Same But Different

Well here I am in Singapore.  The hotel is surprisingly pleasant.  That up there is the view from the balcony.  Why on earth any loony architect would put a balcony on the twenty-third floor is beyond me however.  Vertigo is just built into the price of the hotel room.

It's very handy to everything.  Mind you Singapore is only 50 kms across the widest point so nowhere is that far.  It's bit hard to get your head round an entire country that's half the size of Perth but which seems to have more shops than the entire of Australia. It's bewildering the size of the

 malls here.  You go in, thinking "this is a nice mall, quite big, a bit like Garden City/Bluewater".  Then you walk round the corner and realise that there is another wing as big as the first.  Then you round a third corner and there is yet more of it!  And if you are really lucky it'll be joined to another mall which is as big again.  It's all a bit overwhelming.  You must be able to buy pretty much anything here.  Except Darth Vader Lego key-rings.  They are totally sold out everywhere.  

As you go round the shops it can get a bit disorienting, as there is a weird mix of shops here.  There's Spotlight and Harvey Norman over there from Australia, then round the corner is Marks and Spencer from the UK and then downstairs there's Carrefour which is French. Your brain starts to scream "WHERE THE HELL AM I??".  But you're never far from M&S knickers which must be an improvement over Perth.  

Then there are the other things that are the same but slightly different.  Like the Warner Brother Cinemaplex which looks just like the ones in the UK, but serves mashed potato and gravy instead of popcorn.  Or McDonald's which looks the same but has durian flavoured milkshakes on the menu this week.  Which I wouldn't recommend.  If you don't know, durian smells a bit like mango that's been left in a hot wheelie bin for about a week.  Apparently it tastes better than it smells.  Don't know how it couldn't really.  The pet stores look like the ones in Australia too, but the biggest pet they seem to sell is the hamster.  Not many Singaporeans seem to want a great dane for their apartment.

So the shops are great, but buying things can be tricky.  Especially for a hulking great european sized person.  Don't get me wrong I love being generally taller than everyone else on the train but it does have it's limitations when buying clothes.  Ask for a 34" waist and they get a bit stressed, trying not to tell you that they don't carry plus sizes.  I saw a rack full of 24" to 28" waist jeans today.  They were the biggest in the shop.  That can't be healthy surely?

I actually, and against my better judgement, like Singapore a lot.  Obviously there are some benefits to a benevolent authoritarian state.  No gum, no graffiti, no crime.  In fact I went into a 7-11 store at midnight and it was manned by a little girl all on her own.  No bullet proof glass, no security guard.  Can you imagine that almost anywhere else in the world? And it's not as if people are constantly cowed into submission by government intervention.  I've seen no police here yet and no CCTV cameras except on the subway. How come the liberal democracies have to have so much surveillance on their citizens when we are supposed to be the free ones?  At least the government here doesn't even pretend to be supporting a liberal democracy.  Perhaps that's why I can cope with it here.  You know exactly where you stand with little sense of the hypocrisy of the western governments.  However the system here does seem to have created a unaccountable love of Toto.  I've heard Africa about 20 times today in different places.

Perhaps democracy is the better option then.