Last Day in Singapore

Having visited Little India, Chinatown was the obvious next choice.  Our Malay taxi driver had told us where to find their biggest market but we forgot!  The Malays are the original occupants so I guess they don't have their own enclave.

Chinatown was very hot and full of people trying to sell me hand made suits.  One felt the material of my shirt and trousers and looked very sad.  "You could have nice, good quality clothes", he said.  "Then my friends wouldn't recognise me."  He looked sadder.  Only later did I think of a better response: "I already have a Chinese tailor, he's called Ox Pham". 

I had hoped to visit a Chinese temple but instead ....

There was also a mosque but, though some Chinese are muslim, the people in it looked Indian.  As did those at the Hindu temple.  It says a lot for Singapore's multiracialism.

We did look at some local food delicacies

But decided you can have too much authenticity.  The first option are dried winged lizards, the second are dried sea horses.  Yum, crunchy!

We went back on the cool, cheap and incredibly efficient RMT underground to the National Museum, revamped and reopened last year.  It's a good museum though we skipped the more harrowing bits about WW2.  As always it's fascinating to see history through other another nation's eyes.  Raffles was a cad, but his Dutch counterpart was too cautious so the English got away with a lot. But no sign of bitterness.

One exhibit was an old film of Lee Kuan Yew being interviewed by journalists after Singapore was thrown out of the Malasian confederacy.  It was incredibly moving.  The goal he had worked all his life for was snatched away by the refusal of Tunku Abdul Rahman to accept a Malaysia with equal citizenship for all.  It had the making of a Greek tragedy, a variation on Antigone perhaps.  How do you balance the greater duty against the lesser?  And which is the greater?  Lee Kuan Yew chose Singapore which seemed crazy at the time but it worked.  Much can be said against the state he created but articles I've read tend to show his shortcoming against a Western model rather than against other SE Asian states.  I'd call that success.

After the serious bit we visited the museums rotunda where high tech graphics create 360 degree images on the walls plus 180 degree images on the domed ceiling.  The current exhibition has a semi-abstract woodland scene, animals potter about, trees grow and sometimes shrink away again, every so often the trees produce blossom which falls upward to the ceiling to fall again as multi coloured petals.  We lay on the floor watching it.

Petals falling from the ceiling.

The pictures don't do it justice as I couldn't use flash.  When I get home I'll do some photoshopping.

A last thought on Sizngapore. Our hotel had electric sockets which accept British, American, Australian/New Zealand and most European plugs withot needing an adaptor.

Somehow that seems apropriate for this amazing little country.