Thoughts on Singapore

   Having spent four days in Singapore on the way to Australia back in December, I'd like to share my thoughts on it as much as possible for such a brief stay. Singapore was a very exciting city/state to visit, especially considering that the only previous experience I had had with Asia was southern Turkey, which is of course a lot more like Europe than the Far East.
   Singapore is very modern and innovative, as well as very clean (largely thanks to their strict laws and 200$ fines for littering). The modern architecture, which often feels more like futuristic architecture rather than modern, was simply incredible and mind blowing. Everywhere you walk on the streets, you're sure to run into some amazing buildings. The Marina Bay Sands hotel (the famous three skyscrapers connected by a swimming pool on top) is one of the finest examples, along with the Gardens by the Bay right next to it.
   The Gardens by the Bay include a Malay, Chinese, Indian, colonial and palm garden among others (all of them simply beautiful), two futuristic conservatories, seen here on the right,  and also iconic artificial trees. An artificial tree sounds like a pretty awful and useless idea, but these trees looked unlike real trees and instead made you feel like you're somewhere on another planet in an Avatar-like sci-fi film (instead of making the gardens look like an ugly plastic amusement park). These tree structures also support real plants to live on them, making them very useful. This entire area along with the esplanade made me feel like I had been teleported into the year 2038 or something like that, and in a good utopian kind of way.
   The esplanade includes a lotus shaped ArtScience museum, a sports stadium floating on water, the famous Merlion statue and a durian shaped performing arts centre. A durian is a popular fruit that is banned in most places in Singapore because of its foul smell, which Wikipedia claims "has been described variously as almonds, rotten onions, turpentine, raw sewage, and smelly socks". Another 200$ fine for bringing one to the hotel.
   Often times modern architecture has been criticized for making different places around the globe look a lot more similar to each other, which is a serious problem in my eyes. However, the modern architecture in Singapore somehow just felt unique. I was standing there between the Marina Bay Sands hotel and the Gardens thinking that there's no way you could see or experience anything remotely like this in Europe or America. Checking out panorama photos of downtown Singapore, you might feel that it doesn't look very unique, however it is completely different and a lot more powerful up close.
   Singapore also has a rich multicultural heritage, with a fleshed out Chinatown and Little India among other places (72% of the population of Singapore is of Chinese and around 10% of Indian descent, with 13% being of Malay heritage). These areas are very atmospheric and different from each other. Of course the food is delicious. Hawker centres provide you with cheap, but extremely tasty stall food. The Clarke Quay is a riverside area with tons of restaurants, ranging from Thai and Korean to Russian and Cuban.
   Another nice thing about Singapore is that between its highrises and in densely built areas there is still a lot of nature. The streets are very green, having a lot of exotic trees on them. This often creates the feeling (at least for me) that Singapore is a city in a rainforest and not a city that has replaced the rainforest. Despite it being one of the most densely populated countries in the world, there is still room for nature reserves. The Bukit Timah reserve was a really nice and relaxing rainforest 12 kilometres from downtown. It was easy to forget that civilization was everywhere around.
   The climate was very unusual for someone like me. Basically there are two seasons, the dry one and the rainy one. There aren't any significant temperature changes over the year (always a pleasant 20 or 30 something degrees Celsius). In fact, I checked that the coldest temperature ever measured there is 19.4 degrees, with the warmest being 36 degrees (pretty mild considering that it was pushing 50 degrees in Adelaide when we were there). We happened to be in Singapore during the rainy season, which was a unique experience. It would usually rain once a day, not for too long, and everyone would have their umbrellas ready. It would also dry off pretty fast after the rain.
   One interesting thing is that despite its success, people have limited political freedom in Singapore. In 2009, for example, it was ranked 133rd out of 175 nations in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Singapore has been ruled by a single political party (the People's Action Party) since its independence from the UK in 1959. They have often oppressed opposing parties and opinions, and yet they have managed to guide the country to a huge economic success.
   Singapore was for me a very exciting place to visit, very global and yet very unique, with a lot packed into a relatively small area. It's changing rapidly (I'm looking forward to the planned second and third phases of the Gardens by the Bay), with a lot of the esplanade having been
completed in the last few years. Anyway, it was difficult to write this, because I had so many chaotic ideas and things to say about Singapore that were hard to convey and there's still a lot to be said. Singapore has so much: fantastic traditional areas like the very colourful Little India, wild nature reserves, monkeys playing on rooftops, innovative architecture, a huge variety of people from all over the world, the night safari, famous cuisine, world-class shopping, beaches and so much more. Definitely worth visiting, whatever kind of traveler you are.