Big Brother Loves Santa

The trip down to Singapore was a breeze. Our train left KL at just after 8:30 in the morning and about seven hours later we rolled into Singapore. The train was fast and comfortable, and Immigration at the border between the two didn't take all that long. Apparently there was a big scary man with a big scary gun standing next to the queues for Immigration on the Singapore side but only my sister saw that. Sends out quite the strong message - "Don't fuck with Singapore!" Luckily my sister and I have full intentions of behaving ourselves while on this tiny island nation, and we passed into the country without any sticky situations with customs like we experienced when we left Indonesia.

At the train station we (of course) found some locals hawking brochures for their hostels, so we picked one and went along for the ride to go and check it out. Turned out to be an alright place in a good central location. Driving through the streets of Singapore was a bit odd. It felt as if we could've been driving through somewhere back home, like Toronto or Denver or something Western like that. Wide streets with proper lanes (and drivers actually behaving themselves instead of zigzagging through oncoming traffic which is the norm in the rest of Asia), huge square skyscrapers soaring up above our heads, lots and lots of greenery and parks, and streets so clean you could practically eat off of them. Singapore is actually known as the Cleanest City In Asia, and I fully believe it. With very stiff fines for littering, spitting, or even smoking in public, it's no wonder that the streets are completely free of any garbage. Hell, Singapore is a Western city that Western cities back home aspire to be.

Singapore is known globally as 'The Nanny State' because of it's stiff control over immigration, public behavior, social organization, traffic and housing, laws, and well, just about everything, really. Besides the laws over littering/spitting/etc., Singapore has a wide range of laws varying from extremely strict drug penalties (death) to limiting the amount of car ownership in the country, to the maximum height of buildings allowed, to the number of people living within x-amount of square metres before constructing a subway station to... Well it all feels like one giant social experiment, to be honest. Almost a little 'Big Brotherish' actually, you can see the government's gentle guiding hand just about everywhere. However, it seems to be working out pretty well for the locals. Everyone speaks perfect English, people actually wait at traffic lights before crossing, home ownership is the highest in the world, people are respectable and well-behaved, the city's layout and transit networks are organized and efficient to a near degree of OCD, ... It's a really cool place, but it sorta feels like a combination of Stepford and SimCity, in an Asian context.

Regardless, it's a very easy place to be a tourist. Almost too easy one could say. Janelle and I would be walking down the street, shopping bags in hand from Converse and TopShop, having just left HMV, on our way to a Starbucks, discussing whether we want pizza or sushi for dinner, listening to the nearest TATU single being blasted out from a giant TV billboard, and surrounded by a billion and one Christmas decorations hanging from the palm trees. Cool, but surreal at the same time. You almost feel like you're cheating, like you've left BackpackerWorld behind temporarily, and you actually forget that you're really, really far from home. If it wasn't for the constant tropical heat and humidity (Singapore is only 1 degree above the equator and is therefore hot and sweaty year round) you'd swear you were in Vancouver or Los Angeles or something.

And about Christmas... I haven't thought too much about the upcoming holidays while on this trip, until here. Not that I'm not excited to be going home for the holidays (I'm thrilled) but I've tried to keep my headspace over here so I can really enjoy the moment and maximize my fun here in Asia, but it's impossible to ignore Christmas while in Singapore. Orchard Road (the main shopping street of Singapore) is decked out full-out hard-core for Christmas. Giant electric stockings and candycanes and evergreen trees hang above the streets, red ribbon and coloured lights are covering every available surface, and they're actually playing Christmas carols in the streets.

The weirdest part was that because it's so warm it really feels like it's all fake, like a Hollywood set, like they're trying so hard to push in this Western holiday that feels nothing like the familiar Christmas I've grown up with. To me, it's not Christmas unless there's snow on the ground, there's a -30 degree windchill outside, there's a decorated tree in my house, and I'm having to run like a mother banshee to get from the house to the car so I can finish my last-minute shopping at the local mall.

Here, you'd be in a nice air-conditioned bookstore (like the massive Borders), and you'd step outside into the streets, only to be hit like a tsunami by the humidity, and then the next instant look around to see all the holly and reindeers and hear "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" while you sweat like a pig in your shorts and sandals. Something doesn't seem to add up in this picture! I'm in Make-BelieveLand! Haha! I've had two non-cold Christmases in my life (one in California, and then last year's in the Philippines) and they've both felt rather odd and foreign to me. Now I'm here in Singapore, it's mid-November, and Singapore has holiday spirit coming out of it's ying-yang. It's like they're overdosing on The Christmas Drug and keep going back for thirds. The city's high on candy canes and mistletoe and everyone's running around with sugarplums dancing in their heads. I feel like this place could be The North Pole, only all the elves are Asian, instead of snow there's palm trees and tropical ferns, and all the toys come from Esprit, Levi's, or Armani. Bizarre!

We really did have a lot of fun here though. I did a bit more shopping (but that's the last of it, I promise!), checked out the cool Urban Planning Museum one afternoon, and on another afternoon we had a fun-filled day at the Singapore Zoological Gardens and the next-door Night Safari. Night Safari is like a second zoo, only it's full of only nocturnal animals so you visit it at night and either ride through on a tram in the dark, or scurry along all the trails in the jungle woods looking for bats, tigers, hyenas, and flying squirrels (some safely behind fences and moats, and others in cages that you can walk through.) It's probably the coolest zoo in the world and being there totally makes you feel like a kid again.

For being such a big, bright, and modern city, our guesthouse was not what you'd expect to find. Accommodation is rather expensive here (actually bloody everything is expensive in Singapore!) and so our room was a fairly basic guesthouse. We had aircon which was nice, but our toilet didn't really flush, which of course I didn't find out until I took a shit and then spent two and a half days and 37 flushes trying to get it to go down the bowl, our shower drain backed up with shampoo foam, and we found a cockroach scurrying out from under the bed that was so big it actually had a train of dust bunnies stuck to it that it was parading around the room. Oh, the fun! :-)

All in all, I actually had a really good time in Singapore, even if it was really expensive. It was nice to get a taste of 'normal' Western life again, I actually went out on the town on my own one night and for once didn't look like a grubby backpacker (thanks the new clothes I had just bought), and the variety of restaurants and shops left us swimming in choices. And despite my teasing, I must confess that I kinda did like all the Christmas get-up, and actually did feel myself slipping into Holiday Mode a bit and looking forward to celebrating it for real, with my family and the cold and snowy evergreens back in Canada in a few weeks.

Well we've had our fun in the big Westernized cities of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, now it's time to get back to Southeast Asia's biggest draw - The Beaches! Thailand, with your glorious sun, island jewels, and aquamarine waters, here we come! :-)