Rarely
do our food fantasies live up to our expectations
and we had extremely high hopes for Singapore. Before we arrived I declared
a week of continuous "gluttonous indulgence." Also we decided to do no
tourism. We would not feel guilty if we failed to see all the must-sees
in Singapore. If all we did was eat, sleep, and read, that would be OK.
Somehow we managed to accomplish all of this in merely seven days. And it truly lived up to our fantasies.
The ride from the airport to the city was typically western.
A guy in the airport saw us getting the bikes ready and told us that it
was illegal to ride on the freeways. We asked him how to get to the center
of the city without using freeways. He thought about it then said--in a
low voice--
go ahead and use the freeways and if you get stopped "just tell them you're
foreigners and didn't know." That's just about the same advice I'd give
someone bicycling out of an American airport.
We arrived just before dark. We had light for the first 15 minutes or so which was important because we were riding on freeway and also there was just enough light for us to see the east coast bike path. After just about three kilometers on the East Coast Highway, we got on a really nice bike trail. Much of it was lit. The only problem was the pedestrian traffic. Now and again we had to slow down or stop. On weekends apparently the path is choked with roller-bladers, joggers and bikers but it really wasn't too bad on a Monday night.
Just like a bike trail back home, this one ended abruptly in the middle of nowhere. Not much of the small island of Singapore is in the middle of nowhere, but this bike trail managed to find it. It ended underneath a huge freeway bridge. The bridge went over a shipping channel and so was very high. Far underneath where we stood the street lights cast eerie shadows of large abandoned industrial things.
One
difference between here and America: in most cities in America, I would
be scared to death to stand at a place like this. Here I just felt slightly
uneasy, mostly because of the eerie shadows.
We saw a stairway coming down from the bridge deck and rolled the bikes over to it. For some reason, the first step was three feet above the grass. It took both of us to lift one bike onto the bottom step. After that we had to carry our bikes up three flights of stairs.
At the top of the stairs we had the sidewalk all to ourselves except for occasional tire parts and other car and truck debris that must have been accumulating there for years. Clearly no one ever uses that sidewalk.
The other end of the bridge just confirmed this. The sidewalk ended again in several flights of stairs leading to no where except an inaccessible bit of land among the freeways. There was no point in going down there. So we decided to get back on the freeway. We had to lift our bikes over the barrier (freeway berm) between the sidewalk and the road.. The barrier was one of those heavy-duty ones you see on bridges all the time with a three- inch pipe supported several inches above a three-foot high concrete wall. It took quite an effort to lift the bikes over this (again, two of us on one bike). Once we got a bike high enough, we'd balance it on top of the berm long enough for us to hop over the other side and lower the bike onto the foot-wide shoulder of the highway. Actually it was onto an exit ramp and had good lighting so it wasn't actually that dangerous. Ironically, our hotel was only about 200 meters from this spot.
Note to other bicycles riding from the Singapore airport: Get off the east coast bike trail before the end and ride on into the city on the freeway.
(Joan: At the hotel, we encountered an interesting woman:
a fabulously rude and fabulously efficient person. We hadn't seen many
of either kind in Asia up until Singapore, and here we had both of those
traits in one person. When we walked in, she took a look at our sweat-soaked
clothes and asked, rudely, "Is it raining outside?"
"No, we just rode from the airport."
"I SAID, is it raining outside?" she said, glaring at
me.
But I was up to the task. "AND I SAID, NO, THE REASON
WE'RE WET IS WE JUST RODE IN FROM THE AIRPORT!"
That seemed to settle that. She checked us in pretty
quickly after that).
The first morning we had breakfast at the Westin-Stamford because they had French toast with maple syrup (for a price - it was S$8 each plus S$4 for coffee, though we skipped the coffee since we had already had Starbucks). Every day we slept in. We ate cheese at nearly every meal. We went to Starbucks (Singapore has many) a few times a day. We spent hours online doing email. We ate again and again, avoiding anything with rice in it and looking for high fat content. I found a great bacon and cheese sandwich place in Raffles Mall.
I knew Singapore was a developed city, but it still surprised me how western it felt. It's not quite as spic-and-span as I had heard, but it is clean. It's against the law to jaywalk (and probably has a hefty fine attached), but people still do it. Despite the yellow lines on the subway platforms, the incoming passengers still crowd the doors and block the way of the outgoing passengers. Most of the architecture is pretty bland. These little things make it seem even more like an American city.
Here are some ways we were reminded that it's not in America:
they drive on the left; no one holds the door for anyone else (if you do,
they look at you funny); it's more difficult to be a pedestrian (I'm always
running into people on the sidewalk); there are malls on almost every 
corner
(called Income Center or Lucky This or Fortune That); every day is 92 degrees;
the parking places are smaller. We also heard about cat-sized rats, cobras
in gutters and surveillance cameras everywhere.
Lots of other white folks walk around the streets. For once we appear to be poor by local standards. A Singapore dollar is worth about 62 US cents - or is about the same as a kilometer compared to a mile. Most things we wanted, like eating out, books, Tevas, etc. cost about the same as San Francisco.
However, some essentials like owning a car, drinking beer, and having a home can be extraordinarily expensive. A Honda Accord, for instance, runs S$110,000. And that doesn't include the S$20,000 fee for a permit to own a car. Beer normally costs S$70 a case. Rent on a three bedroom house runs S$7,000 to S$12,000 per month.
After a couple of days of gluttonous behavior, we got a hold of some people we had gotten to know over email. Kris and Joan used to work at the same company, but in different departments, on different coasts. They had never actually met before. They only met on email when Kris, who was doing some work for the company's in-house newsletter, emailed Joan some questions for a story he was writing about our trip. It turned out that Kris's wife Anne grew up across the river from me in Moline, Ill.
We had a fabulous time with them. We got along immediately
and ended up moving out of our hotel and staying with them for several
days. We shared all kinds of stories with them, 
mostly
the ones about our own suffering and frustration, and they acted interested.
After Kris made a fantastic meal for us the first night (fresh fish from the wet market with asparagus and potatoes), we bought lots of groceries and Joan cooked a couple of wonderful meals. All the meals started with blue cheese on crackers, beer and wine. (Joan: the day before we flew to Malaysian Borneo, Eric whipped up a special batch of his infamous hash browns, his first in about eight months).
At
some point we took the bikes in to a bike shop to get a few replacement
parts: Front derailleur for Joan's bike and handle bar tape, new toe clips,
a shift cable and a saddle for mine. The new saddle is the third on my
bike since we started. The first already had over 10,000 miles when we
started. The second was on Joan's bike when we started but we moved to
my bike when she wanted a more comfy seat in New Zealand. It was worn out
now. (total price including tune-ups for both bikes: S$225).
Kris
and Anne were fabulous hosts. They opened up their home and fridge to us,
and even lent us their car a few times so we could run errands. They told
us about what a great time they had in South Africa late last year and
got us seriously interested in going. We hope we can host them or anyone
who remotely knows them one day when we have a home to live in again.
While we were there, we helped Anne and Kris move in. They had arrived in Singapore a couple months before but their stuff from New Jersey arrived while we were there. The first couple nights we slept on air-mattresses.
Moving in is an awful chore. The movers carried all the furniture and boxes in but they were left to unpack all the boxes and fill the shelves, dressers, cupboards, etc. For us, it wasn't a chore at all to help. We had no emotional attachment to anything and did not fret over decisions about where to put stuff. We left all that up to them just went at it.
It didn't hurt that we could just pull another cold beer out of the fridge when we wanted to. That was probably the greatest of all the luxuries we experienced in Singapore.
Next: Borneo.
