Author Archives: mdw

Walking Tour

Yesterday I went on a walking tour. This was run by an American who lives in Singapore part of the year. At least half the people on the tour were Australian and were really gregarious and…well…Australian. Do all Australians know each other or do they just act that way?

Actual quote from an Australian person while drinking a Tiger beer at lunch: “Either there’s no actual alcohol in this or I’m still drunk from last night.”

The tour started with breakfast at The Toast Box. Singaporeans seem to have a fondness for toast, which seems like just about the least interesting food item one could have a fondness for. Companies like Toast Box, Toast Fun, and Ya Kun Kaya Toast have built businesses around this. The secret is the kaya spread, which makes the toast much sweeter than it would otherwise be. You eat it with extremely runny soft-boiled eggs (which you basically drink) and Singapore-style coffee or tea.

Actual quote from an Australian person at a 7-11 in the train station: “Where’s the fecking beeah?”

The high point of the tour was monkeys — specifically, long-tailed macaques in the rain forest.

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Afterward, I went back to my room and took a nap. The Australians all went out for beer.

On a Little Street in Singapore

Singapore’s version of the Champs-Élysées, Ginza, and Rodeo Drive is Orchard Road. On Monday, my first day here, I wandered down Orchard from the ION Orchard mall for quite a ways, wondering what was supposed to be so special about this street. It was nice enough, but there wasn’t much on it.

It was only today that I realized that I was on Orchard Boulevard, which runs roughly parallel to Orchard Road. Orchard Road itself is lined with flagship stores of top brands. A lot of this is wasted on me — until recently I thought that Ferragamo was a type of chili pepper — but I can enjoy looking at the ritziness of it all.

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On the way back, I found a place that was the other end of the scale — a pscrillion little shops shoved into the area of one city block. I spent about an hour wandering through all the passageways. I ended up with a couple of t-shirts and a durian. This last is a spiky fruit that has a reputation for both a horrible smell and a delicious taste, but it doesn’t seem to have either. Neither the smell nor the taste were especially noteworthy.

For dinner I had some basil chicken and a coconut, then came straight back to the hotel room to update my several blog fans on the day’s activities.

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I went to Malaysia for lunch.

I took the express bus across the causeway to Johor Bahru (known as JB). This was a short drive on a remarkably verdant freeway to Singapore passport control, at which point we all got off the bus to get out passports stamped, then got on another bus for a five-minute ride to JB. Then through Malaysian passport control, past customs (really, I just walked by it), and into a cavernous bus station with no clear idea of where to go next. I wandered around and around the station and the attached mall, looking for a bus to the center of town, before realizing that the station itself was in the center of town and where I wanted to go was only a few blocks away.

The mall attached to the station is big and new and the equal of anything in the US. Once you walk out the front door, you bump into the third world. Or at least the seedier areas of Los Angeles. It’s as if south-central LA and Beverly Hills were on the same block. I was barely out the door before some sketchy guy tried to sell me an iPhone.

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Further on, it’s more of an amalgamation of small shops and restaurants catering to Malaysian, Indian, and Chinese customers. Kind of interesting to walk around and look at, but not something that takes a lot of time. I had lunch (mee mamak and ice kopi) at the Restoran Hua Mui (established 1946), then headed back to the station.

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It was pretty much the same process going back. The trip itself is only 10 or 15 minutes, but you have to go through passport control for both Malaysia and Singapore. Nothing complex, but it does require getting off the bus and being routed through a large building, only to come out the other side and get on a different bus.

The walk back to the hotel from the bus station is about a half a mile, and I had only just gotten off the bus when it started to rain. It rained progressively harder, but I was mostly able to stay undercover until I was about four blocks away from the hotel. By that time it was a full-scale cloudburst. I decided to run for it. I sprinted for about a block and a half before I realized that there was no point. I was already as wet as I could possibly be. So I just strolled the rest of the way.

One nice thing about the tropics is that even if you’re drenched, you’re not cold. Not until you enter an air-conditioned building, at any rate.