Singapore harbour, just after sunrise
The Durian Convention Centre, which looks a lot like the fruit!
A sea of cranes — there is construction going on everywhere in Singapore
It’s another nice morning in Singapore. Friday night was a bit of a wash-out. We were all tired from a long week, so after a few quick beers with my client after work, I headed straight back to the hotel and into bed. Life looks so much nicer after ten hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Today is all about doing some sight-seeing around Singapore. Gina, my colleague, is taking me out for some dim sum (yes, this is the same Gina that is responsible for taking me out to Steamboat on the first night and ensuring I spent the first few days of the trip feeling quite ill). She lived in Singapore for ten years and is keen to show me the sights, although knowing Gina the sights are likely to include quite a lot of the shops along Orchard Road!
I did a little shopping myself the other day. I needed to set up Skype so that I could call back to the UK without spending a fortune. After a somewhat disappointing first attempt using the built-in speaker and microphone, a colleague insisted that a good quality headset was the key to reliable Skype communications. So I headed out in search of a Sennheiser headset, which took me to Funan IT mall (and solved my Skype problems!). I’m sure for anyone who lives in Asia and is surrounded by new technology, this sort of mall is commonplace, but for me it was a little overwhelming. Imagine a seven-storey mall full of nothing but IT shops. For a gadget guy like me, there is temptation everywhere. Only my upcoming trips to Hong Kong, where technology is even cheaper, has kept me on the straight-and-narrow…
I’m really warming to Singapore. It’s cleaner than anywhere else I’ve been in Asia by a long way – so clean that it loses a little bit of its character. It doesn’t have the same buzz as Hong Kong or Bangkok – the pace of life is much more sedate. The food is wonderful and there’s a huge variety, all of it very cheap. Taxis are ten-a-penny, inexpensive, and make it very easy to get around the city. Customer service is just as refined and friendly as you’d expect it to be. The fact that everyone speaks good English means that it’s really easy to communicate and make yourself understood.
If Disneyland created countries, they’d have created Singapore.
