I'm gonna be honest about Singapore: I wasn't totally excited to come here.
I've been to Singapore once before, over a year ago, on a 24-hour layover with my brother. It was a fun day, of course, but Singapore didn't really stay with me in the way other places in the world have. There was no grit, no feel, no overwhelming sense of place. I left thinking, "Well, that was nice, but I don't really have to come here again."
Wrong. Turns out second looks are a blessing.
In the last few days, Fellow Awesome Seekers, Singapore has really blown me away. I haven't been blogging because there has been just so much to do and so many things to see. It makes sense--Singapore is a city (country? city-country?) of over 5 million people, all crammed into a finite piece of land. It's a churning sea of different cultures, a place that's still finding its own identity while being proud of its history. It's young, while old, and people seem excited by the idea that they can still define what Singapore is to the world.
It's also probably the cleanest place I've ever been, which is what I remembered most about my last visit. Singapore seems to have no dirt, but still has a lot of trees (HOW DO THEY GROW??). In fact, if you asked me to define Singapore with one adjective, I would quickly respond: shiny. This place glows, sparkles, creates an aura of breathtaking Awesomeness, day or night (but especially night).
Berna, my friend and producer on this trip, had a pretty accurate first impression: "It's like a giant business lounge, built into a jungle."
I feel poor just looking at the city.
And maybe that's why it rubbed me the wrong way the first time I was here--in the same way I don't go to Beverly Hills on days I want to feel good about myself, Singapore seemed to celebrate the haves while completely ignoring the have nots.
But what I should have realized is that a 24-hour layover will never tell you the full story about a place, even a small city-country kinda place like Singapore. Turns out, there's a whole lot more to Singapore than its initial giant-shopping-mall impression.
This city is cool, but you have to work to find its flavor, its essence of what makes Singapore truly Awesome. It reminds me of Los Angeles in that way; Awesome is not handed to you, you must make it, find it, create it. You must listen to locals and stray off the nicely landscaped boulevards. You must want to like it, and not simply expect to.
Which is great in Singapore, because it's so safe here that even walking down a dimly lit back alley at night really doesn't raise the same alarm bells it would anywhere else. (One cab driver explained it well: The punishments are so harsh in Singapore, no one even really thinks about committing crimes. This place still canes people regularly, on top of jail time. You know, he said matter-of-factly, six months, six strokes. Um, what??)
Example: Berna and I followed a local ex-pat's advice in a search for genuine dim sum. "You want the real deal?" he said, and then jotted down some serious taxi directions on how to get there when we nodded. It was in the red light district of Singapore, he explained, but just so good, and there were durian stalls right across the street. Lots of them.
Dim sum? Hookers?? Durian??? Sold.
The dim sum was Awesome. We were absolutely the only non-Chinese people there, deciphering a menu that thankfully had pictures. (Shark fin soup and fried frog legs?? We didn't quite go that far, but we could have.) It was also just cool to be able to leave, wander the "red light district"--hookers and all--as two super-foreign women, and feel 100% safe. And this is coming from someone that takes her safety pretty darn seriously. High five, Singapore.
Since we're on the topic of food: Singapore has a lot of it. It's known for its hawker street food stalls, which serve up a pretty wide variety of grub from the melting pot of cultures that make up Singapore. We filmed a segment on the different street food to be found in Singapore, led by Singapore's Food Ambassador, Violet Oon.
Dear god, it was interesting, and (mostly) delicious. A totally eclectic mix of stuff filled my belly. I managed to cram down mutton-filled murtabak, chicken curry, roti prata, a veggie spring roll, rojak (a veggie and fruit salad covered in shrimp paste and tamarind), fried oyster omlette, and a red-bean-filled-condensed-milk-covered snow ball for dessert.
That whole vegetarian thing has been forced to completely disappear on this trip, at least on camera. But I guess that's the job, huh. It felt good to overcome food fears--like oysters, for example (this was my first)--because, well, I kinda had to. You don't really keep this kind of job if you can't appreciate the different food for your audience.
And so appreciate I did.
Now, real quick, before I've lost all you Awesome Seekers in the obscurity of a blog post that is far too long (and perhaps much too general), let me just leave you with maybe my favorite part about Singapore: The trees. Ugh, I love the trees. The Director of PR for the Four Seasons Singapore where we are staying (IT IS GORGEOUS, BY THE WAY) called our rooms our own "luxury tree house," and at first I laughed before realizing it's pretty spot on. Looking from above, Singapore is covered in a blanket of trees. It's like a giant park that happens to have a city in it, instead of the other way around.
We took a trip to the Urban Redevelopment Authority to find out a bit about city planning and urban development in Singapore, and what I thought was going to be some stuffy, dry room full of unimpressive city models turned out to be one of the coolest displays of Awesomeness I've seen in a while. A full-fledged, super-detailed, million-dollar scale model of Singapore covered the floor of a huge gallery, and interactive displays described the growth of the city in the last century and into the future. I'm not much of a nerd for urban planning, but I could not get over the coolness of it all.
All the trees were finally explained as well. Turns out Singapore, with its space limited and land at a premium, has developed a rule based off the Japanese city of Yokohama. Any land that is developed into a building, must be replaced by the builders in the form of a park somewhere within the building, whether in a courtyard, on a roof, wherever. And not just any park, but a publicly accessible park, so that major developments can not take away public park space from the people and the city.
I LOVE THIS IDEA SO MUCH.
I could continue to geek-out about the intense (and thoughtful) planning going on with this city, but for now, let me just leave it at this: I'm excited to see where this city goes. With its seemingly endless budget, its multi-cultural population, its attention to eco-friendliness, and its interesting uses of space and architecture and design. There are some seriously Awesome things going on here.
And, let's not forget to mention this sign from a restaurant I ate at a few days ago:
Stay Awesome, indeed, my friends.
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