First impressions of Singapore

Thursday, 1 Mar 2007 | Life in Asia

This trip to Singapore is one where my schedule is so tightly packed, that I hardly have time to see the sights. An hour here and there to just aimlessly walk around (or write articles for my weblog), but mostly just going from here to there to see the people and attend the events I had planned.

Now, for those of you who don’t know: Singapore is a city-state, meaning it is just one city that makes up the entire country. About 4.5 million people live here, the country has a booming economy and income levels are about the same as most western countries. So here are my first impressions of Singapore.

• This is a very organized place, VERY organized and VERY efficient in every way possible
• Public announcements are in 4 different languages, English, Chinese, Malay and another language I haven’t figured out what it is yet. The national language is English, but the Chinese here speak with a very heavy accent even if they were born here. Expats refer to it as Singlish, we’ve got Tinglish in Thailand so that makes sense!
• It looks really pretty.
• This is a car city, wide roads everywhere and no congestion anywhere.
• This place is all about business.
• It’s boring here!

To be honest, I expected a city much like Hong Kong. But Singapore is nothing like Hong Kong. Sure, it’s a former British colony, there are a lot of Chinese here, it’s a financial and logistics hub, etc. But one of the main differences is that Singapore has nothing ‘Asian’ about it. It really is Asian only by location, the rest is western. The way things are set up, the incredible organization of it all, the way people deal with each other. It’s not Asian, it’s what we do in the west.

While that may all seem like a good thing, it is all so meticulously planned and flawlessly executed that it turns the city into a boring and bland place. Singapore has always had the image of being boring, so the government went ahead and tried to change that. But they did it in a Singaporean style … designating a few areas for ‘recreation’ and filling them with nice, clean nightlife venues. Speaking to some expats at the British Chamber of Commerce networking event tonight, they confirmed just that. The place gets utterly boring after having lived here for a year. It is the blandness of Holland that made me want to leave it, so perhaps Singapore is not the best of places for me to live. So I haven’t been turned into a big fan of Singapore on this trip just yet.

Now, that may all sound really negative. But that is not entirely true. It is like a breath of fresh air being in a city that ticks as flawlessly as a Swiss watch. It’s great to go shopping and not feel like an outlander with an ATM sign on the forehead. And it is cool to go out in an area (Clarke Quay) and see nothing but nicely designed, hip places that play good music and have a nice crowd. So there are some things I like about Singapore!