36 Hours in Singapore

Few places are as oddly familiar and yet completely foreign to me as Singapore. Similar to my relationship with New York, Singapore is a city I’ve never spent more than 48 hours in.

This, my second time visiting the famous city-state by the sea, was essentially a self-imposed stopover on my way to Phuket, Thailand. Getting from anywhere in the US to Thailand is a lengthy ordeal no matter how you choose to approach it. I opted to try my hand at taking the 16 hour flight from SFO to SIN via Singapore Airlines.

While the flight was comfortable, the food and service stellar, and the modular business class seat/bed was an impressive design, I don’t know that 16 hours on a plane is necessarily my jam. That being said, Singapore is an immaculate international vortex and is the most accessible city in Asia for first time visitors from English speaking countries.

I landed in the city around 7:30 pm, sailed through customs, and checked into my hotel in the Clarke Quay area. After dropping off my bags I headed straight out into the night, walking to my favorite pocket-sized cocktail bar.

I had a few of the expertly crafted and curated cocktails, made friends with the bartender, and decided to find something to eat. I knew there was only one option, the Oriental Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown.

Think of it as an OG Chinese spot with a Cheesecake Factory sized menu filled with real ass Chinese food, a slough of various grilled skewers laden with five spice, and cheap cold beers. It's the kind of spot you go to when you need to lay down a solid foundation for a night of drinking, or to soak up the remaining alcohol after a night of drinking.

I ordered way too much food: beef fried rice, a few sets of skewers like enoki mushroom wrapped in pork belly as well as the spicy grilled beef, and the shrimp omelette, a crispy open faced omelette with shrimp and peppers…oh and I ordered a Tsingtao beer, which I didn’t realize was a large sized bottle and couldn’t even come close to finishing.

A little buzzed, very full, jet lagged and a bit disoriented, I stumbled back to my hotel and got some sleep.

The next day I woke up and walked over to the mall (of which Singapore has many, each larger, more luxurious, and increasingly labyrinthine than the next) for some kaya toast: thin slices of bread with knobs of butter and kaya, a popular coconut jam made with eggs, sugar, and pandan. Requisite breakfast meal completed, I took a stroll around Fort Canning Park, a large historical park and cultural center of the city.

Having worked up a bit of an appetite after roaming around the giant hilltop park, a stop at a local food hawker center was needed. I chose the Alexandra Village Food Centre, and gorged on some chicken rice, the national dish of Singapore, as well as a nice plate of roasted duck with a dark sticky sauce.

Intent on doing a bit of shopping during my brief stopover, I wandered across the street from the food hawker stalls over to the Queensway Shopping Centre. One of the oldest shopping malls in Singapore, Queensway had one of the strangest layouts of any mall I’d ever been to.

Wikipedia says “The layout of the mall is made up of a series of concentric circles radiating outwards, which makes it look like an octagon. With its unique trigram shape layout, many shoppers get lost within the mall.”

Facts. This mall is very confusing, with an almost Penrose stairs or Inception-like layout centered around a lower level food court from which a confluence of drastically different aromas waft up the escalators into the higher level floors.

I popped into a bunch of different stores, spending the most time in a shoe outlet store, failing to find anything that tickled my fancy and was available in my size (11.5 unless it's Nike then I’m a 12 or 12.5).

Later that evening I had plans to hang out with Shona, a hilarious and interesting young Indian lady and Sinagporean native.

I met Shona when I was on vacation in Cabo San Lucas last year. My friend David had recently gotten his first passport and naturally had to take his first adventure to Mexico with none other than yours truly.

While out on the town ingesting way more tequila than any medical professional would advise, David and I stumbled into the Mucho Macho Bar where Shona happened to be working. David and Shona hit it off and did a bit of dancing and twerking to Beyonce songs. Over the next few nights we returned to that bar and I got the chance to chat with Shona a bit. She told me that she was from Singapore, and was just taking a break from life, living in Mexico for a bit. She had plans to come to LA to visit a friend, so we exchanged info in hopes of hanging out across the border. We weren’t able to link up when she was in LA, but I told her if I ever came to Singapore again I would hit her up, so I did.

Meeting up with friends in different cities and countries around the world is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Shona suggested a spot to meet up for dinner, Blu Jaz, a clever little restaurant tucked away on Haji Lane, an eclectic, artsy corner of the city with some great cafes and nightlife. We grubbed on some good naan, butter chicken, and palak paneer as we caught up and talked about travel, jobs, and the necessary and sometimes odd interstitial phases of life we all go through (some of us more than others).

Shona was kind enough to show me around a bit, walking me over to the Sultan Mosque, and then over to Boat Quay, where we had some tasty prata courtesy of the New Shah Alam restaurant.

Our bellies full and going above and beyond her volunteer tour guide duties, Shona graciously walked me back to my hotel before catching the MRT home. I ended up having a few nightcaps back at the aforementioned cocktail bar, the only way to end my last evening in Singapore.

Next stop, Phuket, Thailand.