Monthly Archive for January, 2009

I was in Singapore for about a week recently and it was my first time visiting the country (Yeah, I know!). My preconception was that hey it’s so close to Malaysia, it will most likely look and smell like Malaysia anyway. Boy was I wrong! Below are among some of the things that I have observed…

There were queues everywhere for anything and everything. It’s almost like it’s programmed in their brain that if the person in front of them wants the same thing or has the same goal, they will automatically stand in line behind them. Being an orderly natured person, I loved it! Oddly enough, this I did not notice while waiting to get on the MRT. Most people didn’t even wait for passengers to alight before getting onboard. Perhaps those people aren’t locals, possibly even Malaysians and I wouldn’t be surprised!

The streets, the MRT stations, the malls , the parks, almost anywhere I went were all squeaky clean. Anything that could be cleaned,  it’s done! I felt like I was in Sydney but with KL weather and Asian people all over the place (actually Asians were all over Sydney as well).

There were no rubbish bins around or in the MRT stations AT ALL! I realised this when I had a Starbucks latte to go. I finished it just as soon as I reached an the MRT station that I needed to go to and wanted to dispose the paper cup but there were no rubbish bins to be found! I had to carry it onboard the MRT making sure not to put the cup anywhere near my mouth or I’d get my arse fined for drinking in the MRT, bummer! I heard that apparently, this was so no terrorrist could hide a bomb in an unsuspecting rubbish bin near places where there will be crowds.

Broadband was really broadband in Singapore. My uncle had a 10mbps line at home and apparently, to them 10mbit is nothing. Well to me, it was definitely something alright. Wait-forever-myx back home was dinosaur age dialup compared to my experience there! His line was also Bittorrent friendly. I didn’t need to muck around with proxies and protocol encryption or what have you not settings on my router to get excellent 400KB/s per torrent on average.

So as I had recently learned, the people may look the same and talk the same languages, and the weather might feel the same, but Singapore’s definitely nothing like Malaysia!