Day 69 -3/24 – Singapore

Singapore is a city that happens to also be a country. At 267 square miles, it is about 3-1/2 times the size of Washington DC, but with 4.8 million people. It became independent from Malaysia in 1965.

Singapore is extremely clean. This is summarized by a t-shirt we saw that said: “Singapore is a “fine” city…$500 fine for litter, $500 fine for chewing gum, $500 fine for not flushing a public toilet, $1,000 fine for smoking.”

It is also a prosperous city. One person said they heard that the average salary was $40,000 per year, which, I think is ahead of the US.

Another passenger heard that they give a special tax break to any college educated woman who has a child. When someone challenged the ruler whether this was discrimination to only give the break to the college educated women, he responded: “What, so you’d rather encourage a country of dummies?”

We docked close to the city center, so did an excursion on our own. The day got off to a slow start because we had a heavy rain that delayed the boat ride on the river that we had planned. However, it got off after a half hour delay, and the weather remained fine the rest of the day.

Our second stop was China town. Kathleen and the ladies did some shopping. We found the local Chinese –style pharmacist to be interesting to watch.

We had lunch in Chinatown: a Chinese meal including Peking duck.

Next we went to the Raffles hotel. This was the place where the Singapore sling drink was created. We had one even though the price was unreasonably high. The drinks there cost us more than the lunch.

Final stop for Kathleen and me was the Singapore Flyer. This is a huge Ferris Wheel that is 165 meters tall. That’s about 55 stories! Neither of us like heights, but we got some great photos.

I discovered that I had been wrong saying that the port in Thailand was so huge. Singapore claims to be the largest in the world, with (they claim) 1/4th of all of the cargo container traffic in the world coming through their harbor. There must have been 300 of the 20-story tall unloading cranes along the docks, and hundreds of ships resting in the harbor waiting for a dock slot.