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Singapore Impressions – Going Once, Going Twice In 2019, my travel friend Kathy and I built a DIY trip to Asia, starting in Shanghai and including Singapore, a multicultural city with an interesting history, clean to the point chewing gum was regulated, and home to the famous Marina Bay Sands Resort, with its unique architecture and rooftop infinity pool, and to Changi airport with its indoor waterfall. We arrived with plans; I also arrived with a lung infection (not Covid) that I’d picked up somewhere between home, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Luckily, I was flat out only the last day and wound up in a clinic at our next stop, Cambodia, where everyone was capable and kind. But that’s another story. This did slow down both of us in Singapore, though. In any case, with only about three days to explore Singapore and with me incapacitated for a day, we left town with things yet to do, and planned to meet up there again, which we did in early 2024. As with other big places I visit, this isn’t a travel guide, but it’s my story about some of the things that enriched those days in Singapore. The rest can be filled in easily with guidebooks and online research. A Five-Sentence History for a Starter The island of Singapore has been a trading outpost for millennia. Perhaps what we think of as “modern” Singapore dates from 1819 when the British arrived, and Sir Stamford Raffles established a trading post for the British East India Company. Trade boomed especially after the Suez Canal opened. After World War II and Japanese occupation, Singapore was first British again, then became part of the new Federation of Malaysia in 1963, and in 1965 seceded from Malaysia, becoming the independent city-state that we know today. It has long been a multicultural society, with four official languages, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English, and most citizens are at least bilingual. Traffic congestion also happens in the waterways with trade ships. More Fives: The Five-Footway – Shelter from the Elements This is a short digression because we found the footways a great relief from end-of-monsoon rains in 2024. Stamford Raffles’s town plan included the footways, created by requiring street-level shophouses to be set back five (or so) feet from the street, with upstairs living quarters extending out as far as the curb. This went for public buildings as well, and created a type of “veranda,” originally intended to protect pedestrians from the tropical sun, a sudden downpour, and the dangers of the street. As you would expect, the verandas soon filled with vendors, food hawkers and assorted others, making the footways sometimes chaotic and unsanitary, a long-lasting, contentious issue. There’s a good article on the Biblioasia website (“Give Me Shelter: The Five-footway Story,” Oct-Dec 2019). Around Tiong Bahru where we stayed there are five-footways and modern covered sidewalks, so we were able to shop, visit cafes, and reach the metro nearly entirely under shelter. The Five Footway at Monkey God temple in Tiong Bahru. The covered sidewalks in Tiong Bahru are a nice touch. You can imagine that all those food vendors in the footways became a health hazard. So, the famously clean government of the newly independent Singapore began a program of licensing and regulation, resulting in development of safe, hygienic markets and hawker centers. The hawker culture is a huge part of Singaporean life, and I have more about it in Singapore Impressions – Tiong Bahru and its Hawker Culture. Ethnic NeighborhoodsStamford Raffles had clear ideas about developing a prosperous settlement that he had gleaned from experience in British and European colonies in Asia (Java, for example), emphasizing communal harmony and ease of trade. In his vision, that town plan would allocate land to each segment of society: government, Europeans and merchants, Chinese, Malays, and Indians. These fundamental divisions exist today, and visiting each neighborhood to see its temples, parks, markets, and businesses is probably on most first-timers’ agendas. Our Visits – Zipping Around; a Non-Chronological Account Before I continue with my favorites, here is an overview of our days in Singapore. We got around on foot and by metro. Singapore has a well-developed underground, clean, fast and extensive. We bought transit cards from dispensers, like in Washington, DC, Paris, and other cities. Easy. The first day in Singapore, back in 2019, we began with a visit to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The gardens date from 1859 and if you like gardens, Kew Gardens near London, for example, this garden is well worth visiting. It’s the only tropical botanic garden on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and one of only three listed gardens (with Kew that I’ve mentioned, and the Orto Botanico di Padova, Italia, where I’ve also been). Do not confuse the Singapore Botanic Gardens with the Gardens by the Bay! Taking a selfie in the subway. The Chinatown Arcade. The buildings here have real charm and brilliant colors. The Sri Veerama. Temple Gold. A beautiful mosque. The next couple of days we saw the city in a hurry, zipping around by metro to Little India, with its temples and shops; Chinatown, where we saw the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple; and Kampong Gelam (the Muslim quarter), where you can follow the Heritage Trail and meet a true diversity of cultures. And I can’t neglect our stop at the Raffles Hotel Long Bar. We intended to wind up the 2019 trip by seeing the Gardens by the Bay, but my illness got the better of me at the Gardens, and I had to retreat to the hotel by taxi. The Gardens visit finally happened in 2024. When we met up in 2024, the plan included Gardens by the Bay, another stop at the Long Bar, some historic buildings in the government sector, and a sweep through places of interest we couldn’t include in 2019. The Raffles Hotel Long Bar – Home of the Singapore Sling The Raffles Hotel Long Bar is where bartender Ngiam