Four Days In Singapore

For the past few months, I have been studying for the GRE’s in the hopes that I will one day enter graduate school. With school slowing down this month, it seemed that late February would be an ideal time to take them. It would also require me to leave the country, as the GRE’s are not offered in Cambodia. My choices to take the test were Bangkok, Saigon, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Two of these places were places that I had already visited, with one I was saving for a future trip to Vietnam. Naturally my choice fell upon Singapore, a place that I would have otherwise never visited. I suppose I did not prepare very much for this trip as well as I should have. To be honest, my head was so pre-occupied with geometry, critical essay writing techniques, and vocabulary words that I could barely comprehend the fact that I was getting on a plane. Somehow I managed to fly there, find the testing center, take the test, and fly back all within a matter of days. Looking back on it, it feels as if I was awake for four nights straight.

On the morning of the 17th of February, I left my hotel in Phnom Penh in a taxi heading for Pochentong Airport. The driver was asking me questions about where I was from, and I gave him the perfunctory answers that I give everyone. Then he started going off about politics, and I could barely comprehend what he was saying. It did not help that this was four in the morning, and that my brain was not awake enough to load the foreign language program. After arriving, I checked in the Jetstar Airways and went over to the airport tax booth to pay the standard $25 in cold hard cash. I have always wanted to say some pithy remark to the people who run this booth, but I know my mouth can get me in a lot of trouble. The airport tax is a bribe, but there is nothing I can do about it. I see people demanding bribes every day, why should this be any different? The flight boarded at 7:30, and the stewardesses in black and orange dresses welcomed us on board. I wonder if they let anyone borrow their uniforms for a Halloween party. The flight only lasted an hour and a half, but I fell asleep during the middle of it.

Touched down in Singapore, and made my way to the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit). Their subway system seemed as modern as any of the ones I have been in. To buy a ticket you have go to a machine that features a touch screen computer and several ports for money and tickets. First you have to select on the computer what kind of ticket you would like, and then it shows you a map of the subway network. The computer then asks you where you would like to go, and upon pressing a selection it tells you how much money you have to put in. If you buy a single ticket, you pay a $1 deposit on the plastic green card, which is redeemable at any ticket machine after your journey is complete. It seems a little silly to put a deposit on a subway ticket, but I suppose it makes those green plastic cards reusable ad infinitum.

After transferring at Outram Park station, I followed the northeast line to Farrer Park. I did not have enough money on the green plastic card to leave the station, and the man working at the desk helped me sort through a pile of coins in my pocket until I produced the right amount. He asked me where I was from, and I said I was living in Cambodia. "Really?" he said. "Isn't that place really dangerous?" I told him the war was over and that it was quite safe to visit. If only Cambodians knew that their country was famous for mass killings and war, and not Angkor Wat.

The youth hostel I stayed at, The Mitraa, was close to the station in a neighborhood of old Chinese houses and apartment buildings. I checked into the hostel, put my stuff in the locker next to my bed, and took a shower in the shared bathroom down the hall. It was a fairly comfortable place, with six beds to a room and free wifi. The people I met there over the next couple of nights were fairly friendly and from a variety of different places. I met four people from the UK, one Australian, and two Americans.

After showering and getting my bearings a little, I went downtown to Clarke Quay to see a little something of the city. Tall buildings surrounded me, mixed in with gigantic shopping malls, and a comfortable breeze that come up from the river. It was very pleasant to walk around, particularly in the evening when an array of colored lights lit up the banks of the river and a white bridge that spanned the easy width of the river. It was also remarkable to see westerners walk around in business suits running to and from important high paying jobs, instead of the usual Cambodian fare of backpackers or creepy looking ex-pats. I felt embarrassed just to be standing next to them on the subway in my dirty hand washed clothing. (“Oh no, is that woman looking at my shoes or her shoes? I should have gotten the damn things washed or polished before I came here. It’s not my fault! You have to believe me. I just walked out of the jungle. I’m in the Peace Corps!”)

Not only were there adult ex-pats there, but also kids as well. To be specific, I saw American teenagers running around the city. They looked extremely well dressed, and polished, which makes sense. I imagine that their parents work in the island’s gigantic skyscrapers. I ate at a Chinese eating house named BK’s Eating House that evening, beef pepper stir fry and an iced tea.

The next morning I went to Starbucks and studied for the test, which I had scheduled for the following day. At some moment after I arrived, ordered a gigantic iced concoction, and started studying with my books, I wrote down in my notebook, “Am I really in Starbucks, studying for a test?” It also dawned on me just how easy I had slipped back into modern life, how easy it was to fall back into safe familiar pace of a giant city.

After lunch, I decided that I felt prepared enough to take this test, and that there was nothing I could do now that I had not already reviewed during the last three months. I went downtown to Raffles Place to go see some museums, thinking that it was an educational thing to do the afternoon before a test. It was. First I went down to Raffles Place, which features a statue of Sir Stanford Raffles himself as well as several museums. The first one I visited was the Asian civilizations museum, which featured many interesting exhibits about Asia in addition to one specifically devoted to the history of Singapore. When I was finished there I walked over to another museum named the Perankan, which featured an exhibit I had read about in the International Herald Tribune. It had to do with the ancient Indian epic named the Ramayana, and featured different kinds of artwork associated with the epic including a marvelous array of shadow puppets.

When I was finished touring for the day, I headed back to the hostel. A college student from the UK had just checked into the dorm that day, and the two of us found dinner at an Indian restaurant down the street. I ordered the Chicken Tikka Masala, he ordered a plate of samosas, a curry, and another Chicken Tikka. He complained that he had nothing but airplane food for the past day, and that he was on his way to Australia. I explained who I was, and what I was doing in Singapore. I tried to explain what the GRE’s were to him, and he casually dismissed them as being “just absolute bollocks.” We went back to the hostel, where we met another Englishman who started talking about his recent expedition to Australia. He said that he had flown over the whole thing, and that during the middle of the trip he looked out the window and thought that the plane had not moved in its position at all. “There is f@#k-all in the middle of the Australia,” he told us. Then the language arguments started. “Bloody yanks stole our language.” “Limeys gave it to us fair and square.” I had to explain where Limey comes from. It is not effective as “yank.” The Englishmen started going off about how Charles is a boring prince, and that the crown really should be passed to Harry. “He’s a proper prince, just like olden times!” Somewhere in this conversation I murmured, “How strange it must be to have a monarchy,” before I nodded off to sleep.

Next morning were the GRE’s. Found the testing center in the science center in East Jurong. Checked in, emptied my pockets, watch, put them in a locker and entered a room full of cubicled computers at nine o’clock. The next thing I knew it was 1:30, and I was done with the test. I did fairly well, considering all the studying I had done in the last few months. The only thing that went wrong was during the math portion of the test. I was working intently on one problem, and I had not noticed that a woman was coming around and collecting used scratch paper. While I was working at my desk, the woman leaned over me to get the paper. It happened that she was a sizable woman who wore a hijab. Out of the corner of my eye, the only thing I could see was this huge black thing coming towards me. It startled me for a moment, but I recovered enough to give the woman the scratch paper and get back to work. The rest of the day I was brain dead. I went back, showered, took a nap, and finally took a stroll along the lighted carnival fanfare of the Esplanade before retiring for the evening. A Chinese youth orchestra was giving a free performance near the main concert hall, and I stuck around long enough to hear them play. At one point, they featured a piece of music evoking a battle between a stalwart ox and a ferocious tiger. My best guess is that neither of them won, but I really could not say for sure.

Saturday was my final day in the city, and I endeavored to see as much of it as possible. After sleeping late and breakfasting with one of the Englishmen (His grandmother was American, who knew?) I went out to see the Chinese garden at the east end of the city, and walked around the carefully manicured plants and stones before heading back downtown to see the play I had bought a ticket for. The title of the performance was entitled “Invisibility/Breathing,” and was written by a Chinese author in Mandarin. A screen hanging down from the ceiling provided an English translation of the lines, not that it helped. The story revolved around a fisherman, a whore, and a poet who comes to live with the couple and periodically reads selections from western authors like Kafka and Dostoyevsky. Themes of restlessness in modern life and police brutality ran throughout the performance. It even went so far as to feature the execution of a mannequin on stage with an oversized double bladed axe. It was thoroughly bizarre, but interesting to some degree.

Following the performance, I went up to Orchard Road and browsed around the gigantic shopping centers until I stumbled upon a Border’s Books and Music. Oh books, wonderful expensive books how I love you. In Cambodia, we only have the cheap thrillers that tourists throw to us like the scraps of a meal. One of the lines from the play I saw kept spinning around in my head. “In the library I floated down the halls of the library, but the books would not speak to me. They were all full of dead men.” So many of them I could read, but I was still not done wandering the city. At Subway, I ate a chicken teriyaki sandwich and a giant cookie.

My flight left at six the next morning, which meant that I had to be at the airport at four and out of the hostel by three. So I decided to run off all the excitement of running around a city and stay up all night. I chatted with some Americans before I left. One was working in Kuala Lumpur as an English teacher, but he seemed rather too churlish to be pleasant company. The other was a delightful young lady from Kenya whose parents had emigrated from India during British colonial rule. She in turn had moved to America and became a pharmacologist and, among other things, a US citizen. She said that she had traveled for six months, staying in hostels and with distant family friends. I could not understand how she could keep that up for so long.

At three in the morning I made my way to airport, and wolfed down a hamburger from Burger King around four thirty before getting on the plane back to Phnom Penh. I then slept on the bus from the Penh back to Siem Reap and site.

I had done it. I had gone to Singapore, taken the GRE’s, gotten a good score, and made it back in one piece. Now I was very tired.