Singapore Swing

For the second time this year, I got my passport stamped. This time, I was traveling to Singapore, to visit my aunt, following my completion of my classes at Columbia. 

It was my first time traveling to Asia and I have been wanting to see Singapore ever since my aunt moved there nearly a decade ago. After meticulously researching all of the best cites, I made my way across the world to visit this island nation atop the equator.

I touched down in Singapore and discovered a nation of hawker centers, towering skyscrapers, and sweltering heat. It also is a nation of facial recognition at the airport, indoor shopping centers a la Rodeo Drive, and a concrete jungle, surrounded by actual jungle. 

It is a one-party system that takes pieces of democracy, socialism, and capitalism and combines them for their own style of government. It shouldn’t work, and yet, it works almost too well, being one of the cleanest and safest countries in the world. 

After more than 19 hours of travel, I landed in Singapore Changi airport, an airport that puts all other airports to shame. It is a tourist attraction in and of itself with its butterfly garden and waterfall, making for a very warm welcome into the country. 

From there, I got my bearings, going to the Ngee Ann City Civic Plaza in the Orchard Road shopping center, where I spent hours at Kikokuniya Books. I got lost in the rows of books and found a pretty stack of books to bring home, as I can be counted on to do wherever I am in the world. 

On my first night there, I went to a Hawker Center, one of the main things that I wanted to try when visiting Singapore. A hawker center is an open air market, filled with dozens of food stalls, as seen in the movie Crazy Rich Asians. I waded through the crowds, trying out all of the different kinds of incredible food while my mouth watered. Steam wafted up from nearly every food stall. I drank out of a coconut and ate, among other things, some of the best Indian food that I have ever had.

The Raffles Place Hawker Center was the perfect place to start my adventure in Singapore. There would be many hawker centers in my future, as well as more bookstores and shopping centers, all of them explored to the fullest extent. 

I would be going everywhere from nature sites to urban centers. Keep reading for tales of monkey forests, super trees, and botanical gardens.

The Tragic Queen,
Raquel 

P.S.: Check out my blog post about my recent travels to France