The Essentials: City of the Future

Singapore: land of gardens in the sky, old shophouses made new and outrageously expensive cars. Land where sliding glass doors open onto subway trains from immaculate platforms where people legitimately respect queueing lines painted on the floor. Land where public signage includes four languages: English, Chinese, Arabic and Bahasa. Not only is this probably one of the most eclectic mixes I’ve ever encountered, every single language has a different structure.

Good luck learning all of them.

For an entire week, I don’t notice a single piece of litter on the ground.

Double-decker, electric busses cruise the streets alongside an inordinate number of Lexus, Mercedes and BMWs. Seriously, there’s a fire-engine red Ferrari chilling on the street a block down from where I’m staying. People call dibs on entire tables tables in swarming wet markets by leaving a pack of tissues on the seats, and when they return from collecting food, there’s still a clear table waiting for them.

Heat and humidity envelop the city, accompanied by thunderheads which occasionally drop rapid, deafening, torrential storms. “Not rainy season,” Tatik, one of the housekeepers where I'm staying, tells me. “Just always raining.”

I spend my first day fighting off a rude and rapid head cold from the quiet paradise of a family friend’s house, where clusters of bamboo bend over a slender pool and monster koi cruise a shaded pond.

I spend my second day chasing down things and stuff available to me for the first time in three months, because even in the outback, clothing choice is limited. The process takes probably twice as long as it should given that, even though companies in Singapore carry western sizes, the largest shirt on the racks still happens to be a size small.

Yep, definitely still in Asia.

A quick and intimidating afternoon wander into the city’s glitziest shopping mall turns up pretty much every luxury brand in the history of ever: shops guarded by suited men wearing earpieces who would never, ever even let me through the door. Rolex. Gucci. Dolce and Gabana. Chanel. Valentino. A bunch of other crazy-ass shit I never heard of that would charge me half a year’s salary for a pair of socks. Places that rent an entire store and hang like five items on the rack just because that’s the way they want it to look.

… and for some unearthly reason, the entire building happens to be guarded by a giant watercolor techno pug on acid.

I poke around Little India the next morning, finding my way by accident into the infamous Mustafa: a mall that pretty much seems to consist of the amazon warehouse all in one, with people swarming everywhere and no organization whatsoever. I literally get lost in aisles of almonds and cashews. And salsa. Somewhere along the way, I find iron land. I’m pretty sure there’s a floor dedicated to shampoo. Potentially shared with binoculars. Somewhere else, I wander into Land of Luggage. It’s like the entire world has been squeezed into a single block of wizard space (Inner geeks, unite!).

Once I manage to escape Mustafa my afternoon wander takes me through an odd cultural mashup where old lanes filled with three-story shophouses have been converted to middle-eastern shops selling fabric and lanterns and Persian rugs. Eventually I continue past an epic streetside shwarma stall and arrive to Haji lane. The narrow trendy street, complete with exorbitant prices, bursts with historic shophouses have been repainted in massive murals, repurposed and restored into hair salons, boutique cantinas, juice bars and modern vintage shops. The place is pretty much a cross between the 23^rd Avenue of old and Hawthorne Boulevard, built in centuries-old buildings and centered on a mosque.

By evening I find my way to the Gardens by the Bay. Twin shining oblong domes rise in lattices of glass and metal from the water’s edge. Inside the Flower Dome I find something of a cross between an art installation and an incredibly compact, diverse, vibrant botanic garden. The larger dome holds a mountain of a vertical garden, wrapped in the heavy humidity of the cloud forest. A waterfall tumbles from near the ceiling to catch Chinese tourists in white sundresses unawares. At the very, very top, above floors filled with giant crystals and tree trunks carved into wood spirits, just beneath the dome's latticed roof, a pitcher plant garden sits just above the surface of a reflecting pool.

As darkness falls I find myself in some alien synthesis of organics and future tech as I stand amongst the base of the Gardens’ supertree grove. Steel worked into tree-shaped trellises rises skyward around me, trunks blanketed in dense, wild hanging gardens as vines dangle and dance in the evening breeze. Intricate metal webs extend outward to form a canopy high overhead, flashing with fairy lights as light disappears from the city. Somehow, for such enormous structures (pretty sure there's a restaurant in one of them), the supertrees still manage to appear so incredibly delicate.

Twice in the evening music blasts within the garden as techno lights illuminate the trees, bulbs dancing amongst the canopy in front of the Marina Bay Sands’ illuminated silhouette.

On my last day in Singapore, I exit the subway to walk through a maze of trendy old shophouses set beneath glassy skyscrapers draped in greenery. I somehow manage to find a wet market in the midst of the ritz, lunching on a $3 bowl of duck noodle soup with all the extras. I wind my way through Chinatown’s odd mashup of cheap touristy trinkets and pricey chopstick shops and rows of crimson and gold lanterns draped over streets. I wander the city’s waterfront, passing a pedestrian bridge molded into a shining silver DNA matrix, and watch a man blow fifty dollars on gelato for his kids that will melt before they manage to eat half of it. I find my way to the Merlion, a towering white lion-fish spouting water into the bay in front of the CBD, where the skyline’s modern skyscrapers tower over older colonial buildings. Toward the end of the day I detour through the city center, passing the parliament building and the supreme court, which for all intents and purposes appears to be topped by the space needle.