Bussing Singapore

OMG, WTF good grief and maybe even WOW, the wasp coloured double-decker bus to Singapore stung my sight. It was so posh that even had a Captain instead of a bus driver, boarding passes instead of tickets and those little screens in the back of seats that you sometimes get on international flights. My wife said – “Cool”. I agreed.

It had been many, many years since I had taken a bus to Singapore. The last time was a seedy looking rat trap of a bus from Klang (Selangor, Malaysia). That bus had partially working air-con and a driver who stopped every so many miles to deliver packages, take smoke breaks and generally delay my arrival to singular Singapore. This new bus was a whole other creature – sleek, shiny and straight down to Singapore with only one (small) stop for a little leg stretching. I was duly impressed.

The speedy bus was a little early as it arrived at Singapore Harbour front. I had a few hours before my performance that evening, and we had to find a hotel to rest weary heads. It was Easter, not Christmas, but still we got the no room at the inn scenario. We trudged around the old Arab Quarter looking for lodgings, getting wearier with each step. Five hours on the bus had left me a little groggy. The Singaporean humidity made the air into treacle with each footstep. You would have thought that eight years in Malaysia would have acclimatised me – it hadn’t. Underneath the mild tan I was still the very same Englishman who had stepped off of that twelve hour MAS flight back in February 2005, only older and heavier thanks to all that good Malaysian food.

The only ‘reasonably priced’ hotel available in the Arab Quarter was found. We ignored the stains on the ceiling, on the carpet and the trail of micro-ants to and from a slight residue of sugar on the aged dressing table. We breathed in to enter the room; for fear that we would not be able to u-turn once in. Later I quipped with the desk clerk “is that the larger of the two rooms”, “Yes, the other is much smaller” she said with a straight face. If the room had been any smaller we would have been spending the night half in and half out of Narnia, I thought.

That night, Arab Street was plagued with night cyclists glistening with sweat, their hard hats pointing backwards for Christmas. Those self-righteous cyclists smirked the smirks of the newly fit - all fitter-than-thou and scornful of our shovelling humus with pita bread into cavernous hungry mouths, swaying gently to the soothing Middle Eastern vibes.

My much-better-half and I sat at one of the myriad Middle Eastern themed restaurants. We were confronted by slyly spiced yoghurt, gleaming green and overtly jet olives, curious coriander and stiffly squared feta cheese amidst an array of lettuce leaves, cucumber and a mixed mezze squirted with freshly tart lemon juice. At that moment we were free as proverbial Beatles birds, lounging in a Singapore un-beset with meetings or other imposing necessities. My small performance was over, my Southern Comfort drank and we had exited back into the Singapore night unmolested by fans ( of which I have none) or any other even mildly interested party.

The Singapore Arab Quarter seemed to host a number of streets going by the vaguely exotic names of Kandahar Road, Orphir Road and Sultan Gate. Somewhere, nestled in there, was Kampong (village) Glam which, despite its name, was not a nest of 1970s, sequinned, aging rockers whose mascara had run for the last time. The morning eventually claimed us. After greeting the hotel room’s line of small ants with an enthusiastic ‘Good morning line of small ants’, we checked out – for you can have too much of a good thing, and strolled under a mild sun, past the vaguely Art Deco school of art and sought breakfast. We had forgotten, again, that Singapore – much like an ageing actress, does not do mornings. We grabbed a nondescript Nasi Lemak and instantly longed for Malaysia. But Malaysia it was not, for Singapore has not been part of Malaysia since 1965, and there we were roaming that Arab Quarter on a very quiet Good Friday morning.  

Amidst German tourists, Chinese tourists who seem to spend an inordinate amount of cash on large cameras and Americans with curiously cropped hair we skirted the Sultan Mosque and its compound. Outside that compound, eager merchants had gathered to ply their trade without the white lines seen in Egypt – to demark limitations for merchandiser and tourist interaction. Away to one side of the selling frenzy, two white-haired women sat. One was of Chinese descent, the other possibly American. They were imbibing coconut water, through plastic straws, direct from the weighty cut coconuts – “Isn’t it refreshing” the Chinese lady said to the other, her eyes shielded by oversized sunglasses.  A conversation ensued over the merits and demerits of coconuts and their uses. It was obvious that the Chinese lady was a little proud to be able to impart that knowledge to her friend; maybe she was a little proud of Singapore too, smiling as she spoke.

We left the Arab Quarter, travelled across Singapore on the spotlessly clean MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) and arrived in Little India as did the rain. Little India has become somewhat of a haven for authentic Northern and Southern Indian food, hence our opting to stay in that area for the majority of our time in Singapore. Once again accommodation was hard to come by unless, of course, we wanted to share a room, barracks style, with eleven other people of the same sex. I had no desire to do so. We trudged on until we eventually found a reasonably priced hotel. We later discovered that it was a hotel chain which had been infamous for selling rooms by the hour, sometime in its recently lurid past. But, on the day of our arrival, there seemed to be Chinese families and hordes of Malaysian tourists crowding out the hotel – no obvious hookers or johns evident.

The problem with hotels is that you are not at home.  In your unwisely chosen hotel room you are constantly at the mercy of other people’s behaviour. When neighbours arrive, noisily, at 1am, shout and wish each other good night in their various languages you are at their mercy. When the very same neighbours awaken at 7am, you are still at their mercy. Your sleep pattern, or lack of it, becomes guided by the thoughtlessness of others. Groggily, you lay awake to their stories unfolding - the children running along corridors, their banging on doors – and sometimes the right one. You hear, because you have been awoken by them, the grandmothers yelling at the children in foreign tongues, the children’s and their parents’ responses, the slamming of doors and the unnatural quite as the entire party is transported down to the lobby, in the lift. It is the quiet that disturbs more than the noise - the anticipation laying in wait within that quiet.

My much-better-half joined the Singapore Urban Sketchers for a morning’s sketching. We travelled across Singapore, on smartly on time buses, to arrive at Gillman Barracks, vaguely on time, to sketch until luncheon. Gillman Barracks was named after the British General - Sir Webb Gillman, a former General Officer Commanding-in Chief for the Eastern Command (1931), based in Singapore, he died in 1933. The barracks was built and named after him in 1936.

The posh art galleries which have claimed the old British Gillman Barracks didn't open until midday. There was no chance to gain succour there while my much-better-half sketched, so I skirted the closed galleries and headed for the sanctity of ARC (Alexandra Retail Centre). The one Gillman gallery to be open, as I passed, held an exhibition of psychogeographic images. I did a little head scratching and later ‘Googled’ to discover that, in this case, psychogeographic images meant road and footpath markings made in construction work. I was a little baffled and went to ask the young lady seated at a desk what it was all about. She was intent on watching a soap opera on her laptop, earphones plugged in. I wanted to ask if it was intentional that some of the postcard size images were peeling from the walls. Was it a statement on contemporary curation, or on the ephemeral nature of such markings, but I could not gain her attention and left none the wiser.

While others sketched away in a heat, nearing the noon day (when only mad dogs and other Englishmen are abroad), I was biding my time in coffee@room in the ARC mall, somewhere in Singapore. I was unaware that Saturday was live band day at ARC. My relative peace and quiet soon disappeared, as did I after finishing my tea. It is no doubt an age thing. But I just cannot fathom why live music, or entertainment, is necessary in a place designed for shopping. Singapore, and no less so the ARC mall, is a land of enigmas. Fusion mixes to the extent that if becomes confusion. Food and drinks are no longer bound by strict cultural rules. Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean becomes a soft drink emporium, Vanilla becomes a muffin shop and the aforementioned live Chinese band plays pseudo prog rock into a mall distinctly lacking people – quite possibly due to the smallness of the mall and the loudness of the music.

Having at least partially sated ourselves with Indian food, good Art and good company it was time to climb aboard the yellow and black caterpillar and dash back to Kuala Lumpur. I say dash, though in reality it was a seven hour slow dash - due to it being the Easter weekend, raining and dark. Singapore by bus was an experience – more luxurious than ‘coach class’ in an aeroplane, cheaper but much, much slower. The trip was nice for fun, but probably not on a regular basis due to the huge amounts of time it consumes. We (mentally) waved fond farewell to the wasp coloured caterpillar and earnestly considered driving down to Singapore in the future.