@pfooti · 2025-08-16

July 27th - 29th: Singapore

We woke up early (at the end of the previous post) and made our way out of Indonesia. I had written a pretty long post about queuing behavior and culture; how in a place like an airport various cultural norms come together about how close to the front of the line you have to be before you are really “in line” and not just milling around. Different cultures have different thresholds, and in the airport they all kind of mix up. Let’s just say for now that you don’t need thousands of words on this, and I’ll table that post for now and bring it back under #autisticlife about how I just can’t stop thinking about some things.

The Singapore F1 race is in October; it is a street circuit so most of the streets I walked were part of the race. The pit building is permanent. We were in Singapore just a few days before its 60th anniversary celebration, so there was some extra stuff set up in the pit straight, but ultimately it was just a big dark fenced-in street I walked to late after we got to Singapore (I did not want to miss it later, so I just ran off for an hour and wandered around right after we got in).

Singapore was lovely. I frequently get to a new place and immediately think about “how could I move here?” and Singapore was not different in this regard. The locals told us to come back later in the year; it would be cooler then. Reader, Singapore is basically right on the equator. It is in the mid 80s and up, plus super humid all year. So, there’s that, unrelenting heat. On the plus side, the downtown business zone has a ton of shopping arcades and underground tunnels, so as you traverse the city, you can kind of leapfrog air-conditioned locations. There are other reasons I might not want to live here, but it is complicated. More on that in a bit.

In the Singapore City Gallery, one of the main exhibits was a scale model of the entire city state, including every building. They would project different things on the model over time, synced up with the presentation. It was a nerdy delight.

Singapore has a lot of central (some may say authoritarian) planning. In the City Gallery, our guide (Terry) told us about how the government makes these ten-year plans for expansion and growth. Earlier, he had mentioned that most of the financial offices in the high-rises he was pointing at would be moved to the Marina Bay area, and the high-rises would be converted to housing and mixed-use zoned stuff for more interesting commercial and touristic activity. The City Gallery showed previous project history and the plans for the future, and while I was there and recalling what Terry had said about moving a huge number of businesses about a mile southeast so a huge area could be redeveloped, I was struck by the enormity of that effort. Singapore is a city that is constantly rebuilding itself. It is so hungry to expand that both Malaysia and Indonesia banned the export of sand to Singapore (most of the Marina Bay district is built on what used to be Malaysia, packaged up and shipped in bulk over to Singapore). They still ship other kinds of rock and fill material, just not sand anymore. They get that from Cambodia, Burma, and Vietnam now.

The big round flying saucer building is not a rotating restaurant. It is the home to the Singapore Supreme Court.

The first full day in Singapore we had a walking tour, starting with the Parliament building, we also saw the Supreme Court building, a bunch of other historical buildings, and several cultural zones. A little history, and as usual this is a combination of “stuff the guide told me” and “stuff I figured out with a cursory search of wikipedia and maybe reading some linked citations” so take this all with a grain of salt. Anyway, Singapore was founded by a bunch of Malayans who built a fishing village way down at the end of the Malay peninsula. Then in the 1800s a white guy showed up and actually founded it, I guess. Stamford Raffles decided it was a great location for a British colony, due to proximity to shipping lanes. He did the usual colonizer thing, and Singapore ends up being peopled with a mix of Malayans, Chinese, and Indian immigrants.

Marina Bay. The Sands (that big triple tower with the boat on top, see later photo) is behind us. The sphere is an Apple store. Marina Bay, despite being … a bay, is mostly fresh water. There is a big seawall that keeps the sea out, and this is a big reservoir of fresh water. I guess it helped that this was the confluence of a lot of rivers flowing south (and downhill) out of the northern part of the island, but still I am impressed by the sheer scale and audacity of Singaporean city engineers.

The usual history ensued; Singapore was occupied in WWII by the Japanese, and afterwards became a Crown Colony and then gained independence in the early 1960s. Then it was briefly a member of Malaysia; a lot of Singaporeans are ethnically Malayan. This only lasted two years, for a lot of reasons, most of them about ethnic supremacists. The Malaysian Federation was pretty fragile (Singapore was probably a marriage of convenience), it seems because there were a lot of Malayan people who were really intense about Malayan supremacy. Wikipedia has a whole article on Ketuanan Melayu about this, and it is fascinating. There’s a whole thing about how mainland Malay people are better than island Malays and so on.

As promised, the Marina Bay Sands. Apple store for scale. On the left is the museum of science and art. The Sands is a pretty giant hotel, but also a casino. In a pretty smart social engineering move, the government mandates a $150 fee for any Singaporean to visit the casino. Foreigners can visit free. I presume that this is to mitigate the social risk of having a big casino right there for all the locals to visit as only some of that money flows back to the government. A percentage of tourist dollars is great, though.

There were race riots and bombings and other seriously terroristic acts in the 1960s in Singapore. The Indonesian dictator / president Sukarno (not Suharto, he came later) was interested in destabilizing the Malaysian Federation, so he probably funded some of that (plus he backed military incursions into Malaysia). After two years in the Federation, Singapore left. Or was kicked out. Our guide said that Malaysia treated Singapore like it was a septic toe that needed amputation, wikipedia makes it sound a little more mutual, but that’s probably one of those “wikipedia tries to have a neutral point of view” things.

We also visited the Botanic Gardens. One of the main attractions are these big enclosed domes. The domes are climate controlled (and they do scheduled misting, which is super refreshing when you come in from the schweddy out of doors). These domes were like ten storeys tall? The brontosaurus is for scale, they had a bunch of dinosaurs over, there was a whole Jurassic Park thing. I guess Jurassic Park figured out the kinks with their plan in the intervening years. I didn’t see any velociraptors.

So, since 1965, Singapore has been an independent city-state. There has only ever been one political party in Singapore. As far as I can tell, they do not rig the elections, they just keep getting re-elected. There is an opposition party (which is further to the left) that has some seats in Parliament, but the People’s Action Party have never not had a majority. Singapore has a President as a head of state as well as a Prime Minister, but the presidency is largely ceremonial. Also, as an entrypoint to the interesting nature of Singaporean government, there are some really strict requirements for the presidency. You need a certain amount of business or political experience, a lot of independent wealth, and there is a specific ethnic quota system in place so that the three main ethnicities have to more or less rotate. As a result, the current president (the first woman president of Singapore) ran unopposed.

Selfie from the top of the dome, with the Sands for reference. That hotel wants to be in every shot, it sure does know how to dominate a skyline.

Let’s talk about chewing gum. I suspect most people have heard that Singapore has banned it. In fact, you can buy chewing gum, but you need a doctor to give you a prescription, and the only prescription strength gum you can get has neither flavor nor sugar; it is just for chewing. This was something of a “ha ha so weird” thing I thought about when first entering the country, but then Terry told us a story about why. Apparently, chewing gum was behind a huge subway shutdown (the gum caused doors to malfunction; trains doors couldn’t close or open, so there was a big backup and eventually all the subways were involved in the stoppage and nobody could get in or out). Gum was already a littering nuisance, so the subway incident led led the ruling party to just ban the whole thing outright. I mean, it is certainly an effective approach to a specific problem.

This is the other big attraction in the gardens. They are actually the vents for the hot air from the ginormous climate control system for the domes. They are enormous and, like the Sands, tend to dominate the skyline in a lot of the photos I didn’t post. We didn’t walk the elevated path (it was in the 90s and humid, so no).

But yeah, Singapore is pretty authoritarian. There are limitations to freedom of speech and religion. On our walking tour, Terry pointed out the “free speech zone.” This is where you go to protest, it’s a park area with a prominent police station right there. In fact, you need permission to protest, and you will not be given permission if the theme of your protest is:

Xenophobia (especially against immigrants)
One ethnic group is better than another
One religion is better than another or some religion is bad
Politics in general

Other than that, you are free to protest. Not sure what is left. Terry explained the last point as: “there are free elections every five years, if you think the government is doing a bad job, run and change something.” My natural skepticism discounts that, but otherwise … I don’t hate this? Yeah, curtailed freedom of speech, but if the curtailment is “you can’t be a White supremacist in public” you know, I guess I am okay with this.

Part of the temple was Buddhist, part was Taoist. There was a Hindu temple up the street, and a mosque not too far away. For the most part (Terry said there was one mosque with an exception) the mosques are not allowed to broadcast their calls to prayer loudly. Instead, they send out text messages and broadcast on the radio to the faithful. This is what I mean when I say that there is some freedom of religion (you can worship as you please for the most part, there’s also a lot of Christianity on the island) but within constraints (notably around evangelizing).

Remember that Singapore in the 1960s (and presumably earlier) was a hotbed of racialized violence. This was a response to that; they looked at problems and pragmatically solved them. Gum causes issues? Ban it. Racism causes issues? Ban it. No system is perfect, and on balance I would rather live in a very free society where everyone chose to not be a racist, because giving a government that much power is just waiting for someone to come along and abuse it. Still and all, a very complicated but compelling issue. On the other hand Singapore is pretty bad on LGBTQ+ rights. Being a gay man was illegal (but not really enforced) until very recently (lesbians were okay, due to a quirk in a very penis-oriented bit of legal verbiage), and they still do not recognize gay marriage. So: not great in other ways, and of course the protest laws and difficulty of making reforms in a single party system means change is slow.

First course at Candlenut. Clockwise: pork neck satay, ngoh hiang (a kind of housemade sausage), tiger prawn curry in a little muffin kind of presentation, and beef cheek curry. Everything there was amazing, but I really loved the beef cheek curry.

Dinner the first night was at Candlenut, which is a Straits Chinese (or Peranakan) restaurant. During the early British and Dutch occupation of the area, there was a lot of mixing of Chinese settlers with the local Malay, Thai, and Javanese people. The result was an ethnicity (and foodway) that mixes the whole region up. The food was amazing (they do have a Michelin star). I spent way too much time thinking about how the Peranakan people fit into the Singaporean rules for the presidency. My understanding is that this has not come up yet, but I bet it would count in the Chinese category. On the one hand, I really dislike categories (that’s probably the demand avoidance talking) but on the other hand I recognize that we need to understand and mitigate the damage that racialized categories that other people believe in have caused, so. Anyway, I loved the food.

One tiny part of the hawker center. We started our food tour at 10 am, so it wasn’t too busy at the time. Singaporeans eat a lot of their meals in hawker centers. The tables are numbered so you can easily meet up with friends; if you need to share a table, people are super-friendly.

On the second day of our visit, we went on a food tour. This was one of my most-anticipated events of the trip, to be honest (right up there with Orangutans). Singapore has this amazing cultural history of hawker centers; there used to be a lot of street food vendors, but the government decided that was too untidy to have them on the street, so they built big buildings to house them. There are about 200 hawker centers in Singapore, each have about 100 to 150 stalls. You do the math and tell me if I should try to do a “we visit all the stalls” podcast.

An exception to the “hawker stands are run by older people” thing I will point out below, this ramen stand was started recently by some young folks who wanted to make the worlds best ramen, and I am pretty sure that they succeeded. It has a distinctly Singaporean flair- the noodles are maybe thinner than ramen I’ve had in japantown in SF, but boy howdy was it delicious. The textures were great, the flavors better. If you’re ever in Singapore, check out A Noodle Story.

Singapore does a lot of social engineering stuff. There are free apartments for pretty much any citizen who meets some income requirements (more wealthy citizens can just buy a nicer place). They prioritize people who are living close to or with their families, they prioritize people who are having or have had children. The free homes are actually leases with limited transferrability. You can sell after a little while (five years) and this is usually financially beneficial, but these properties cannot be inherited. Singapore has about 6 million people in it, and the official estimates for the unhoused population are around 1500 or so. By comparison, San Francisco has about 800k people, of whom 8000 are unhoused. Giving people a free home really does mitigate homelessness. The drug policies are draconian (including the death penalty, which is one thing we have in common with Singapore I guess) but most drug offenses come with mandatory rehab and the official position is one of rehabilitation rather than punishment. As with the homelessness estimates, I take “official” with a grain of salt, but honestly, a country that does not demonize its unhoused or drug users is a country that is facing in the right direction (modulo its other authoritarian flaws).

It looks plain, and it kind of is? It is amazingly comforting though. I had four or five kinds of Chicken Rice in the two days I was in Singapore. I’m probably basic, but my favorite was from Tian Tian, which is the chicken rice that put chicken rice on the westerners food map (when Anthony Bourdain couldn’t stop talking about it). The key here is the rice. Instead of just plain rice, the dry rice is sauteed in ginger, pandan, chicken fat and other flavors, and then it is cooked in a broth instead of plain water. The grains are not sticky and wow are they amazing. The chicken is also excellent, but I’d eat the rice by itself.

One thing that I am concerned about is sustainability. Not in a green / ocean levels rising kind of a way (although they are building defenses against the rising seas) but in a demographic sense. As a country, they are younger than my parents. These social engineering policies haven’t seen the full cycle of a generation or two of people. The median age for a hawker stand owner is 60. Stands close all the time as the owners retire, and their children have been raised with excellent public education to be doctors, engineers, lawyers. Who is going to make five dollar chicken rice plates all day in ten years? What will happen with all these free condos that the government builds when they run out of space? That last thing at least does not seem to be happening any time soon- most of the construction on Singapore is for private housing, the population is becoming wealthy enough to buy their own houses. But that speaks to rising cost of living and probably income inequality. I don’t know what the future holds, but it will be interesting to pay attention to.

First of all, curry puffs are a great idea. Take some delicious curry and put it inside a puff pastry, what’s not to love? But also? Take a look a this super-tiny stand. There are three people here working, one guy filling and folding the puffs (couple hundred a day, note the drying / waiting racks hanging from the ceiling), plus someone in the back doing the frying, and the woman was doing counter sales. That is a lot of work, day after day, in a small space. It was also, as you can only imagine in an open-air building with a lot of fryers running, pretty warm.

And that was the end of our trip! I feel like a trip is never really over until I’ve written up the last blog post and finished my malaria prophylaxis treatment, so I’m still kind of on vacation for another few days. This time I was on the stuff that you have to keep taking for almost a month after you get out of the malarial zone (Borneo), but on the plus side it doesn’t give you awful dreams when you’re taking it like that other stuff.

We got back and this pot had just gotten out of the kiln. I am really happy with it. Red velvet clay with a porcelain slip inlay, temoku glaze.

Okay, bye for now! Maybe I’ll write more now that I’ve gotten the travelogue done. No promises; while I love writing, I need to be in the right headspace for it, and my day job usually does not leave me in that headspace.

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