The Spore

1) Singapore really is the Schaumburg of Asia. Except there are far, far more Carl's Jr.'s (i.e. Hardees) in Singapore. They're all over the place, from along the east coast, next to the seafood restaurants, to right across the street from my hotel.
2) And why go to Singapore for a three-day weekend? The same reason you go to Schaumburg. To go eat buffalo wings. To go to brewpubs. To go shop at massive bookstores that you don't get in the urban center of Hong Kong, where you can browse for three hours and spend waaaay more money than you ever intended buying books. To shop at Gaps (though the Singapore one wants about $80 US for a pair of pants, oddly and illogically.)
But not to buy stuff at Orange Juliuses.



3) It's hard to emphasize how clean and scrubbed Singapore is. Sure Tokyo is clean, but there still is a gritty feel to some of its neighborhoods; there still is an organic feel to the city.
Singapore just feels.......scrubbed. When you first get there, it's, "Awesome! Lots of great food everywhere. Cabs everywhere. Everything seems to work, and the weather is better than Hong Kong (the skies are not hazy, and slightly less hot)." But after a day of wandering around, everything feels very Stepfordish. There's no other way to describe it. You realize there is only one place in town where people are authorized to protest the government, providing they get the proper paperwork and reservations first. You realize that this is a city that, yes, would arrest you for jay-walking without a second thought.
On the other hand, their pepper crab is one of the must-have dishes you need to have before you die.
4) Needless to say, the Spore is unnaturally safe. But all the cabbies were obsessed with one thing when I told them I was from Hong Kong: how dangerous HK is. Which is funny, because I have never, ever felt unsafe for a second in Hong Kong, no matter the hour of the day or the strange alley I was in. Never confuse grit with crime: you can be grungy and dirty and still be safe, as HK proves.
That said, it was weird to be in a city again where I could automatically chat with every cab driver, as they all spoke English. One cabbie on Sunday said he could speak 12 languages, including about 6 dialects of Chinese.
5) I did miss my HK cabbies, though. Singapore is filled with this weird mix of surcharges and fees that makes getting a cab there an infuriating practice. Sometimes, you paid a surcharge for driving at a certain hour on the weekend, sometimes not. Some areas included a surcharge, some did not. And then there is the infamous midnight rule: Fares go up a lot at midnight, so cabbies are loath to pick up one between 11 and 12 because they can make more then. (Yes, this makes no sense, as they can still get fares between then, and at midnight. Everyone knows this, and still cabbies think this way.)
I missed my flat fares, regardless of day, in Hong Kong. The only time you pay an extra fee is for a) going through a toll booth and b) if you have a lot of luggage, and then it is a nominal fee.
It's like income taxes. When I was in the US, I scoffed at the idea of a flat tax, where you get rid of 99.9 percent of all the writeoffs in exchange for a flat tax that everyone would pay. There's no way, that would work, I thought. It would be unfair to the poor.
Then I come to Hong Kong, where they have that essentially. You take deductions for a) dependents b) approved charities c) mortgage interest d) bad loans you take a loss on e) a few more, such as your housing allowance. You can detail all these, with the legalese, on probably less than 10 pages, instead of the literally thousands of pages you need in the US to go through everything, with the legalese.
And the first time I did taxes here, it took 30 minutes to register and figure out the right browser to file taxes. Then it took 7 minutes to fill out my tax form and compute what I owed.
And in the years since then, it has taken, on average, 4 minutes to do my taxes. And the rates scale up - you pay a nominal amount on the first few hundred thousand HK, and it caps out at about 16 percent. But you can figure out your taxes automatically every year. It takes only a few minutes to figure out because it is so simple. And because it is so simple, there are far fewer ways to scam the system.
Just like taking a cab in Spore. Like Tokyo and HK, you assume the drivers will not scam you, but still, with all the surcharges, you wonder.
6) Speaking of, a word of advice in Singapore. If you flight is at 8:05 am, take a cab at 6:10 am. You still will have an hour and a half to blow after you clear security and customs, and you will only pay the meter rate to the airport, about $9 sing, or about $6 US. If you leave the hotel at 5:58 like I did, you pay the midnight-6am rate, of a flat $40 sing to the airport. Ouch.
7) Beer in Spore: Expensive. Though it was nice to have fresh microbrews again. I forgot how tasty a well-crafted, malty yet hoppy pale ale is. And I was able to hit four microbreweries: Brewerkz, (hooray for buffalo wings and Kolsch beers, the Pump Room (which had the best beer of all, their pale ale, Red Dot, and a Paulaner brewpub next to my hotel. Plus, there is the Archipelago Brewery, whose brewmaster I hung out with on Friday night and who thankfully picked up most of the tabs, keeping me out of bankruptcy. The man mixes purple dragon fruit with an effervescent lager to create a beer all foodies could love. Make your own joke about the purplish-pink head on the beer, the first I have ever seen among the thousands of beers I have tried.
8) One thing I do love about traveling is hitting the ground running and meeting people you never would otherwise. On Friday, I spent the night drinking with three brewers fand three artists, including two Americans on their way through Asia before teaching in France. Hard to not have a fun night of beer and conversation with that group.
9) Happiness is wandering through a Takashimaya, a Japanese department store, on a Saturday and coming across a Katsu stand and getting the deep-fried pork sammich for lunch. Yummy.