Friday the 25th: Chinatown & the City of Love

On Friday, June 25th, I was planning to just hang around the dorms. I ran into some other SEAS kids in the canteen, though, who were planning to go to Chinatown (yes, this is the third time I've been to Chinatown) to do souvenir shopping, so I decided to tag along.

Not much to say about this trip. The evening of this day corresponds with the blog I wrote about falling in love with the city (see: Singapura, City of Love). The first half of the day was just me buying the rest of my postcards and a few souvenirs. So here are pictures from the adventures.

The next three pictures are from a shop in Chinatown where you can buy these paper products shaped like material goods and burn them for your ancestors so they will have wealth in the afterlife.

Squids!

Chinatown Alleyway

Chinatown has beautiful street signs.

A lot of the shops in Chinatown have these shrines out front.

There are lots of posh tea rooms in Chinatown.

A random alley in Chinatown.

This is the alley where I do most of my souvenir/postcard shopping. The MRT stop is at the end. For some reason, the glass/steel structure seems to clash with the "traditional" looking buildings.
A carving on the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple.

Thursday the 24th, Part II: Dinner with UNC Alums & Walk Around the Riverfront

After the HDB visit, we all went to a Thai restaurant in downtown to have a paid-for-by-the-program dinner with some UNC Alums living in Singapore. I actually wasn't wowed by the food, but I did get Thai Iced Tea, one of my favorite drinks even in the U.S. (there's a great Thai café in Greensboro that has AWESOME Thai Milk Tea).

I also got durian for dessert - I don't remember if I've talked much about durian, but it's pretty infamous amongst our group. It is a big, spiky fruit that is expensive and horribly pungent. There are many places - the MRT stations, certain hotels - that have explicit "No Durian" signs. The smell can apparently get into fabric and never come out, and it's really not a pleasant smell.

Despite all these drawbacks, it is a delicacy among most Asian countries. We all joked that it is a fruit that has done everything to scare people away - it's big and spiky, it smells terrible - and yet people still eat it!

So, of course, I had to try some. The dessert was actually quite good, but the texture was rather odd. I'm glad I tried it, though. I rather enjoyed the taste, but the smell lingered in my mouth for a bit too long afterwards.

After dinner, Hui Qian led a group of us around the downtown area to see some of the important Singaporean landmarks - the Raffles Hotel, the World War II Monument, the Esplanade Theatre, the Merlion, the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort, the Business District at night. It was a slow, easy, chill evening, very romantic and atmospheric. It was the first time I'd walked around downtown at night, and it was really neat to be in a big city at night time.

^^ The Raffles Hotel, an iconic building in Singapore.

^^ Group photo in front of the World War II monument. Since you can't really see the monument, here's a picture of it, thanks to Google.

Walking through the Esplanade, the premier arts theatre in Singapore (which happens to be delightfully shaped like a durian!), we decided to stop and take funny pictures with these weird paper maché statues in the lobby.

Here's the iconic Esplanade theatre viewed from the riverfront. The third image, again thanks to Google, is of an actual durian. See the resemblance?

Pictures taken by the riverfront with the business district in the background.

The just-opened but already-iconic Marina Bay Sands Integrated Gambling Resort/Hotel/Skypark (you've already seen pictures of this in some of my earlier posts).

The hyper-iconic Merlion, a fusion of a lion and a fish artificially created by the government to be a symbol of Singapore. Even if it was only created specifically for tourism, and has absolutely no cultural or historical significance, it's a pretty neat thing.

Thursday the 24th, Part I: HDB Headquarters

On Thursday the 24th, we went to the Housing Development Board central office. The Housing Development Board (I can't remember if I've explained this before or not - if it sounds familiar, just skip to the next paragraph) is a branch of the government and has enacted perhaps THE most effective public housing scheme in the world. Something like 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB housing, and Singapore provides more housing for its people than any other country in the world.

That being said, it is a government department, and it does its deal of dirty work. From firm and uncompromising land acquisition rights to its "pro-family" policy (you can't buy a government flat before the age of 35 unless you're married) - which is pretty clearly a terrible way of running things, as it doesn't allow friends to live together, discriminates against homosexuals, and often pushes young people into marriages they aren't ready for - to its "Big Brother" methods of dealing with poor people (they're allowed to buy highly subsidized housing, but at a certain level of subsidization, they are highly monitored and checked up on by the government), one cannot blindly go around only talking about how "effective and wonderful" it is.

And yet, it really has worked wonders for this island. Look at pictures (unfortunately, I don't have any, but part of the HDB center was a museum with a series of exhibits that did show the evolution of Singaporean living conditions) of what Singapore looked like before the HDB (and this was as late as 1950s/60s), and you can hardly even fathom such rapid and thorough change as has taken place. Pre-1960s living conditions were appalling - people lived in shacks, had no electricity or running water, threw their waste out in the streets and in the same rivers they bathed in, had leaky roofs and drafty homes. Fast-forward to today, just 50 years later, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone living in these conditions.

Part of the HDB's success, of course, comes from Singapore's size. It's a lot easier to run such a program effectively when you're a small country. Even homes for the disadvantaged (homeless shelters), like the ones we volunteered at on Saturday and Sunday the 26th and 27th (to be discussed in an upcoming blog post), are much easier to run in a small country, where things are easier to regulate and manage. Of course, one obvious downside, as I've already pointed out, is that it also makes it much easier for the government to control things whenever and however it wants.

Anyway, you're probably tired of hearing political jargon. I didn't bring my camera to the HDB place, but I've stolen a few pictures from other people in the group. As I said, the place was set up kind of like a museum, with the information I've shared above (though in much more propagandized terms) and lots of biased videos and interactive computer programs. It was actually really neat, if you filtered out the propaganda - there were big computer screens where you could look at maps and choose which housing development you wanted to learn about, and other ones that told about future development plans. The neatest part was the show flats. The HDB apparently has a few pre-set flat layouts that vary based on number of bedrooms: 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-bedroom. Most of the pictures I'm stealing are of some of the interiors of these show flats.

Honestly, all of us in the group thought they were pretty nice and neat. Many Singaporeans I've talked to, though, feel that they're "quite small" and cramped.

Here was a neat screen where you rolled the screen across a picture, and the screen also showed you a computerized version of the picture. Then, when you got to a certain point, the screen started playing a video based on what picture you were over. So when you crossed a picture of, for instance, Toa Payoh Housing Community, the corresponding video would start playing. Super neat!

Here was a thing where you could pull/slide an information board out of the wall.

^^ Lookin' trendy in the living room of the 5-bedroom show flat.

^^ All the beds had these silly flowers on them. But, hey, it matches my floral shirt!

^^ Bein' trendy!

^^ Haha we can't remember if we were trying to be velociraptors or lions...

^^ Family meal! No forks or spoons were set at the fake table, only chop sticks!