Singapore

The sleek, imposing skyline. A city-state of ~4.5 million, Singapore is a major banking and finance hub in Asia.



Shopping, probably the second most common activity in Singapore. It's a shopper's mecca. There are huge sprawling malls everywhere, and you can get anything you can get in Canada plus more... except maybe Timbits.



Eating out - would have to be THE most common activity here. People stay up into the wee hours of the night, and hawkers are everywhere. And cheap. And delicious. And still the people stay skinny.



Singapore is best known for its immaculate cleanliness. You'll be hard-pressed to find any litter. Roads are smooth and pothole-free. Toronto with its cigarette-butt and gum-stained sidewalks seems like a dump by comparison.



- MRT. Singapore transit makes the TTC look like something out of Mogadishu. Ultra-modern and squeaky-clean. And super-busy all hours of the day. Kiosks from which you can top-up your card. Screens that let you know when the next train is due to arrive. Automated messages that tell you to mind the gap and not block the doorway - in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Subway lines that extend everywhere. A broad, expansive bus network - crucial in a society where people live in tiny apartments and only a handful own cars.



- Coolies. Mostly Indian/Bangladeshi/Indonesian, they do the dirty construction jobs in the searing heat and humidity that no local Singaporean would stoop to. And forget amnesty - these guys come on 2-year work permits and get kicked out afterwards, though they have the option of renewal if the employer chooses. So Singapore's spick-and-span spotlessness and rapid growth comes very much on the backs of cheap, Third World indentured labour.



- Maids. About 30% of "households" keep maids, usually imported from the Phillipines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. There have been stories of them consorting with the construction guys, some even getting pregnant. It's a growing concern.



- Eye contact from strangers passing by. I noticed a lot more of it happening in Singapore. Of course, there's the inevitable brown-on-brown stare-down, when the offending party (usually a skeevy moustachioed brown guy) tries to figure out what species of brown you are and whether you are one of his kind, and in my case it's not exactly discernable at first glance, so I always get the creep glare and whether in Singapore or Scarborough, that's universal everywhere. But I even found myself getting eyed by the local Chinese girls, much more so than over here. Maybe I stack up well against the local dudes - certainly there aren't many whites guys or black guys to compete with. One pretty office-worker type even smiled at me from a bus stand as I jaywalked across the street and boarded a cab. That pretty much never happens to me in Toronto.



- Race relations. In Singapore there are three main groups - Indians, mostly Tamil (~10%), Malay Muslims (~15%). The rest are Mandarin Chinese, and they run the show. You also have a non-trivial white ex-pat pop - mostly Brits, Aussies and Americans. All the groups get on well on the surface, and there is respect for all faiths - Hindu temple jostle for space with Sikh and Buddhist ones and mosques. And it's not uncommon for public signs to be displayed in all four(!) official languages.



But I do wonder if there's covert racism beneath the surface, evidenced by subtle behaviour. Would a Singaporean Chinese girl seat herself next to a curry-smelling, dirty-Sanchez sporting dark-skinned Tamil FOB on the MRT? I myself was taken by surprise when, while seated on a two-seater, a fairly attractive short-shorts-and-flip-flops-clad Chinese woman in her 30s entered the train and promptly assumed the seat next to mine when there were vacant seats in the vicinity. Then again I was clean-shaven and dressed for a night on the town, and sport a dark tan complexion closer to the Singaporean mean than the "blacker-than-black-people black" of a lot of the Indian Tamil workers there. I asked if the rep of brown people was degraded by all the imported labourers, but Kandan and Naren attested that the locals could differentiate between the native Singaporean browns and the foreign and definitively non-cool coolie imports. I'm sure the notoriously status-conscious and gold-digging Singaporean women are cued into class markers - clothes and shoes being the biggest.



- Entertainment. Singapore has a beautiful riverfront entertainment district lined with clubs and bars that would put Toronto's industrial warehouse renos on Richmond to shame. Drinks are insanely expensive - $13 SGP for a Heineken. Maybe it's an effort by the paternalistic government to curb binge drinking. Or maybe the locals betray the low-tolerance/cheap-drunks stereotype, and bars gotta make their coin somehow. It's also insanely civilized - no puking, pissing, screaming, hooting, shootings, cops on horses... Eddie, you'd find that refreshing here.



- Hookers. Yeah, they're quite common and concentrated in the Red Light District of Geylang. Mostly Thai or Mainland Chinese. Prostitution is legal in Singapore, though active solicitation is not. Nonetheless, I saw it happen when I went out into Riverside Point - mostly middle-aged ex-pat white guys getting propositioned, because they're assumed to have money. Sometimes it's hard to tell who's for hire though because the local girls wear next-to-nothing as it is. Another scary prospect is that often the girls are not really girls... good thing I had a couple of local Singaporean mates to point out the she-males.



In sum, Singapore's a fascinating place - a buzzing, sparkling, multi-racial Southeast Asian oasis of wealth in a cesspool of poverty and squalor. A city-state with no natural resources that built itself into a Tier-2 Alpha city on the strengths of the visionary leadership of Lee Kuan Yuew and its intelligent, disciplined people. Some of us in the West might criticize Singapore for its autocratic heavy-handedness, but you know what? Fuck democracy - what's the point of a free press when most people can't afford the paper???

Sydney is next.