Singapore, hold the Sling

I'm back from Singapore and here's what I have to report:

We got in Saturday morning and headed to Little India, where we checked into an overpriced but funky room over an Australian pub, specially designed for people who don't like to sleep, ever. We spent our first day wandering about--mostly in metro stations trying to find our way out of the giant malls that seem to surround every single exit, and seem to have no exits of their own, much like a Las Vegas Casino with an exclusive clientele of teenyboppers and hipsters--eventually working our way to the one and only Raffles Hotel, where we were hoping to enjoy a Singapore Sling in style at the Long Bar from whence it sprung. Turns out, though, you have to basically sign away your kidneys at the door to be able to afford those things, so we elected instead to nibble a few free peanuts surreptitiously, soaking up the lazy colonial ambiance the place is so famous for, and then retreated out the door before the waitstaff was put in the awkward position of having to explain the traditional practice of actually purchasing something from the establishment you're in. Oh well. I'll drink a Singapore Sling someday when it doesn't cost 27.05 in any currency, and I'm sure I will enjoy it just as much.
From there we recommenced wandering and got a pretty good tour of the city on foot, down to the Asian Civ Museum (we didn't go in, though. very bad tourists, i know), over to the Merlion statue, who looks out on a massively ugly contstruction site across the river which seems little insulting for the poor guy, and then down to Lau Pasat, a recommendation from our very own local expert Fred (thanks Fred!) We had the best satay the world has to offer and about six other things between the two of us, just so we didn't feel like we had missed anything. This quickly became a pattern for the weekend--eat at food stalls, eat often, eat a lot, go back later and eat some more, eat something on the road between food stalls, and then plan the next time we were going to eat in a food stall. The food options alone made the trip worthwhile. I can now completely understand why one of my fellow VIA volunteers actually named her blog after an avocado milkshake. Right on, alpokatshake, you are so justified.

On Saturday night we wanted to save a little money on beer (alcohol being taxed at what must be a record rate of 100%), so we went into the 7-11 to pick up a few cans. I asked the clerk if we were allowed to drink on the street in Singapore, a country well known for it's high standards of public cleanliness and thus one which I expected would frown upon such debauchery, but the clerk replied,surpisingly, that I could. "As long as you do not disturb two persons."

"I'm sorry?"

"Drinking on public sidewalk is permitted provided you do not disturb two fellow persons."

"How do I know if I'm disturbing 2 fellow persons?"

"Some foreign official will decide."

"Is that so?"

"Indeed yes. Foreign official will decide your case, madam, if suspected of disturbing two persons or more."

I can generally smell illogical circles of nonsense explanations a mile away, thanks to all the practice I got in Senegal, but I really couldn't tell if my clerk friend was being serious and if so, what in the blazes he was possibly trying to convey. Undercover foreign officials roaming the streets of Little Inida recording instances of suspected drunken fellow-person disturbing? I just don't see how that would work. But just to be safe, we took our beers and sat under a dark overhang with a bunch of Indian guys who were doing the same thing, banking on the fact that none of them would be bothered. Certainly not two of them, anyway. And bothered they were not.

Anyway so that's just day one of the fun, and I'm leaving out the part where we went back to the Australian pub and got smashed for no real reason except that you don't really have a choice in an Australian pub, and we wouldn't have been able to sleep if we hadn't, right? So we started day two with a wee bit of an oucheyhead, but a few blissful hours lounging on the beach at Sentosa Island made everything better. Plus Charlsea won the sunburn of the year award by applying zero sunscreen whatsoever and then swimming to her heart's content under the blazing equatorial sun. Couldn't be prouder of you, there, Charlsea.

And that was that! A great weekend. Singapore is really a grand old town, even with all the new stuff. It's a town where monks and weathered old British ladies in sun dresses walk down the same sidewalk and seem to both feel completely at home, like each one owns the version of the city they happen to inhabit and doesn't realize or mind that scores of people who are nothing like them feel the exact same way. Everyone's got a niche. And it's clean, and things work. And you realize just how much you miss that when you get back to a country, like, say Cambodia, after getting up somewhere in the neighborhood of 3:30 am to catch your flight, and you ask your moto driver to take you to your home near Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum/Prison, one of the biggest landmarks in the entire city, and your moto driver happens to be a little fuzzy on his Khmer Rouge war memorials and instead tries to take you to Choueng Ek, the killing fields, located some 15 kilometers in the opposite direction. At least I got a tour of the prime trash burning locations of the greater Phnom Penh area, which I have duly noted for future reference.

Singapore 1, Phnom Penh -5.