had such an embarrassingly easy time taking it from them just a few years before.
Fast forward to 1958, when the Communistesque People’s Action Party was voted into office. This was when colonialism was starting to smack a touch of racism and exploitation and it was thus becoming very uncool. Britain knew that she would never be voted prom queen if she didn’t drop the colonies like a velvet scrunchy. But she definitely couldn’t let it go if they were going to swing Communist… What to do, what to do…
In 1961, someone suggested a merger of Singapore and Malaya including the territories of Sabah, Sarawak, British Borneo and Brunei. Singapore declared independence from the Queen in 1963 just before the Malaya merger, thus freeing the British of Singapore and Singapore of the British. And the Federation of Malaysia was born. Unfortunately, the new fusion country did not have an easy start. First of all, the Philippines were, and remain, pretty sure that Sabah belongs to them and cut off all ties with the country. Then Indonesia, believing that they had claim to all of Borneo, began a three-year military confrontation. So the first official act of the new country was to piss off all the neighbors. Good job.
But wait, there’s more! Brunei was all about this plan until the Sultan thought about it for two seconds, realized that he was effectively about to sign over his fabulously rich and oil-bearing country to Kuala Lumpur, and decided to sign it off to his oldest son instead. So no Brunei.
Aside from being full of oil, Brunei was also full of Malays. This was important to The Powers That Be in KL, because without Brunei, the Malaya/Singapore joining created a country with an ethnic Chinese majority. KL needed Malays from Brunei to balance out the Chinese from Singapore.
Tension between the leaders of Singapore and the leaders of Malaya, and general disagreement over politics, economics and social policies trickled down to the people. The tension led to a series race riots in 1964 between Singapore’s Chinese and Malays. Despite government attempts to squelch the riots, the violence didn’t stop. So in August of 1965 Singapore was booted out of the Federation.
Singapore was now the independent country that exists today. And this is where my history recap stops. After independence, Singapore had problems of unemployment, housing shortages and a notable lack of natural resources. But Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s administration (1959-1990), through boring economic and social policies, managed to put it all right, and today Singapore is the 17th richest country in the world (based on GDP per capita). It’s quite the accomplishment actually. Definitely a resume-builder for Mr. Lee.
::I know it’s wildly nerdy, but I love this story. I’ve loved it for years and have told basically anyone who will listen ALL about Singapore’s origin story. It wasn’t good for much except making people’s eyes glaze over, until one fateful day… A few years ago, I was taking a class at the University of Canterbury about nationalism in Southeast Asia and the professor asked us if anyone knew how Singapore became a country. Did my hand ever shoot up. I recited the story almost verbatim to how it’s written here. The professor looked amused and my classmates looked, well, a little glazed.
Anyway, I think my professor was impressed so I think the story has served its purpose. The point is that there is some value to knowing this stuff. The value is this: for every twenty people you bore, there is one person who will be impressed. And if that person happens to be the one who decides your final grade, then you’ve come out on top.::
12 Hours in Singapore
::In between the trip to KL and the trip to Singapore, I went to Indonesia, which is when the famous near-kidnapping occurred. So now we’re soaring through the air, off to Singapore…::
My last impression of Indonesia was the bird’s eye view of Medan as the plane took off for Singapore. The bulbous mosques; the rusty corrugated tin roofs; the billowing smoke pumped into a blue sky by factories without to restrictions of an EPA. It was quirky, different, gritty… I wanted to stay longer, to see more of Indonesia.
But just like every rose has its thorn, every trip must have its end. This particular leg of the grand adventure was taking me to the spotless metropolis of Singapore. I’ll admit it: I didn’t want to go to Singapore. If it had been solely up to me, we would have gone back to Malaysia from Indonesia and tooled around there for a while. But V was tickled by the notion of visiting three countries in eight days. 24 hours in Singapore wouldn’t kill me.
My media impressions of Singapore came from two places. One being the third ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie, where the go to Singapore and mix up with some Chinese pirates. The other being the Tom Waits song. Both paint a delightfully sinister picture of Singapore as a dark and dirty town where anything goes and pirates and one-armed dwarves run amok.
With a bar set so high I knew I was bound for disappointment. What I had heard from people who had actually been there is that Singapore is clean, controlled and kind of boring. Kind of like the Central Business District in Saigon, but an entire city of just that. Nothing to do but eat and shop. Sounds like exactly the kind of place I would never want to go to.
This is what was in my head as the plane began its descent. When I felt the plane tip its nose towards the ground, I glanced out the window on my left. My jaw dropped. Singapore was beautiful. The first thing I noticed was the pristine blue-green ocean, full of toy-like tanker ships. Full of them. Then the shiny white skyscrapers making up the Singapore skyline. My eyes were glued to the window as the plan landed.
Customs was simple, and we soon found ourselves outside the terminal, in need of a metro transfer into the city. In Vietnam this would have taken easily twenty minutes of asking people, being misunderstood, pointed in the wrong direction or ignored. But one thing about Singapore, which I had forgotten about until it became very useful, is that everyone speaks English. I asked a woman at the Singapore Tourism Board kiosk and not only did she tell us where the metro stop was, but she also suggested we call the main train station (where we were going) and double check that they had available overnight train tickets to Malaysia. We wouldn’t want to waste our time going over there for nothing, she explained with a smile as she jotted the train station’s phone number down on a piece of scrap paper which she gave us along with a subway map.
Um. Wow. Not only did I not have to struggle to find a way to explain what I wanted, but she answered all my questions perfectly and even offered a few extra tips. This would absolutely never happen in Vietnam. Even if I could speak Vietnamese in a way that would make myself understood I would never get this level of service. Going beyond the single task you were given is not something that we do here. Service is just not a consideration (I went to a restaurant in Saigon once, ordered, waited 45 minutes before the waitress reappeared only to tell us that the chef actually hadn’t shown up yet, and would we like to order a pizza instead? Because she could make the pizza herself and then we wouldn’t have to wait indefinitely. That this might have been good information to share 45 minutes before, when we ordered, apparently never occurred to her).
It was nice to be helped, and we found the metro with no difficulties. We got on the metro with no difficulties. We found our stop and got off with no difficulties. Then we walked to the train station, bought our tickets and stored our bags with yep, no difficulties. Singapore is possibly the easiest place I’ve ever been. It’s like the theoretical town from the Walgreen’s commercials. Perfect is based on Singapore.
It wasn’t quite lunch time, but we were both hungry so we set out on a long and winding road of my choosing towards the super secret spot I was bringing V for lunch. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed walking around Singapore. It’s remarkably pedestrian friendly, which is something I always value in urban areas (up there with comprehensive public transportation- two points for Singapore!).
It’s also clean, but not as disconcertingly clean as I had expected, and kind of quirky. The evidence of a colonial history is evident in the architecture as well as the unanticipated statues and signage that popped up along our path to enlighten us about the who, what, when, where and why of Singapore’s short life as a country. I’ll elaborate in the next post.
W I was starving before we got to the super secret lunch spot. It made it all the better. I had been dragging V to one of Singapore’s famous hawker center’s, this one in Chinatown. See, Singapore used to have all sort of street vendors dotting the sidewalk, like the have in Vietnam, but at one point decided to clean up the city and make it illegal to take up the sidewalk space with your mini-business. So they moved the hawkers into centers.
The idea is very similar to a mall food court, only dirtier and cheaper. I had a dish of noodles with seafood and peanut sauce for about $3USD, and a drink that I bought purely for the fun of it:
Now that we were fueled and recharged, we set out for the infamous Merlion statue because we absolutely, positively HAD to take pictures of it. It was easy enough to find, and did make for some iconic pictures.
Next it was my turn to pick the destination. I knew exactly where I wanted to go. I had found the Singapore Art Museum on the map and had my heart set on it from the moment we set out. I haven’t been to an art museum to far too long (the decaying Museum of Fine Arts n Saigon does not count). I used my old college ID to get discounted admission and spent an hour and a half going through all the rooms. It was a pretty small museum, but there were some great pieces. I wasn’t really interested in their featured exhibition (Xu Beihong- a Chinese artist who spent some time in Singapore), but I really enjoyed their permanent collections that focused on artists from South East Asia. I wrote down some of the names of my favorites for Googling later, but have since misplaced the list.
::I never found it::
Anyway, it was a good way to spend some time. Afterwards there was some more walking, some shopping, more walking and eventually we found ourselves on Arab Street. That made for some fun walking around. I found some beautiful dishes that were hand-painted in Afghanistan. Only $50USD per plate. Apparently this is what people buy when they have more money than they know how to spend.
I had dinner in the enclave at a café selling food that was completely unfamiliar to me. I pointed to whatever looked like fun and then had my poor, confused server give me whatever his favorite thing was. Plus a lemonade. It was all really good. The sun was starting to go down and it was notably cooler as we wandered away from Arab Street.
We caught the MRT back down to Chinatown so we could go shopping in the night market, and V could get some Chinese food at the hawker center, for a few hours before our train left. I bought some silk and velvet pillowcases, and V bought presents for everyone she knows. It made me feel kind of like a bad friend, but not enough of one to actually buy gifts. That was about it. We went to the train station, got our bags; I took a shower and then we hopped on the sleeper train. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Singapore. It wasn’t as creepily clean and controlled as I had expected. I’ll go back.
::What good foreshadowing to end the post on. Also, I have a note about those pillowcases–I dragged them all across the world, from Vietnam to Knoxville to Washington to Christchurch, since they were so special and souveniry. You know, real one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime kind of things. Or so I thought, until I went into a Chinese $2 shop at Riccarton mall, looking to buy a tiny top hat that pins to one’s hair (I had a formal occasion to go to, so it was necessary) and what do you think I found? Yes, my Singaporean pillow cases. Well played, Singapore, well played.::
Kuala Lumpur Redux
::So, despite swearing off international airports, I’ve left New Zealand’s fine shores for some tropical adventures. I’m in Malaysia, is what I mean. And instead of writing a whole batch of stuff in advance and setting the robot to post, I’m actually going to copy things from an old blog and paste them here. It’s basically stuff I wrote way, way in advance. Like four years in advance. I’m so foresightful, I know.
What it is is this–my notes and observations from Kuala Lumpur and Singapore the first time I went, back in 2008. This way when I come back, I can tell you how my perspective has changed now that I’m older and wiser. Also, I was living in Vietnam at the time I wrote these, and I think they smack of deprived obsession with air conditioning and clean public spaces. This probably won’t be the case this time around.
Anyway, here we go… Staring with the trip to Kuala Lumpur, which will be referred to as KL from here on out. I went with my friend Van, which is who V is. Acronyms everywhere!::
We stayed at V’s friend Steven’s house for the night. Steven is going to school for Tourism and Hospitality in KL and lives with a handful of other Vietnamese students. Apparently Malaysia is a popular place for young Vietnamese to go for college as it is cheaper than Singapore, which is cheaper than Australia.
Steven had the day off, so he offered to be our fearless leader for the day and brought us to KL’s most notorious landmark- the Petronas Towers.
Up until that moment I had been completely ignorant as to what was in the towers. Offices? Apartments? Was it full of coins like Uncle Scrooge’s money bin? Or maybe completely empty, just a shell of a building, existing for the sole purpose of being the second tallest building in the world? The possibilities were endless and amazing. As it turns out, the towers (known as the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center or KLCC) were full of offices, a convention center (hence the name) and a shopping mall. A glorious, glorious shopping mall.
We got there around lunchtime and hit up the food court. I had an amazing Malaysian dish of curried beef over rice made with coconut milk. The rice was fantastic and complemented the curry perfectly. I found a recipe and it’s ridiculously simple. I’m going to give it a shot next time I’m inclined to cook up some curry.
::Present-day self would like to note that this promise was forgotten almost immediately upon typing it::
After a languorous lunch, we hit the mall.
::Gah, I can’t read this without cringing. Lunch was not a languorous affair, but rather a languid one. I’ve acquired a dictionary since writing this::
I am completely unashamed to admit that I spent my first day in a foreign country entirely in a shopping mall. To me, a modern shopping mall is as exotic and remote as a jungle trek in Sumatra. I have never in my life been so happy to see a Gap. Not only did I get giddy at the familiarity of the stores and their products (Gap, the Body Shop, Dunkin Donuts…), but I reveled in their normal sized clothing. I held up a pair of pants to my waist and smiled as the hems flopped all the way down to my feet. All the way to my feet! “I’m not a gigantic freak!” I proclaimed out loud, causing a store associate to look up, mild concern on his face.
I bought a pair of pants, which is something I haven’t done in over seven months. You better believe that I hate, with a fiery passion, each item of clothing I own and have been wearing on a weekly rotation every day for over half a year. New pants are good for my wardrobe as well as my mental health. I would have gone all out (pants, shorts, t-shirts…) if it weren’t for my desire to spend my money on something else. Something I miss even more than new clothes.
I found a bookstore. Like a bona fide English language bookstore. Again, something I haven’t seen for over seven months. They had everything. I spent at least an hour pouring over every shelf in the store remembering authors that I had meant to read, discovering new books from favorite writers, reading back covers and smiling at those books that I had read years ago and then forgot existed. I loaded up. I spent more money on books than I did on accommodation over the course of the entire trip. It was completely worth it.
We took a fruit break after that. According to the Lonely Planet, crushed ice covered in tropical fruits and juices is a popular snack in Malaysia. It was another gastronomical treat. It was like a sno-cone that didn’t taste like sugar and dye. And I even like those. Between all the deliciousness and my bag full of purchases I was uncontrollably giddy.
There was something else that delighted me too. People watching. It’s a fun activity anywhere, but something I noticed in KLCC made it especially appealing. Everyone in Malaysia looks different. Malaysia is an ethnically diverse country; full of Malays, Chinese, Indians and the less common but still present white people. And everyone was dressed differently too. Muslim women in their jilbabs, businessmen in their suits, punky teenagers in baggy jeans hanging out in the mall lobby, tourists in socks and sandals, girls dressed way too provocatively for a day at the mall, hopeless middle-agers with airbrushed kittens on their t-shirts… Their differences shocked and fascinated me.
Diversity is something I only sort of knew was lacking in Vietnam. On the one hand you’d have to be blind not to notice the cultural homogeneity, but on the other hand it’s very easy to start to think it’s normal. Vietnam has never been a hugely popular immigration destination, and the party is not so sensitive to their country’s minorities (like the Hmong and the Khmers), so it makes historical sense that there’s not a lot of diversity.
Back to Malaysia. We wanted to get onto the viewing bridge of the towers and check out the vista. I heard it was a pretty awesome view of KL. So we nabbed a trio of free tickets and hung around until 3 o’clock, when we were scheduled to go up. We browsed and ate gelato to kill the time. Finally, it was our turn. We clambered into the elevator with twenty other tourists and rode all the way to the 40somethingth floor. Here’s the viewing bridge:
And here’s KL in all its grandeur:
You win some you lose some.
After all of that, our feet hurt and we were a little tired of shopping (read: broke). But we had two hours before two of Steven’s roommates were supposed to meet us there for dinner. Also, as per the above photo, it was pouring rain out. So we did the logical thing and went to a movie. A movie! How amazingly normal, yet belonging completely to a world I no longer lived in. I was all about a movie. We saw a Chinese film about historical battles between kingdoms, loyalty, strength, filial piety and acceptance of fate. It was basically the most stereotypically Chinese movie ever made. Enjoyable enough though.
What was not enjoyable was the air conditioning. I live in a sub-tropical country and don’t have ac. I’m used to the heat at this point. Apparently Malaysian filmgoers are not. It was frigid. That was another new experience. I haven’t been cold, like actually cold, since maybe March of 2007. Over a year. And there I was, shivering in Malaysia, tucking my hands between my knees. At the end of the movie my legs ached from my muscles contracting. It reminded me of why I left New York.
After it was over, we met up with the roommates and went out to a Malaysian/Thai restaurant for dinner. At 10:30, V and I left for the bus station. We had an over night bus to catch to Butterworth. The plan was to get to Indonesia by boat from northern Malaysia. We were going to be back in KL for the last two days of our trip, so we would have a chance to see something of the city other than it’s most famous shopping mall. I was pretty content with KLCC though. It was like a big sigh of relief- a step back into the comfort zone that I left a long time ago. It was nice for a day. But it was time to step out again.
::Hopefully I’ll spend less of this year’s vacation marveling over pants. One can only hope.::
The Fanciest Burger King
Cultural differences come in all sorts of packages. Sometimes they even come in packages that might superficially look like something homogeneous, say globalisation.
Take McDonalds, which is basically the creepy face of global sameness.
Pictured: the world's lowest common demonimator
MacDonald’s whole business structure is based on the regularity of their product. From the seat covers to the shape of the ketchup packets to the percentage of pink slime in each Happy Meal, every MacDonald’s experience between Witcheta and Warsaw is going to be pretty predictable.
There are a few cases of cultural adaptation though, which McDonalds is actually semi-famous for. Like, do you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in France? A royale with cheese. It’s because they use the metric system.
McDonalds tweaks the actual food sometimes too–in Thailand you can buy a McThai burger, which is made of pork and seasoned with cilantro and lemongrass or something equally exotic and Asian. When I moved to New Zealand in 1998, the McDonalds here sold KiwiBurgers, which were essentially Big Macs with a fried egg and slices of canned beets on top.
The point is, that while certain aspects of the McDonalds experience are tightly controlled, others are deliberately adapted to better suit the culture. What’s interesting is to note which aspects are changed, and then drawing subsequent conclusions about the target audience. Fun, right?
Forget the menu item differences. I think the KiwiBurger has been discontinued anyway. What’s more interesting are the things that they make the food out of. These are known colloquially as ‘ingredients’ and can be identified as those curious items in the grocery store that do not feature plastic wrap and attached lists of polysyllabic scientific innovations that made them possible. Things like eggs.
Eggs used in American McDonalds come from battery hens, which live packed in dank little cages and are all depressed and diseasey. I won’t go into the whole factory chicken thing, since I would be surprised to find anyone who doesn’t already sort of know about them. The point is, we Americans get around this by a mental trick called ignoring things that upset us. As such, most of our eggs and meat comes from really awful places.
Not so in New Zealand McDonalds. Cage-free eggs only. Really? Really. That said, I’m sure there are economic reasons that cage-free eggs are easier for NZ McDonalds to use than the American restaurants… Being on an isolated archipelago has some effect on supply chains. The point is, it’s an interesting difference to note since it doesn’t speak to local tastes at all, but rather local value sets.
Moving on the the restaurants themselves. I haven’t been into an American McDonalds in a very long time, so my memories are a bit hazy. What I remember is that they are awful places to be–crowds of hungry people (the worst kind of people to find in a crowd), underpaid staffers yelling numbers out like auctioneers, paper wrappers congealed with cheese strewn on the floor and smelling of grease and the stale urine of the PlayPlace. Mmmm… unfettered capitalism.
And then you have McDonalds in New Zealand. Maybe it’s the $13/hour minimum wage, but everyone seems a lot happier and calmer. They tend to be cleaner too. More expensive, sure, but still cheaper than a hamburger at a restaurant with waiters and a liquor license. I think the extra few dollars are worth not being in a place that makes me to weep into my Quarter Pounder over the tragedy of the human condition.
Let me offer this tidbit regarding how clean and sleek New Zealand’s McDonalds are: a number of them offer meeting room space to be rented out to business people, with wifi and everything. Legitimately. People will have important business meetings at McDonalds. I think this might be catching on in the US… I found a Yelp review of a McDonalds in California with a meeting room and the reviewer was shocked and amazed by the thing. Almost as shocked and amazed as I was that a McDonalds got an average of 4 stars on Yelp.
I think all of this says something about New Zealanders. Kiwis are clearly not as good as Americans at ignoring awfulness. But don’t feel bad New Zealand, it’s a skill set that you can develop over time. I think it would be beneficial if you developed an electoral system that featured two parties, neither of which ever manage to represent general public opinion. Disenfranchisement helps a lot with accepting an unpleasant status quo.
Anyway, this brings us to the fanciest Burger King of the title. Because McDonalds does not have a monopoly on surprisingly posh fast food outlets. There’s a Burger King on Cuba St that is so fancy-looking from the outside that we daren’t go into it. I doubt I’d fit the dress code on an average day.
No not really. The reason I don’t go in is because there are myriad better places to eat in downtown Wellington. Still, I like to admire the architecture of the Burger King (which goes on the list of things I never thought I’d say). Behold: the fanciest Burger King in all the land…
