By any rational measure, Singapore should be a near-ideal city/state for me:

• Good, cheap public transport (including driverless underground trains where you can see right down the tunnel ahead).
• Spotlessly clean streets and gardens.
• Wide interplay of cultures and cuisines.
• English as one of their official languages.

And yet. I’m missing something. Maybe I just had a bad day.

I went to a “recommended” cafe for breakfast that turned out to be a Starbucks-like chain, and where my reheated sandwich was still partly chilled.

I took a bus and underground to Chinatown expecting to see some evidence of its historic past, but found a tourist market and some (nice) artwork.

The abundant gold leaf in the Buddhist temple felt a bit excessive next to the pleas for donations.

Everything felt like it was a bit sanitised and tourist-friendly. Except then I decided (against my initial instinct) to do a tourist-favourite attraction, the so-called SkyPark perched on top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel towers.

Roughly, the deck at the 56th floor looks like this, a slightly curved sweep across the three towers of the hotel.

And for S$35 (25€, £21) you can visit, well, a tiny part of that deck, on the right-hand-side here:

All the rest of it is either for hotel guests only (like the infinity pool, fair enough) or for other access uses like a restaurant. You get to explore an area about 30×20 metres. It all feels like a bit of a con. I eked out twenty minutes up there, half of which was trying to shelter from the intermittent rain.

It left a bad taste in my mouth and a general ambivalence toward any of the other attractions in the area (all costing similar sums).

Hawker Redemption

It’s not all bad though, by any means. I had a late lunch at a hawker place near my hotel.

(“What’s a hawker place?” I hear you ask. Basically, a food market, like an indoor market in the UK but mostly with small, independent food outlets.)

I dutifully ordered my food, waited for it to be prepared and then went to pay with card.

Oops. Only QR or cash.

I don’t have cash (didn’t think it necessary here), and QR only works for locals.

“It’s OK,” says the guy. “Eat your food, then there’s a cash machine just over there. I can keep tabs on you because you’re so tall and also the only white guy around.”

There’s still a place for trust and honesty here 🙂