So, yes, this blog is woefully behind schedule. I’ve been in Singapore for a month now, school starts tomorrow, I have a cell phone, an apartment, an internet contract. A roommate (who has a much more present tense blog than me). I’ve been to Malaysia, and Bali, and was nearly killed – on more than one occasion – in Jawa, which is spelled with a W rather than a V and is therefore pronounced “Jah-Wah” rather than “Jah-Vah”.
And meanwhile, you’re still reading about my flight over and the airport in Taipei, and one measly Sweeping Generalisation (don’t worry, there will be more). Singapore Blog Fail. What can I say, but apologies.
And promises! Just as Singapore promises its citizens protection from (let’s be honest) non-existent terror attacks, I promise you blog-o-rama in the days, weeks, months, years, Millenia(!) to come. Photos! Videos! Stories! Singapore!
Oh, the fun we will have .
To start:
I arrived in Singapore at noon, and I managed to power through the rest of the day, mainly by walking, blindly, through town. The way that I deal with any challenge in life – whether it be jetlag, fatigue, hunger, travel anxiey, or newness in a foreign locale – is to walk. Walk it off, walk it through, walk and walk and walk.
So I spent the day walking through the heat of Singapore, a heat that was neither as oppressive as I had feared nor as benign as I might have hoped. I walked through an area that I would later learn is not a terribly good one, from the standpoint of being of zero interest, zero aesthetic, zero things to look at, zero sidewalks that lead you where you want to go (Lavender MRT stop area, I am talking about you), before stumbling onto the Arab Quarter,at which point things improved.
There will come a post soon, I promise (Historical Information!), in which I will tell you all about Sir Stamford Raffles, and the ethnic and cultural ghettoization of Singapore; about how the city was drawn into quarters that would keep the Chinese from the Malaysians from the British from the Tamils; and how this particular situation- a mass conglomeration of ethnicities which were encouraged to live together but not intermingle – has shaped Singapore to this very day.
But at this point, this particular Walking Monday, I didn’t know about all of that. I hadn’t really done my usual required historical reading. I skimmed that part of the guidebook. And coming from New York, which, like most American cities, had voluntarily segregated itself into ethnic ghettos, I didn’t think it all that strange that suddenly I was in an area of mosques, falafel, pedestrian streets and the promise of water pipes once night fell.
(Pedestrian Streets In The Arab Quarter! Soon to come, a discussion of how the Singapore government works very hard to manufacture phenomena – like historical walking streets in historical areas with souvenir shops and ethnic eateries – that happen naturally in other parts of the world, because pretty much nothing happens naturally in Singapore, and if it does, well that will be remedied quickly, not so much by eliminating that thing which happened naturally, but by finding some way to control it.)
I, of course, didn’t make it to night fall, because by six PM I was pretty much dead on my feet. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that the ground beneath my feet had a peculiar tendency to roll, as if I was in my own personal earthquake, a symptom of the jetlag and a phenomena that would take fully two weeks to stop completely.
The following days were much the same. Up early, walking all day, working my way systematically through the various areas of Singapore (Colonial District, Central Business District, Chinatown, Little India, check check and check). I went to my school, I met some faculty, I began to look for an apartment. And I kept fighting the jetlag, and the heat, and the constant newness, which is perhaps my favorite thing to do, if all cards are laid on the table.
And by Friday, I began to have Singapore a little under my belt. Enough so that I hopped a bus (well, no; I hopped a train to a train to a train to a 250 meter walk to a mad dash across six lanes of traffic to a bus) to MacRitchie Reservoir, which is both a public park and an attempt to ensure that Singapore has a water source should we face apocalypse and/or Malaysia stops supplying all of our water. Among MacRitchie’s many offerings are an 11 kilometer trail through a forest populated by a number of animals, including packs of monkeys.
I had walked maybe ten minutes into the woods – less – when I noticed them. On the trail, in the trees. Walking overhead, jumping from limb to limb. In Grand Teton, you walk onto a deer or a moose or a bear; in Singapore, you discover monkeys.
The monkeys that I watched foraged for food, and scratched their heads, and eventually had a quarrel amongst themselves. The monkeys that my friend JB saw, on his walk a few weeks later, tried to bite him. Everyone has their own experience. (JB now carries a monkey stick when he goes hiking. It’s five feet long and thick; I will let you know if if it proves effective.)
It’s late now in Singapore, the Singapore from which I’m writing, from which I have to be up early in the morning, from which I should go to bed. But the Singapore of my first week, walking through the Monkey Forest, a little of that still lingers, and I will leave you with a small piece of it.
With the monkeys. No monkey stick required.
