Presented with two choices during my weekend visit to Singapore:
1) Frenetically race around the tourist sights
2) Get pissed up on booze by the waterfront
Guess which option I went for? From the confines of riverside micropub Brewerkz, Singapore is a spectacular city-state – the second highest density of people in one place after Hong Kong, Singapore doesn’t disappoint as a great place to people watch from the beer garden. Orchard Road, seemingly Singapore’s 5th Avenue, is a plethora of international brands clamouring for attention from an equally international and afflulent clientele. Whilst the shopping on offer may be bland, those circulating around it certainly aren’t. A little light electronics shopping beforehand gave a suitably smug rush of moneysaving glee (plus the joy of 5% sales tax being refunded at the airport – cashback!), interspersed with a visit to the Esplanade, Singapore’s answer to Sydney Opera House which is a vast building shaped like a durian.
Durian is an extremely prized and extremely smelly large spikey fruit reknown through South East Asia – its stench is so pungent that most hotels carry prominent “No Durian” signs in their lobbies. For connisseurs, the smell is all part of savouring this notorious fruit’s flesh – and clearly it must be held in high regard to fashion a state of the art Arts building in its shape. Rising like a double breasted metal hedgehog from the waterline, the Esplanade has been rightly criticised for not having much room in which to show off its charms – given Singapore’s premium on space, this is understandable, but it’s a real shame that such a dramatic building is hemmed in by its less exciting peers and a frickin’ great motorway. Fiona’s need for “cheeky arvo bevvies” soon outweighed my appreciation of Singapore’s architectural wonders, so off to Brewerkz it was to satiate my Australian chum’s thirst. Heartbreaking.
In the cab back to Fi’s place, only a couple of miles out of the city centre, the trees grew thick and tall either side of the motorway and vines and creepers infested the undersides and railings of concrete walkways across the speeding vehicles. I got a definite sense of the jungle constantly waiting to impinge and repossess this concrete island in its midst.
One thing that does need to be repossessed in the name of sanity is Raffles Hotel. I dragged Fiona there for the obligatory Singapore Sling – a distinctly sickly concoction with more pineapple in it than a Del Boy pina colada – and not only was the Long Bar full of riff-raff (yes, including me) and grossly overpriced, but the entire colonnade had been repurposed into boutique shops. If I could afford to stay in Raffles, I would be distinctly fed up that my supposed escape into colonial luxury had been ruthlessly pursued by bland-smiling automatons of death hawking luxury wares which smell nice. Raffles should be an oasis of serenity. Instead it has become a high-class shopping mall, and in my lexicon, that is not a compliment. It’s simply depressing that an establishment that so obviously makes so much money anyway has to whore its name to all sorts of low-rent enterprises around it – and that people so willingly pay to be bent over the table and shafted too.
