Singa-pure

Well, as an intro to SE Asia, Singapore is definitely a good stop…but as everyone there advised me: “don’t stay too long or you won’t get a total flavor of South East Asia’s best treasures.” So I spent a couple of days just sort of roaming the streets. Thanks to Vero (my friend at Fairmont Mayakoba) I got VIP treatment at the Fairmont. Despite arriving super-early in the AM after skipping a night (flight left at 1PM South Africa time and arrived at 5:35AM Singapore time) I was able to check-in to a 1BD suite and close all the night shades for some rest. I then realized that the hotel…and from my experience EVERY building in Singapore…is connected to a mall. Yes, I’m talking huge malls that occupy at least 4 and sometimes up to 11 floors of retail shops and the inevitable food courts. My first food court experience made me feel like Crocodile Dundee in New York City – I had no idea what the dishes were and most of the workers had limited English skills. I ended up pointing to a menu and asking for chicken. Turned out decent, but paled in comparison to my later meals at “hawker centres” and the famous Singaporean beef noodle dish and pepper crab delight. Well, despite the fact that you could get away with no sunlight and just explore buildings all day in Singapore, I did manage to walk around.

The architecture is very cool and the city is extremely well organized and clean. The nutshell is that in the last 40 years the government completely transformed a small island in the middle of Malaysia to a business haven and launch point for SE Asia by encouraging foreign investment, investing in infrastructure and creating a super safe (if somewhat sterile) environment (no spitting, no selling chewing gum) where everyone follows the rules. I loved seeing people waiting at intersections until the “WALK” light came on despite there not being a car in sight. One of my favorite modern buildings was the new Supreme Court building. During my self-guided tour of the building a worker asked me if I wanted to see a live case. I opted for the drug case and got to see justice in action, complete with the traditional gowns worn by the judges and lawyers (yeah, my bro would look great in one of those…haha). It was in the fact verification stage and the prosecutor was grilling the accused on the witness stand. It was obvious that the man was involved in drug smuggling but since the consequence can be the death sentence, the man continued to lie out of his teeth that he didn’t know it was drugs he was shipping. And Clinton never inhaled.

Of course, I liked to walk around chewing my imported gum and jaywalking, but besides that I had to be well-behaved. And after 3 days here I did take the advice of locals and jumped on a flight to Kuta Kinabalu, Malaysia where the highest peak in SE Asia (Mount Kinabalu at 4,100 meters) resides.