Singapore and KL are, on the surface, quite similar, but I preferred KL for some reason unknown to myself. I found it a more welcoming place, though I cannot say exactly why. It's not that I found Singapore in any way hostile, I just felt that I fitted into KL much more quickly. From a practical point of view, KL is a lot cheaper, so our strained budgets got a bit of a rest. We got our travel vaccinations and medication in Prince Street hospital which I would highly recommend for their level of efficiency, friendliness and professionalism. Every where we went in KL people were nice to us.
Looking back at Singapore, we were tired and stressed after the huge effort of moving away from Australia. The act of selling, giving away and boxing the stuff that we have acrued was tremendous. I found myself a little shocked by how much we had gathered since I foolishly considered myself to be a non-materialistic person, but there we have it, five large boxes of stuff sent to Ireland comprising of clothes, books, a laptop computer, a monitor, a box of electronic stuff, a plaster mould of my face, a few small kitchen applicances, a game of majong that we have yet to play and a load of presents for people in Ireland which we bought last year in Turkey but couldn't post. 5 full boxes!
Added to that there was the selling and giving away of furniture: a table, a desk, a bench, a chair, a suite of furniture, a vacuum, a fridge, a tv, a bookshelf, bikes, a guitar and tons of books, utensils, board games and other trinkets. What we didn't expect was that trinkets would take up about five bags. Trinkets were the unknowns which we didn't plan for.
So, we were exhausted by our crazy few weeks of posting, packing, selling and op shopping culminating in one crazy weekend of non-stop chaos, sleeping on the floor because we had already sold our bed and finding an odd pleasure in sitting amid duvets on the living room floor drinking the last of our home brews and watching trainspotting before I posted it to the lucky ebay bidder.
Anyway, I digress, we found ourselves amid chaos, the cleaners came an hour early on Sunday while we were still packing, we fought with them and after four threats to abandom us, finally they waited until the right time and gave us the opportunity to remove the last of our stuff.
Our last day before we were supposed to leave was filled with a thousand and one little jobs to do, four trips to the op shop, posting things to ebay buyers, sending off crates, disgarding rubbish and finally moving our beautiful hardwood table out to the suburb before it was taken by a passerby. The table went quickly and I was glad that was the case. It was a great table. We tried to sell it for a bargain price of 200 (it cost a lot more) but we were irked by a serious of visitors and inquirers who rattled off reasons why they thought it was 'shaky' or 'too big' or 'not the typical formica table which they wanted'. We reduced the price to 100 dollars in the hope that someone would take the handcrafted, recylced beauty which had given us so much joy, only to have people trying to offer us 50 dollars for it and insult the table in order to try to shake us or tell us that we were running out of time so it would be good to take their off so they would 'take it off our hands'. Opportunists! It felt like betrayal to sell such a beautiful thing to somone who showed it such little respect, so in the end we put it on the footpath and let a stranger take it. Oddly, there seemed to be more dignity in it.
I suppose the table, to me, represented our life in Australia and the act of selling it to some unappreciative opportunist who tried to insult it was like dishonouring ourselves. When we gave it away there was a great sense of freedom, like shedding an old skin, and we were finally able to move on.
At the start of this rant, I mentioned that I am not a materialist, and yet I found myself attached to these emotionally charged things around us. To me, they seemed to echo the choices we had made, not only for how we should live, but for who were were, like frozen mirrors remembering who were were for the last four years. Now, I fully admit that I am terrified. Paddy and I share that common fear of migration into the unknown. Sometimes going home can be the most frightening of travels because you think that you know what to expect but you don't and in the gap between what you know and what has changed lies self discovery. It was an ending of one life and the beginning of a new one, perhaps even more profoundly pronounced than our marriage vows. We are taking this trip as an epilogue to our lives as young, free, restless beings and preparing for the inevitable complications of growing up, settling down and putting down roots. Still, we find ourselves uncertain too, we have all the need to put down roots and yet I wonder whether that desire is simply an aching for the phantom roots which we have yanked out of the red Australian earth.
So, anyways, we were exhausted when we left Melbourne and then we headed to the airport, as I have mentioned, to find our Tiger airways flight cancelled. After a quick day in Melbourne we were off again to Perth and then Fremantle. We relaxed in Fremantle, it was such a beautiful and lovely little settlement, my mind still wanders around its narrow, old fashioned little streets. I really prefer it to Perth and I am so glad for the recommendation from my friend Kane to go there. If left to our own, unresearched devices, Paddy and I would have found ourselves bored and restless in Perth. The prison tour was amazing, as I have said before, it really brought us out of our state of panic.
When we got to Singapore, a strong sense of anxiety had captured us. We were tired and grumpy and we had to get travel vaccines before it was too late. We needed to get shots against typhoid and hepatitus a. In my silliness, I was really freaking out because I thought that thypoid was Cholera and I have been seriously traumatized by the painted veil so I didn't want to get that. It turns out that tyhpoid is samonella which isn't too bad, in saying that I am glad to have gotten my shots!
We got to Singapore and after a night on jetstar and a sleep at the airport we were still a little groggy and extremely hungry. We hadn't eaten in 18 hours.
When we got to the nearest food place, a food court beside the raffles place train station, I was stunned by the fact that several restaurants didn't have any vegetarian options! None at all! I asked in one japanese place and they acted as if I had just acted for boiled child. 'Vegetarian food? No, we don't serve that here!'. Finally we settled for a baked potato place and we waited and waited. Paddy got his potato and I still waited. A funny thing happened then which broke the tension. We were the only caucasion people in the potato place until this blonde woman came in. She sat down and ordered a potato. Almost immediately afterwards they brought her out the potato which I recognized as my own. I was ravenous at the this stage and watching the woman arguing with the waitress that this wasn't what she ordered, I couldn't help but wave furiously. The waitress hadn't even bothered to look at the table number which was on the order, instead she had been told that it belonged to the 'white girl' or possibly the 'blonde girl' (although my hair is brown). When she brought the potato over she apologized and I laughed and she laughed. I really enjoyed the novelty of it all which I suppose betrays my own ego. I have to admit, last time I was in HCMC (Saigon) people stopped and pointed or came over and touched my hair and I felt very much like a celebrity.
So, in Singapore we stayed on the edge of little india and although I appreciated it's charater and range of excellent eateries, we were a little bit dissapointed with the hostel we had and a little bit overwhelmed by the heat and the busy streets. I did love the ample supply of vegetarian food though!
We got to an internet cafe the next day, printed out all our tickets and reservations and reduced the myriad of tasks we had to do down to a few.
After that we had a pleasant boat ride, found out about Singapoe happy hour and a delcious micro brewary (singapore seems to have a few good microbrewaries). We found this area of the city, near the river, with lovely coloured government buildings and crazy arcology-style roof coverings over a few outdoor streets which are lined with shops and restaurants. We had beer, listened in to the conversation of an English guy who raved about Germany and talked about what things would be like for us in the next few years: the unknowable.
I got a scottish ale and despite the hot weather it was delicious. We followed that up with a trip to the park with the fort which looks down over Singapore. We just lay on the grass for a while and relaxed until a loud speaker in the field next door started pumping pop music, so we left.
We headed out to a decadent little spannish bar for some sangria and free food and talked about the hedonistic pleasure palace which Singapore seems to be. On Sunday we left for the train station. On the way I saw a man squashing cans on the street on Sunday morning to make money while we avoided a guy in a shiny merc and the huge division between rich and poor in this city struck me as a frightening thing. If it were not for the welfare state and a government funded university education I would probably be squashing cans too.
We made the mistake of being too brave in trying to find the train station, walking to the train station, getting the train to the nearest station and walking the final 800 meters or so to the train station. We found out that our Haigendaz sponsored free map of Singapore was completely inaccurate with major mistakes in the layouts of the streets. We got lost, had to ask directions from several people, tried to get a taxi (the driver wouldn't take us because we were already so close) and finally arrived at the station about an hour early for our train. The station in Sinagpore is run by the Malaysian train service (KTMB) which means that it is not connected up to the Singapore metro service and seems to be a source of shame to most Singaporians. It's about to be decomissioned, so I recommend having a look at it before it goes as it's a beautiful art deco building.
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