My friends are chasing me up the green hills of Singapore. It is during the weekend, and a lot of Singaporeans are out in in the parcs to exercise. How do they manage? The humidity is amazingly high, probably around 90%, and although it is my fourth day in this city, I am still not used to the heat, sweating a lot, feeling easily tired and taking a shower whenever I can! We are seeing monkeys along the way, and I'd like to go up to them, but they are holding me back: actually the animals are quite agressive, getting the fruits that people eat when they are back at their cars. They look peaceful, but they are not! Sitting on the cars, waiting for the fruits to appear! It is a funny experience this morning as we get our own labyrinth, not finding our way to the gorge that my friend wants me to show. We are trying twice, always getting back miracously to the car park! After the second fail - that actually brings us to see a lizard quite big, taking the sun on the road, probably being 1,5 m long! I feel quite courageous passing him with maybe half meter distance!
Back on the parking we decide to go to lunch and then again! We don' t find the way into it! How strange that feels...you wonder around, try and try and try and there doesn't seem to be a way to get to the place tht you want to get to! Thanks to the strong will of Christian, my schoolmate's husband, we find a parking and stroll to have pasta in the food court. Pasta in Singapore, I am quite sceptic, but actually it's not too bad!
After all this walking and searching, our minds and mostly our feet are tired, so we decide to rest and give a big reward to our feet! I am so curious as we will get a type of foot massage by fish! It's a species coming from Turkey, and they are happy to eat off the skin from your feet! How funny, it's actually quite strange having hundreds of small fishing eating from your feet...but it works and after a couple of minutes I finally enjoy it! After that we get a long reflexology foot massage, and my massagist is an expert in European soccer so I get to discuss some of the German and Italian soccer players. Very entertaining! Thanks to my happy feet I succeed on the way to the airport with my quite heavy backpack (14kg), and the help of a nice lady on the MRT (metro).
What I think about Singapore after these few days? I enjoyed a lot the long walks with my friends in her neighbourhood, as it felt special to me what she was telling to me giving me some views on her life there, personal and work. I should tell you first what I liked: the food of course! The fish curry was just great, having the boiling pot with the fish head in front of me! The orchids were too beautiful to believe, and the rainforest, the different shades of green and the richness of the nature is something I will take with me. What I didn't like: it's the social order that you feel and see, between the different Asian cultures, Europeans, Indians there. I can't understand why people have to be treated differently: why do you need to be impolite to a Chinese waiter? Why is a Malay massagist different to us? You can feel it, when eating out, in the metro, and it's something that I really resent and don't like at all. I noticed it when smiling at my Chinese massagist, people seem to be surprised when a Westener meets them in this way (and there was nothing about attracting each other in it).
I felt that the city was kind of missing an own character, and I was amazed by the number of shopping malls. It seems like an artifical world, you enter, stay there for hours and don't even see the sunlight! And that's what they do: like the Malaysian or Philippine maids that have off on Sunday and go into town to shop. What a weird picture: themn in front of the Gucci and Chanel stores staring into the windows to get a grasp of our World, a really materialistic world that probably doesn't offer them more on a human basis than they wouldn't already have. That's kind of pessimistic, but I felt it that way. I would prefer to live in a city that would be less clean, more chaotic, but having a character a soul, having a democratic system with real free elections. Thanks to that 'Old man' (Khee lu, I need to look up his name) Singapore became one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but unfortunately missing a soul and not giving 100% freedom to all its people. One thought I'd like to add: the control that the Singaporean government has and executes, was justified by them with the tendency of the local people to be wild or chaotic or without manners. So it's all about that and probably a synthesis: the less mannerly people, the more control you need? If your ideal is to be prosperous and clean... it's looking up to the Western ideals and our culture: as we value cleanliness, and manners, and to have a "culture", someone decided to put more control to attract Westerners, and it perfectly worked out! I am not a fan of it, mostly because of the social order that comes with it, but happy to have experienced it for some days! Let's move on to Australia...
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