F&G: Singapore, Round 2

We arrived in Singapore late at night/early in the morning on Friday, and were picked up by my old college housemate and her boyfriend. They helped us move into our new place the next day. Since Singapore is ridiculously expensive, we rented a single room in a four-bedroom apartment that is shared with 7 or 8 other people. We’ve only met two of the others: most people stay in their rooms since the common space isn’t air-conditioned. We think there might be 5 Vietnamese students in our apartment along with the other two or three tenants.

We have a bedroom with an attached bathroom. It’s bigger than our place back in Madison, has hardwood floors, great internet, hot water, and is only two blocks from a train stop so we’re really pleased with it. We’re actually just a few yards away from the train line but we can barely hear its quiet whirring as it goes by. In fact, this is the quietest place we’ve been in our whole year so far.

We’ll be in Singapore for a month, returning to the U.S. in late May. While many of you may have heard that Singapore is a big, densely-packed city, it really doesn’t feel like that after we’ve traveled around Southeast Asia a bit. Singapore is actually quite small, only about 5 million people, and it doesn't feel nearly as dense as HK, Manila, or Jakarta. (We think that the reason for this is that much of Hong Kong is not actually livable due to mountains everywhere. So if they would actually measure the land where people lived then HK would be much denser. HK, for example, has giant clumps of towering skyscraper apartment buildings everywhere while most of the buildings here are 4 stories, with 20- or 30- story buildings popping up at regular intervals). Out in eastern Singapore, especially, it feels like a very nice, clean, Florida suburb with a very diverse mix of people and lots of delicious food. While lots of people complain about Singapore being boring and sterile because of its strict regulations and clean streets (for example, see here and here), we know we’ll enjoy living here. These same things that may make Singapore seem boring to tourists also makes it quite easy to live here (one of my relatives who used to live in Jakarta said that coming to Singapore was like going to Bethesda, Maryland). The only comparison to Manila is the heat. The actual temperature is actually about 10 degrees cooler but the humidity is much more intense so we end up being much sweatier. Our glasses normally steam up when we step outside if we’ve been in air conditioning.

Our friends have already taken us out to several great places to eat in the neighborhood and, this morning, took us to a pool and then helped us with errands. I’m going to start working in the archives tomorrow while Grace finishes getting us settled in.