12 HOURS IN SINGAPORE

Visas are funny things, especially when you're living in a country that's riddled by slow bureaucratic processes and corruption. As of the 2nd, I'd been in Indonesia on a tourist visa, good for one month, and extended once, but I had to go to Singapore for the day to officially get my work visa. All I had to do was bring my passport and the application fee (which the school gave me) and then Julia (another teacher who went with me) and I were free to explore Singapore for the day while the visas were processed.

It was a full day because I was picked up by a school van at 4 AM and got back to my apartment around 11 PM. We ended up with about 12 hours in Singapore, which flew by. Singapore is awesome! It's only about a 90 minute flight from Jakarta but the two cities are night and day. Jakarta is actually less hot and humid than Singapore, but Singapore is CLEAN! The streets aren't full of rubbish (for good reason, you wouldn't litter either if you got a $500 fine,) the subway system is efficient and easy to use, and it's just a really interesting, diverse place. We had time for really only two things: first we went to Little India where we window shopped at the market selling Indian clothes and had lunch, and second, we went to Marina Bay, walked along the harbor, and went on the Singapore Flyer, which is a big observation wheel, kind of like the London Eye.

The first adventure of the day was meeting up with Julia. We had separate flights so I arrived at the airport by myself. We both had been given similar directions ("Go down one level, and out exit door #2 to meet the agent.) But, it turns out, we had arrived at different terminals! Add to that my phone wasn't receiving any text messages and wasn't connecting to the agent's Singaporean phone number and I was a little worried. Eventually I got ahold of Julia and made my way over to terminal three where we met up and found the agent, a woman named Fiona who handles all of this visa business for BBS in Singapore.

Fiona drove us to the agency in Chinatown where we dropped off our passports and got our pictures taken, and then we were free for the day until 5:30, when we were supposed to come back to the agency. I was impressed with my sights of Singapore, in the airport and driving to the downtown area. For instance, in the airport bathrooms there were touchscreens on the walls as you exited, asking you to rate your experience of the bathroom with five correspondingly happy or disgruntled smiley faces. On the bottom of the touchscreen monitor it read: "This screen is sanitized every hour." That's just the sort of place Singapore is: smart, efficient, modern, and scrupulously clean. Also very impressive (and completely mesmerizing) in the airport was the metal-raindrop-mechanical-artwork (that's the best way I can think to describe it) where a grid of at least a hundred ceiling-suspended raindrops moved in formation to make various shapes and patterns. It was awesome and I watched it for quite a while.

As for the rest of my day in Singapore, let me transcribe for you some of my journal entry:

"8:22 PM. Today was great. We did two things mainly: visited Little India and went to Marina Bay and in the Singapore Flyer. Spectacular view! Apparently Julia has a bit of a fear of heights, but she did fine. Coming back to Chinatown and the travel agency, we came up the escalator and found ourselves in a splendid, colourful, bustling street with all kinds of small clothing and souvenir shops. And... a Tintin boutique! I resisted the temptation to buy anything, but I did get my picture taken in front of the store, like a dork. I would really like to come back. Singapore is such an interesting, diverse place. It really deserves three or four days to explore properly. Who knows? I may very well be back sometime in the future."

"10:35 PM. (Still Singapore time, though we must be closer to Indonesia than Singapore by now.) I remember what I was going to say: I really enjoyed the Singapore airport. At any airport I love to people-watch, and the exhilaration of seeing all sorts of people from all over the world coming and going to all parts of the world. But the Singapore airport especially creates that feeling. I especially enjoyed seeing the Westerners. So many white people compared to Jakarta! Maybe every one in thirty are white in Singapore, compared to what feels like one in five hundred in Jakarta. There are particularly a lot in the airport (including, fairly frequently, a white man with his Asian girlfriend or wife and biracial school-age children out on holiday.) You can spot the Europeans fairly easily, especially the continental Western Europeans. And so many with sandals and straw hats and baggy pants and dresses, big, heavy-duty backpacks full, arriving in Singapore or on their way to the next leg of the great Asian journey.

"I saw three people whom I believe were German. A young, mid-20s couple dressed stylishly and a woman in her sixties with them, dressed in baggy, white cotton pants and shirt, in a typical Southeast Asian style, and black tennis shoes. I saw many families too. European I'm sure, because North Americans just don't go on family trips to Singapore. I wish I could sit down with a lot of these people and chat, hear their stories, find out where they're from, where they've been, and where they are going.

"Anyway... Singapura was great! I hope to go back. There's so much to see!"