The flight path from Brisbane to Singapore crosses the interior of northern Austalia, which is flat, shattered, and extraterrestrial. Rare floods have left stains of braided streams, hundreds of dark interwoven squiggles joining up with other strands of squiggles and going off together towards the sea. It's dry and geologically dead -- the weather doesn't come here, and the processes that usually renew the earth's surface don't operate. Not just a dead land, but a decomposing one, an old sheet of rusted iron, with an infinite variety of colours between maroon and scarlet.
Singapore is famous for having some of the world's harshest drug laws (though most of the rest of southeast Asia is also in the ring), but it was hard to think they were as worried as all that. I turned up on a Friday night with bloodshot eyes, forgot where I'd put my passport, and fumbled with my luggage like Jerry Lewis for two and a half minutes at the back of the empty arrivals hall. I looked like I was on all the drugs in the world except Ritalin. And they just waved me through.
I did shave beforehand, in case my stubble made me look seditious. I imagined a passport control officer looking at me, looking at a picture of Che Guevara pasted up behind the counter, looking at me, looking at Che.
Even so, it was hard not to wonder there might be a rule I didn't know about or had forgotten. Singapore's a one-party quasi-democracy, a relatively benign one except for an enthusiasm for executing its citizens that seems overdone to a lot of people. It has three major ethnic groups, four official languages, at least four major religions, and severe inequality that runs partly along ethnic lines. Its governments have tried to fuse it all into a country by sitting on the lid, and sitting fairly hard. Some of its better-known laws are about crime, of which it has almost none, but others are about morality. The government's ideas of morality aren't rooted in any particular religion, but seem to be an amalgamed relic of the social and sexual taboos of various cultures, including Victorian England's.
Singapore's airport had a funky 1970s feeling, while check-in at the little hotel near Orchard Road was like that at an Italian pensione in the late 1990s, with passport-photocopying, paperwork, and reservation numbers. It's not a built-yesterday glass boomtown. Its first great period of postwar prosperity was in the 60s and 70s, so much of it dates from then. At the same time, there's too much money for there to be a lot of decay. As its shopping malls start to look frumpy, they're turned over and expensive new ones thrown up.
It's humid, the light is strangely dim, and the outside air always smells like something -- fruit, or food, or garbage. At dawn on Saturday around Orchard Road, there little groups of men on racing bicycles on the streets. At dawn on Sunday, there are women who might be sex workers trying to hail cabs or waiting for buses.
Singapore's famous for its shopping malls, and, yes, there are a lot of them. The shopping mall is the purpose of Singporean civilization. The southeast Asian dream is to be able to walk in air conditioned malls from Singapore to Bangkok, and no one can say Singapore isn't doing its part. Downtown, at least, its malls are vertical and labyrinthine. You can walk into a Crate & Barrel and come out of a Gap a mile away without passing a bench or an open space of any size. There are luxury-store deserts, where inequality and high profit margins for expensive junk have caused acres of downtown to be made useless to anyone except a tiny handful of people who want to buy $800 pants.
Outside of tourist areas, there are few public benches (sitting leads to sloth and sloth to sedition). On Sunday, there are noisy but decorous picnics in the parks, where garbages overflow with takeout containers and empty beer cans. Otherwise, there's an eerie lack of graffiti, beggars, and litter. Only in Little India -- which really is a lot like big India -- are there piles of litter, mostly juice boxes, in the street. Surprisingly, there are quite a few black spatters of old chewing gum.
Down by the river, there are stretches of tourist restaurants with staff out front to accost passers-by, but they're more diffident than elsewhere. In front of me, there's a tourist with a huge backpack on, drifting from restaurant to restaurant studying menus with an open Lonely Planet book in his hand. Ten or fifteen years ago, tourists like him flocked like Passenger Pigeons -- I was one -- and now they're going the same way.
The bank occupying the tower beside the river has put up a Botero sculpture, with a plaque that says that the bank "believes that so long as there is peace and optimism among its people, Singapore will continue to grow and prosper." It also notes that the sculpture "allows one the pleasure of caressing reality."
Across the water is the Marina Bay Sands, an ironing board on three pillars, which is, as guidebooks love to tell you, the second most expensive building in the world (the Abraj Al Bait, apparently, if you were wondering). To build it, designs were solicited from all the world's silliest architects, and then rearranged using cut-up techniques by stoned undergraduates who kept asking themselves whether it allows one the pleasure of caressing reality. On the lookouts by the river, throngs of other tourists beg wordlessly to be beaten with their own selfie sticks.
Chinese new year (carefully called Lunar New Year, but abbreviated CNY in advertisements) is just over. Singapore airlines handed out little red envelopes containing chocolate coins, and the streets are still decorated with sheep and goats (the Chinese word apparently covers both, so you can take your pick). Ads suggest eating a Subway sandwich to get over the stress of CNY errands, banners in malls say things about flocking together. Chinatown is decorated, and there are still celebrations going on here and there.
Singapore is famous for having some of the world's harshest drug laws (though most of the rest of southeast Asia is also in the ring), but it was hard to think they were as worried as all that. I turned up on a Friday night with bloodshot eyes, forgot where I'd put my passport, and fumbled with my luggage like Jerry Lewis for two and a half minutes at the back of the empty arrivals hall. I looked like I was on all the drugs in the world except Ritalin. And they just waved me through.
I did shave beforehand, in case my stubble made me look seditious. I imagined a passport control officer looking at me, looking at a picture of Che Guevara pasted up behind the counter, looking at me, looking at Che.
Even so, it was hard not to wonder there might be a rule I didn't know about or had forgotten. Singapore's a one-party quasi-democracy, a relatively benign one except for an enthusiasm for executing its citizens that seems overdone to a lot of people. It has three major ethnic groups, four official languages, at least four major religions, and severe inequality that runs partly along ethnic lines. Its governments have tried to fuse it all into a country by sitting on the lid, and sitting fairly hard. Some of its better-known laws are about crime, of which it has almost none, but others are about morality. The government's ideas of morality aren't rooted in any particular religion, but seem to be an amalgamed relic of the social and sexual taboos of various cultures, including Victorian England's.
Singapore's airport had a funky 1970s feeling, while check-in at the little hotel near Orchard Road was like that at an Italian pensione in the late 1990s, with passport-photocopying, paperwork, and reservation numbers. It's not a built-yesterday glass boomtown. Its first great period of postwar prosperity was in the 60s and 70s, so much of it dates from then. At the same time, there's too much money for there to be a lot of decay. As its shopping malls start to look frumpy, they're turned over and expensive new ones thrown up.
It's humid, the light is strangely dim, and the outside air always smells like something -- fruit, or food, or garbage. At dawn on Saturday around Orchard Road, there little groups of men on racing bicycles on the streets. At dawn on Sunday, there are women who might be sex workers trying to hail cabs or waiting for buses.
Singapore's famous for its shopping malls, and, yes, there are a lot of them. The shopping mall is the purpose of Singporean civilization. The southeast Asian dream is to be able to walk in air conditioned malls from Singapore to Bangkok, and no one can say Singapore isn't doing its part. Downtown, at least, its malls are vertical and labyrinthine. You can walk into a Crate & Barrel and come out of a Gap a mile away without passing a bench or an open space of any size. There are luxury-store deserts, where inequality and high profit margins for expensive junk have caused acres of downtown to be made useless to anyone except a tiny handful of people who want to buy $800 pants.
Outside of tourist areas, there are few public benches (sitting leads to sloth and sloth to sedition). On Sunday, there are noisy but decorous picnics in the parks, where garbages overflow with takeout containers and empty beer cans. Otherwise, there's an eerie lack of graffiti, beggars, and litter. Only in Little India -- which really is a lot like big India -- are there piles of litter, mostly juice boxes, in the street. Surprisingly, there are quite a few black spatters of old chewing gum.
Down by the river, there are stretches of tourist restaurants with staff out front to accost passers-by, but they're more diffident than elsewhere. In front of me, there's a tourist with a huge backpack on, drifting from restaurant to restaurant studying menus with an open Lonely Planet book in his hand. Ten or fifteen years ago, tourists like him flocked like Passenger Pigeons -- I was one -- and now they're going the same way.
The bank occupying the tower beside the river has put up a Botero sculpture, with a plaque that says that the bank "believes that so long as there is peace and optimism among its people, Singapore will continue to grow and prosper." It also notes that the sculpture "allows one the pleasure of caressing reality."
Across the water is the Marina Bay Sands, an ironing board on three pillars, which is, as guidebooks love to tell you, the second most expensive building in the world (the Abraj Al Bait, apparently, if you were wondering). To build it, designs were solicited from all the world's silliest architects, and then rearranged using cut-up techniques by stoned undergraduates who kept asking themselves whether it allows one the pleasure of caressing reality. On the lookouts by the river, throngs of other tourists beg wordlessly to be beaten with their own selfie sticks.
Chinese new year (carefully called Lunar New Year, but abbreviated CNY in advertisements) is just over. Singapore airlines handed out little red envelopes containing chocolate coins, and the streets are still decorated with sheep and goats (the Chinese word apparently covers both, so you can take your pick). Ads suggest eating a Subway sandwich to get over the stress of CNY errands, banners in malls say things about flocking together. Chinatown is decorated, and there are still celebrations going on here and there.
