Issue 12 | 24th June, 2023 | 10 minutes reading time
“Why are you here for 29 days?” the immigration official asked me suspiciously. I began fumbling my words, trying to explain that I wasn’t planning anything untoward - no hunting for jobs or locals to marry, I swear. Yes, I was hitting Singapore’s visa limits by staying that long and, as I later learned, far exceeding the 3.5 days that the average traveller spent here. But what could I do? My previous encounters with this glorious city had left me smitten, intoxicated and entranced, and I needed to have more of it.
A nervous trip to the special interrogation counter later, I was let into this beautiful city. I’ve spent every moment and ounce of energy since then exploring its neighbourhoods, parks and forests. I’ve been fed by its bourgie coffee shops and hawker centres. And I’ve walked and walked and walked till my feet have been blistered and my soul has felt full. In this month’s Multitudes, I’m going to try to put into words the joy I’ve felt throughout. So, get yourself a mug of chai or coffee and spend the next ten to fifteen minutes reading the ramblings of a man hopelessly in love with a city that’ll only open itself to him for 30 days at a time.
This is my third time in Singapore. I have only vague memories of the first - it was 2002 and all I can remember was seeing a treadmill for the first time in my life, crying my eyes out at Sentosa because we missed our bus back to the city (I was an easily startled six-year-old), and feeling glee at eating McDonald’s for breakfast one day.
My second visit here in 2019 sparked my infatuation. I arrived with no plan but, in making it up as I went along, I fell hard and fast for the life this city promised. I took free guided tours through Kampong Glam, Chinatown and Little India. I felt a sense of wonder walking through the mini-rainforest that was the MacRitchie Reservoir on my runs through the Botanical Gardens. I devoured the delectable offerings of hawker centres and drank free Milo at the Marina Bay Sands Casino. At the end of it all I was left with one thought and one thought only - I WANT MORE!
And so here I was, four years later, to get more. That I could spend a month here was made possible by the guest room available in my brother and sister-in-law’s apartment and their generosity in subsidising my stay. Armed with their kindness, I set out to explore the city I fell for four years ago.
Having a full month here has allowed me to do things with ease. My days have had a routine and my weeks have had a rhythm. On weekdays, I’d get up around 7, write for a bit, work out, have a quick breakfast, and get ready. Prepped to face the day, I’d then put my laptop in my bag, hurriedly slather sunscreen across my arms and legs, and make a beeline for one of the many bourgie coffee shops around town.
Oh lord, how these cafes have nourished my soul. In keeping with the city’s spirit, it feels like the baristas care about what they’re doing. Every cup has been filled with love and warmth. Every day I’ve regretted my ‘no coffee after 1 PM’ rule because I can only get a cup or two in my belly before it’s time to stop.
Even Bangalore, India’s own bourgie coffee capital, can’t compete - the worst cup I’ve had here probably ranks in the top 10 I’ve had there. Here, I could dare to order my coffee black, trusting that the beans wouldn’t be roasted to the point of burning and the resultant coffee wouldn’t taste like ash. And so, my mornings have been spent working amongst fellow hipsters with their heads buried in their laptops, powered by caffeine and the occasional dessert from their impeccably arranged display cases.
Caffeination complete, I’ve made my way to the nearest hawker centres for lunch, another of Singapore’s culinary marvels. Though the busy stalls at these centres are meant to feed the masses, they’re serious places with real pedigree - two of them have won Michelin stars and the chef of another defeated Gordon Ramsay in a chicken rice cook-off. The city descends upon these havens of humidity (no air conditioning + many hot stalls = sweat everywhere, all the time) throughout the day. The (very orderly) queues for the more famous stalls stretch for hours.
Because they’re meant to feed everyone, they’re also delightfully cheap - one of the Michelin-starred hawkers sold his humble bowl of chicken and rice for $2.5. Most meals I’ve had have been between 3-7 dollars; even my cheap ass would pay that much for this food in a heartbeat in India.
In keeping with my 2023-search-for-novelty, I’ve never been to the same place twice. I even mustered up the courage to point at random things on menus with little clue as to their contents and obediently devoured whatever’s been sent my way. All but once have these yielded happy results. Fishy soups, chilli oil wontons, mapo tofu, laksa, barbecued pork rice, and a surprisingly authentic serving of tandoori chicken and garlic naan - YAY. Starchy bowls of Lor Mee that become too much to take after the first few bites - decidedly nay. One failure for many successes is a ratio I’m willing to accept.
With my stomach full and mouth occasionally numbed by heavenly Szechuan peppercorns, I boarded the city’s sublime public transport on my journey home. As someone plagued by mild anxiety at the best of times, how do I communicate the rapturous joy I’ve felt in trusting that, if I miss one, there’s always another bus or train around the corner? Where are the words to tell you the happy tears I’ve shed seeing these buses glide down smooth roads? Torrential downpours that would bring Bangalore to a standstill are but a minor inconvenience to life on the streets here. No part of the city has felt inconvenient to reach.
These buses and trains are also a great equaliser - in a city where owning a car costs a small fortune, public transport becomes a dignified default for large swathes of the city’s population. Oh, how I would simp for, twerk for, and debase myself in any other way for this to be a staple feature of my life.
Some weekdays have started with adventures, courtesy the glorious free walking tours conducted by Indie Singapore. I first stumbled across these kind folks in 2019 and explored Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam with Wei, one of their guides. I’ve always found these tours the best way to see a city. They’re slow, deliberate, and immersive. Each walk is about 3.5 hours of conversation filled with history, culture, trivia, and more. It’s much preferable to walking around aimlessly and unaware, especially if you’re travelling alone. Talk to fellow tour-ees, make friends, discover more of Singapore together, and then eventually become Instagram acquaintances who like each other’s stories even six years later. It’s a special kind of bond.
I re-did the walks around Chinatown and Kampong Glam, and also made my way around the Singapore River with them (where Wei and I recognised each other, even four years later). These artificially antique parts of town are no doubt tourist traps, but I’m all for it. Imperfectly so, but the city’s preserved history and forgone gazillions of dollars to keep two-story shop-houses alive in a sea of skyscrapers. It feels forced, but if it wasn’t forced it wouldn’t be. Real estate developers would have bought out this land and buried Sago Lane, the former Chinatown home of funeral parlours for poor workmen, beneath concrete. The trippy art and hipster havens of Haji Lane would have suffered much the same fate.
I reserved my more offbeat excursions into Singapore’s wilderness for the weekends. Guided by energetic retirees volunteering for a Sustainability Fest, I ambled through mangrove forests and the Jurong Lake Gardens and watched Komodo Dragons laze around. With MyCommunity guides, I made the gentle trek up Mount Faber, discovering a hidden lake and World War Two-era bunkers along the way.
Four years after hearing the story of Bukit Brown and those fighting to save it, I got to visit the cemetery. The largest Chinese Cemetery outside China, Bukit Brown was set up in the 1920s and all filled up by the 1970s. It was a manicured grassy hillside during those years, but after it got full the government stopped maintaining it. In the decades since then, nature returned. Fifty years doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s done from being bare grass to a full-blown rainforest in this time. It’s been taken over by vaulting trees and climbing creepers whose roots, I’m hoping, are nourished by the tens of thousands of people buried here.
The cemetery lay forgotten after it stopped accepting corpses, but bounced back into public imagination a decade ago when the government built a highway through it and announced plans to replace the graves and groves with luxury housing after 2030. Volunteers (called “Brownies”) started taking groups across the hillsides, educating them about its history and the lives of those buried here. They’ve even fed them edible and medicinal parts of the forest (it gave food and shelter to impoverished locals during WW2) and patiently sat with them in the undergrowth, watching migratory birds pass through every few months.
On my last full weekend, I went on my most extravagant adventure. I walked right across Singapore from South to North, along the old Rail Corridor-turned-nature trail that once linked the Port of Singapore to Malaysia. There was no good reason to do this, but I didn’t need one. I savoured the 25-ish kilometres without the need for podcasts or music. At every step of that journey, I marvelled at its existence. Literally in the heart of this dense concrete jungle are 20+ kilometres of paths meant solely for those lunatics among us who somehow find enjoyment in walking, running, and cycling in Singapore’s heat and humidity. Coming from cities with rapidly diminishing green spaces and nothing nearly as impressive as this, I couldn’t for a moment take it for granted.
If you’re reading this issue on the morning it comes out, you’ll be reading this on my last day in Singapore. It’s a day I’m spending in a daze. A month has gone by at warp speed. 5 free walking tours, 4 forest adventures, and dozens of bourgie coffee shops later, I’m forced to leave a place I’d love to call home.
This might just be me lusting after the convenience of life in a developed country, but I’m leaving part of my heart behind here. I’ve fallen in love with how polite and considerate people are. I’ve fallen in love with the city’s efficiency. I’ve fallen in love with the effort that seems to go into making it a reality. It might just be a small social experiment on a city-island-nation that can’t be replicated elsewhere, but you get the sense that everyone’s trying to make this experiment as successful as it can be.
Yes, I’ve experienced life in a bubble here. But god dammit it’s the best bubble I’ve ever come across. It’s a bubble that’s made me feel ALIVE and hopeful. And it’s a bubble I’m going to miss so, so dearly.
So, that’s about it for this month. If you’re ever in Singapore, I can’t recommend Indie Singapore’s walking tours enough. They’re the best way to see parts of the city, especially if you’re only staying for a short time. You can also look at the MyCommunity tours which are targeted more for locals but are equally interesting. These tours are free, but tips and donations are recommended and deserved. Keep an eye out for the Bukit Brown walks as well - they don’t happen often, but they’re well worth the experience. If you want to see my ever-expanding list of bourgie cafes and restaurants across the city, you can do so here.
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See you next month,
Shantanu