Singapore: Three Days of Watching the Bus You Want Drive By

Our first stop on our 23 day adventure through Southeast Asia was Singapore. Our stay in Singapore was unique because we were fortunate enough to have an old friend of Seth’s (who lives in the US but is home visiting his family in Singapore) and his girlfriend (who is also Singaporian but living in the states) give us the grand tour for 2 days. They were both really friendly and made excellent tour guides since they lived in Singapore until college. Honestly, If we didn’t have them to show us around, I’m not we would have seen half of what we did. Seth and I didn’t have much success navigating the public transportation. More on that later…
Singapore is a melting pot of South Eastern Asia cultures and it’s very apparent when you walk around the city, especially after spending 6 months in a very homogeneous country. It was really refreshing to see people who looked and dressed differently from each other. Singapore is mostly a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian people, but there are some other groups mixed in as well. Seth’s friend YS is sixth or seventh generation Chinese living in Singapore. He explained that people like him don’t identify with Chinese culture as much as they do with Singapore culture. Recently there has been an influx of Chinese to the country which has caused some tensions between the Singapore-Chinese and Chinese. YS also explained that when the British came to Singapore, they brought with them their Indian servants ,which is why there are so many Indians in the country. In Singapore there are different areas where large groups of each of these ethnicities reside (Arab Street, Little India, Chinatown, etc) each with its own unique cultural flavor. Little India was my favorite by far. It’s very colorful and very different from any place I have seen so far in my life.
The official language of Singapore is English, although people speak a variety of other languages. It was nice to be able to communicate with random people again, even if their English is difficult to understand. At one point our trip we ended up in a taxi with 2 Vietnamese people who were speaking in English to the taxi driver and even though they were speaking English, Seth and I could barely understand a word they were saying.
One of the more interesting things we were able to experience because of our tour guides was Singapore public housing. Their public housing is different than anything I have ever seen. Its unique because the different developments are self-sustaining. High rise buildings are set up around the perimeter of a town square area. Within the town square is pretty much anything you could ever need to get by in life: food stores, bakeries, computer stores, furniture stores, restaurants, banks, a post office, etc. YS’s girlfriend’s family lives in one of these public housing complexes and explained that most people don’t need to leave their complex to go shopping at all. They took us to two different developments where we walked around and tried a bunch of delicious foods (including an actual ice cream sandwich where they put a block of ice cream on a slice of white bread…apparently it’s a favorite of kids). It was interesting to get to see a side of Singapore that most tourists don’t get to see.
One famous landmark in Singapore is the Singapore Flyer. I believe it is (or was) the tallest flyer in the world. It looks like a giant Ferris wheel that takes about a half hour to complete a rotation. Instead of individual chairs, there are giant pods where 10-20 people can sit and stand and look out the windows. The Singapore Flyer was one of the main things I wanted to experience in Singapore since I’ve never been on anything like that before. Wednesday evening we decided to go and ride the Flyer. Our excursion ended up being a huge disaster (as were most of our attempts at public transportation). We missed our bus stop by miles, ended up at a popular shopping district that was nice to walk around, went and got 2 beers at a trendy bar where the beers ended up costing over $15 each (oops!), took the subway to what we thought was the flyer and ended up in some construction area with hundreds of men from Bangladesh who were loading into the backs of trucks after their shift, took at taxi with a really nice Vietnamese couple who made the same mistake we did, and just made the final ride on the Flyer. After exiting the Flyer at around 11:00 (mind you, at this point we hadn’t eaten dinner) we attempted to find a bus that would take us back to our hotel. After about an hour of wandering and waiting we gave in and took a taxi home. As you can imagine, neither of us were in the best of moods by the time we got home that night.
Thursday night, also New Year’s Eve, didn’t start off that much more successful. At this point we had run out of Singaporian dollars so we needed to find a place to exchange money. After missing a few buses and getting on the wrong bus, we eventually found a stand where we could change money. Our next stop was at an ocean-side restaurant to get a famous Singapore dish called chili crab. We ended up missing our bus stop and riding the bus 30 minutes out of our way but eventually got to our restaurant. We ordered our food (which was DELICIOUS by the way) and when it came time to pay, realized that we didn’t have enough Singapore dollars or enough US dollars to cover the bill. Luckily, the wait staff was really nice and let us pay in part Singapore, part US money. After dinner, with only about 20 minutes to spare until midnight, we rushed downtown to see some fireworks at 12am.
Some other interesting places we went included:
- Sentosa Island which is like a mini island theme park and very touristy, minus one beach area we found.
-Buddha Tooth Relic Temple which is a temple that opened in 2007 that supposedly houses one of Buddha’s teeth. However, the tooth was tested recently and it was discovered that it’s not a human tooth. The temple was really beautiful though, and is the only temple I’ve ever been in that has AC and an elevator .
-Hawker centers which are centers with little tiny booths that sell a wide variety of delicious S.E. Asian foods. Surrounding and in between these stands are little tables for people to eat at. The hawker centers are awesome for two reasons; the food is super cheap and the food is really delicious since each stand specializes in only a few things.
So to sum up our 3 days in Singapore, we spent a lot of time waiting for buses, getting on the wrong buses, and rushing around. But minus those temporary moments of frustration, I had a really great time, saw a lot of unique things, and ate some delicious food.