The casino beneath is off-limits to Singaporeans.
The Lotus at left, Merlion at right, and bay to Marina Bay Sands, the surfboard-roofed hotel and casino.

For rock stars, athletes and ordinary folk alike, life in their 20s is likely the most powerful and guiding decade of their lives. Times, places like hippies in the 1960s, Capone’s Chicago, and so forth, became scenes to be experienced. My wildest decade was spent teaching English in Asia, but the scene was migratory. In 2014, four years into my decade-plus stint in the Orient, I was part of an ex-pat exodus from Daejeon, South Korea to Singapore with three other couples. Most of us signed two-year contracts with different branches of “I Can Read,” a phonics school mostly for 4 to 8-year-olds. Prianka, my then-girlfriend, signed with a similar school off Orchard Road.

An island 30 miles from east to west and 17, north to south, Singapore’s home to six million people. Take away the ports and the shockingly large reservoirs and greenspaces, maybe half the land is actually inhabited (by humans). Smack-dab on the equator, the dense city-state is a vortex of human insanity unlike any other I’ve ever experienced, a sci-fi world on Earth. 

Imagine the airport in Men in Black, with all the different aliens going about their business, and everything is as normal as possible before their flights. All this despite the different arms where arms don’t belong, entities without faces and lifeforms breathing bubbles as they sashay about, with all the different languages and customs – and appendages – they all separately have, and everything’s as organized and polite as interstellar travel can get.  

Well, that’s Singapore, but they’re all human and from different, mostly Asian countries and cultures, all swaying in-and-out of everyone else’s worlds and back into their own. It’s a large Manhattan in the jungle, with the whole world swirling together in one of the richest countries in the world, distinctly Asian, but stuck together with English glue.  

Shopping mall on Orchard Road, the shopping and fashion district of Singapore. Not where Pri worked.

Reality frequently slaps you to remind you where you are, in a place where long-tailed macaques also call home. The crab-eating macaque. These guys are ten to twenty pounds and about knee-high, walking on all-fours. They’re used to humans. Certainly not friendly, but chill. (Well, other than that one time…)

Macaques are numerous in Singapore, in the “least-endangered” category. Sometimes when going around the city, your bus will pass by an empty stop, and there’ll be a macaque in one of the seats, possibly snacking, comfortably covered by the stop’s roof. (Sadly, I never saw one waiting next to a human.) They were just taking a break from the sun or the rain, just like you might if you forgot your umbrella.

That didn’t happen everyday, but I got used to it pretty quickly. You get used to the weather pretty quickly, as well, depending on how you measure time. To start, every day is about the same, with a high/low around 90/73 degrees F (23/32 C). Getting in the 60s? An escape, and above 95 is a swampy, humid sweat-storm, and far more frequent. Dry heat? Singapore is jungle hot. Parboiled hot. Every month and day of the year.

Thankfully, air-conditioning is Singapore’s mechanical mascot, and they do not skimp. Every place blasts it and walking down the dense, storefront streets, the auto-doors give you a potent punch of arctic chill as you pass, one after another. Gals, blessedly in airy sundresses, sometimes lead the way. (Trapped in soggy pants myself, like a jellyfish herder, their breezy fashion choices are still a Win for me.)

It rains every other day, or so. I’m not sure I recall just a sprinkle, only downpours. The storms crossing the ocean sometimes turn into monsoons. Forget the faucet. Dump the whole sink for a couple of days straight. Graciously, most showers are short and pass in a few hours. A sudden collapse of rain, like someone pulled the tablecloth from underneath the fish-tank clouds.

Sunset over the ocean was about an hour away on public transport. Shipping’s always afoot.

Back to time, Singapore has a way of making you forget about it. Onthe equator, you get 12 hours of daylight and 12 of nighttime every single day. You don’t get any seasons. (Other than monsoon season, they say, but I never really noticed, frankly.) The shocking part for me and our friends was how without winter drifting through and out of summer, we lost reference to help locate memories in time. Pictures alone didn’t help because the weather is always the same; leaves don’t change color and flowers are always blooming. And macaques don’t hibernate. They’re always around (running late for something, apparently).

A quick look at Singaporeans shows about 75% are Chinese, 15% Malay, 9% Indian, and the last 1% is, well, the rest. Having said that, apparently about 30% of residents are foreign workers and come and go, like our expedition.

Thanks to the British, however, everywhere you go in public is in English first, followed by translations below. The legal system is in English. All business is in English. Even older locals will be able to speak it enough, and they ‘all’ have incredibly strong accents. But casual conversation, ordering food, instructions for a taxi driver, talking at work, being sentenced to caning, all in English, no problem. (Well, that last one would be.)

All pics are a decade old, apologies, but the heart of downtown. Fullerton Hotel visible at bottom, center-right.

Locals talk to each other in English because groups are often mixed. As soon as they talk to friends or family, however, their native tongues run free.

Singaporean English, Singlish, is fantastic in its brusque simplicity. By far the most common expression is “Can!” It simply means “Yes, I can do that,” “Yes, I did that,” or “I will do that.” They add other syllables with meaning, but I don’t know the difference. I do remember “can can” because it’s stronger, like “I absolutely will.” And it’s fun to say, especially in context, because the stronger people push the sounds, the more serious it is.

Helpfully, “can not” is the exact opposite of “can,” and it’s always two syllables. 

Listening to our schools’ front desks was hilarious. We ex-pats would hear staff respond to bosses on the phone, as the invisible higher-up would give a litany of names, tasks, or whatever they were talking or asking about, in English or whatever language they knew they shared.

On our end, we’d hear staff respond with great enthusiasm to each: “Can! Can! CAN NOT! CAN! CAN NOT! CAN CAN!” 

At work, we were also exposed to perhaps the biggest culture-shock in my life. Let’s just say, some parents didn’t really believe in dental care. Their baby-teeththed kids would walk around with a black dagger of a dead tooth (or three) in their gumlines. Normal life sanded them into obsidian razors, jutting out through their pink mouths.

For maybe 10% of our students, this was normal. In the second-richest country on Earth. Children in class would be cheerful, bouncing up and down, participating, and the numerous, jagged black shards were nasty gut-punches to ignore as we taught kids their short vowels.

I asked Pearl, our pristinely-dentitioned local teacher at my school, who answered in disgust. She said some parents (usually Chinese, she wasn’t shy of adding), wouldn’t waste money on baby teeth that were going to fall out anyway, so the parents just let them rot off. 

From a cable car as Pri and went to Sentosa, Singapore’s island of theme parks, incl. Universal Studios.

Nevermind Dickensian dentists, Singapore’s a bustlin’ place. It’s also incredibly expensive, particularly for food and drink. Pri and I, along with our ex-pat friends, and many Singaporeans found it easy to get around the costs. Just fly out of the country! (Changi Airport (SIN) earns its reputation as the best in the world.) 

We went to either Phu Quoc, Vietnam, or Phuket, Thailand to ring in 2015. (Who can remember, eh?) They’re both only a 90 minute flight away. To splurge, Bali’s about two and a half hours, and once you get to these exotic spots, hotels, food and entertainment are damn cheap! 

Trying to live out their fantasies and see these spots after they retire, old folk waste so much time getting old they miss these cheap, local flights. (And their youth.) Now, it’s maybe $1500+ from Chicago, but either destination was about $50 (round trip) from my home back then. 

Pro tip: Fly into Bangkok or Saigon, and then take a bus to Phuket or wherever. Toughen up.
(See also: Don’t have children.)

I finished my contract in ‘16 and went back to Indiana to see my family. Then, after a few more spells in Daejeon, with an interlude in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I returned Stateside for good(?) in June of ‘22. Singapore was a remarkable knuckleball in the mix, predictable in its unpredictability. A dense, southeast Asian Monaco in the ocean. All in comfy English.

I haven’t yet returned to that equatorial cyclone of affluent madness, but if I could drop a (friendly?) alien anywhere on Earth to show them what this planet’s really like, and we only had a day or two? Singapore’s easily the best spot for ‘em to land, or whatever it is they do.

The greenspace trails are lovely. That squiggly tree shows a lot of character.

That alien better be a well-behaved one and not act like an urban camper in San Francisco. Singapore don’t play.

A 90 Day visa from our test-visit to scope it out. I wouldn’t dare risk overstaying it.

************************************

Sharing my hawker and food experiences is for later. There are other fun details about teaching and life in Singapore. There are some interesting political twists, as well. I believe I’ll reveal what happened that one time with those damn macaques. 

While writing this, I was offered and accepted a job, causing much delay. For a hopeful Part 2, let me know what you’d like to see and hear, and I’ll do my best to oblige. Help me out, or Singaporean spirits will linger. Ya may end up like this dude:

(Note the man on the curb with his hawker food: Singapore, in a nutshell Styrofoam plate.)