sing a pore

            What’s up, Singapore?! We only had 12 hours in this fascination of a town. For those of you that don’t know, Singapore is a pretty cool place. Singapore is both a country and a city. It has a higher average income than the average per capita income in the United States. Actually much higher. I don't know the number, but you can tell. Everything there is about money. High-end retail stores are at every turn, swanky restaurants dot the streets, all taxi cabs are Mercedes and casual dress means business casual. It is one of the best planned cities in the world. I have taken a couple of classes on urban planning at Michigan and Singapore is constantly held up the ideal example of a well-planned city. Its public transportation system is more sustainably efficient and effective than any other system in the world. Many people live in large apartment style complexes designed to be small microcosms of the actual society. The percentage of residents in these complexes mirror the percentages of people in various income-levels, races, etc. in the larger Singaporean society. Going there, feeling like I was going to the holy grail of planning, led me to have very high expectations.

            In the end, I mostly got this eerie feeling of being in a bizarre utopia. Possibly, because it was too planned.  I felt (and the people I was with, who hadn't studied its mapped out streets and intricate metro system, noticed as well) that things just seemed to be working a little too smoothly. Everyone had money and was shopping or eating, living in opulence in some way. Everything was perfectly clean. I could have eaten off the floor of the metro station. Everyone was going somewhere with a purpose. No one was chatting or catching up on the side of the street. And no one was dancing because it is illegal to do that in public. It is also illegal to spit, practice homosexual acts, and own a car for more than 10 years.

            While I was there we crammed as much as you possibly could into 12 hours. I was exhausted by the time I returned to the boat. We went to the main shopping district and looked at the fancy designer stores. We went to see the Merlion fountain. They are obsessed with this half fish, half lion figure and this large statue of the mythical animal projects water from its mouth in the center of town. We went to China Town, which was weird because we are going to be there in a few weeks. We walked through a beautiful Buddhist temple. We had lunch at a place called a Hawker Centre. Just imagine a really clean supersized food court that serves awesome Pad Thai. We went to the Raffles Hotel, which is this beautiful old British style hotel. It was where the Singapore Sling was invented so we obviously got one. We ended our day sneaking up to the top of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. This hotel is composed of 3 towers, each 57 stories tall. The towers are connected by a large structure on top of that 57^th floor, which resembles a boat. Extending across the entire length of that structure is a pool, which gives the illusion of spilling over the edge of the building. You are not allowed to the top unless you are a guest but we made some friends with the people on the elevator ride up and, once we realized that “we left our cards in our rooms," they were nice enough to offer to let us go to the pool with them.

            We spent our last couple of hours in Singapore watching the sun set from the pool. What a life.

Bailey and I at the merlion.