| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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I could wait
until then. But then the group decided to go to Swensen's for ice cream
and I got even ootsier. The service was not very good and we really
didn't get what we ordered and I kept asking myself, is this the best
use of our time? I suggested we forget about Orchard Street and go look
at Chinatown. Evelyn and Steve agreed and the three of us took the
Metro.
Ah, yes. The Metro. It has to be one of the most amazing in the
world. They had the stored-value magnetic cards. The tracks are sealed
off behind glass walls with doors that coincided with where the doors of
the trains would stop. That made jumping on the tracks impossible. The
train cars themselves were very modern and very clean. They were
protected from litter by heavy fines. There were no dividers between
cars so that it looked like you were in one long articulated car that
ran the length of the train rather than many shorter cars.
And for people waiting for the trains, where the United States
would have ads (London also), they had signs up with brain twisters.
One was the old puzzle about the hunter who shoots a bear, walks a mile
south, a mile east, and a mile north, and is back where he started.
What color is the bear? (In fact, there are more points that he could
have started from, but he might have had to bring his own bear. There
are more points on the Earth's surface you can walk a mile south, east,
and north, and be back where you started.) That was the easy puzzle.
The harder one was five 'complete-the-sequence' puzzles. I am pretty
good with this sort of thing and figured out three of the five. Steve
figured out a fourth. One none of us figured out.
In the United States if somebody puts brain twisters in a public
place (as opposed to publishing them in a book), they are trivially
simple. Generally they are aimed at children. HBO had a program called
'Brain Games,' but the questions were all aimed at an eight-year-old's
mind. In the United States, the popular culture tries to send a message
to people not to think quantitatively. People who do are usually
portrayed by the media as weird or nerds. With very few exceptions,
mathematicians are portrayed as people who are out of touch with
reality. The sciences are generally shown in the media as being at best
misguided and more often evil. The media have the attitude that we all
know deep down that scientists are useful at times, but they are
enjoyable to laugh at, particularly because they are not well
understood. As of several years ago, we turned out twice as many
lawyers as engineers in our schools, Japan turned out twice as many
engineers as lawyers. I am sure the ratio has gotten worse since then.
Asia has a much greater respect for the human intellect, or so it seems
on first brush. Having no children, I can watch this whole situation
with detached amusement. There is enough momentum in the economy to
keep it from crumbling badly in my lifetime. Not that I won't feel the
pinch, of course, but the next generation will feel it a lot worse than
I do. At least I expect it will. Perhaps it is my values that are
screwed up.
Much of Singapore still feels the influence of Sir Thomas Raffles
of the East India Company who more or less founded modern Singapore.
Raffles organized a Chinese section of town with different sections for
each of the clans. In a sense it became like many ghettos closely tied
together. People on a given street would be from the same part of
China. Sometimes they would form into secret societies like the Tongs.
As I mentioned earlier, Tongs were often fraternal but more often went
in for the same sorts of things the American organized crime went in
for: drugs, gambling, prostitution, loan sharking. They were sort of
their own Mafia. Their power continued until the Japanese moved on
Singapore and occupied it. By the 1950s there were just too dang many
people trying to live on too small a place in Chinatown and the younger
generation started heading out to the suburbs. With them went most of
the money that maintained Chinatown and conditions went downhill. The
government wanted extensive urban renewal, but found it was too
expensive and let things go downhill.
We got off the Metro and pulled out a map to try to find our way.
A young local stopped and asked us if he could help us find anything.
Steve seems to think this is a relatively common occurrence even in
Manhattan. My suspicion is that is not true.
The Southeast Asia Guide had a walking tour of Chinatown and I am
not entirely sure why we did not take that tour. We probably just did
not think of it. Instead we sort of wandered around. Much of Chinatown
is made up of shop-houses. The bottom floor is a shop; the top two are
houses. A city block will be one huge building with one roof, but it
will be subdivided into shop-houses with a dozen or so on each side.
Somehow in the middle of all this is an Indian temple. It is another
Sri Mariammam Temple. The doorway is about twenty feet high but above
it is a steep pyramid structure fifty or sixty feet high that is divided
into five levels and a roof as if it were stories of a building, though
exaggerating perspective to make it look even taller. On each of the
levels there are statues of deities crowded together like a New York
subway. On the lowest level they are life-size, or nearly so, assuming
that Indian deities can be said to be life-sized. On the fifth floor
they are about half scale. This whole thing is overlaid with chains of
flowers. This structure is a gopuram. Then to the sides are roofs
nearly as decorated with plaster cattle and with gods protected with
halos that look like fancy bathtubs upended. This temple is done in a
Dravidian style and is dedicated to the Mother Goddess Devi. Inside you
find yet more plaster statuary brightly painted in little individual
buildings, each a shrine. One we saw off in the distance had a head
five or six feet high.
On the street we visited more shop-houses. We walked around
Chinatown center where there are still lots of street merchants and the
shops sell things like kites and brightly painted fans. On the street
women sell vegetables from portable shops that are spread blankets.
There is a large building actually called 'Chinatown Centre' that is
like an open-air mall with shops selling the inevitable T-shirts. I got
one with an old Chinese poem (in Chinese; I had to have it translated
for me):
Morning rains wets the dust
A small hotel with young green willow trees
My friend, let's have one more drink of wine
Before you go West, beyond the wall
to where you have no friends.
That is considered a very sad and sentimental lament by Wang Wei of
the Tung Dynasty. When you were sent beyond the Great Wall you were in
a different world with no communications back to anyone you knew before.
Evelyn also got a T-shirt. It said 'Singapore' and had a picture of the
Merlion. This should set to rest any remaining questions about which of
the two of us had all the class.
Steve got a coolie hat with a fake queue, a Chinese opera mask, and
a silk robe. This was to be his costume at a party his first night
back.
From there we left Chinatown and walked to Elizabeth Walk. This is
sort of a park on the water. You look across the water and see the
Merlion, the symbol of Singapore. It is a statue of a chimera, half
lion and half fish. As twilight falls the eyes of the Merlion light up.
Somewhere about this time who should come along but Binayak and
Barbara. We were on what was really our last full night in Singapore
(if you didn't count the airport as really being in Singapore), and
Barbara wanted to go someplace fancy for dinner. We really could not
come up with a single idea that all of us liked, so B&B went their
separate way.
We walked around the park a little longer. There was a section
that was just satay vendors. There was some sort of memorial that
looked like four chopsticks in a vertical position. On the way back we
passed an upscale shopping s=center called Raffles Place. We went in to
look around. They were having a camera show. Steve had some interest
and went around to a couple of the vendors and picked up some brochures.
We were interested in finding a place to have dinner. There was a
Chinese restaurant there but it looked pretty fancy for sweaty tourists
like ourselves. The manager was by the doorway trying to get us to come
in so we obliged him.
We had seafood, pan-fried steak, and braised black mushrooms. The
service was quite good. It may have cost a bit more than some of the
other places we have eaten, but it was worth it.
We walked back to our hotel. I wrote for a while and turned on the
television. They had a peculiar quiz show from Canada. But what sticks
out in my mind is that they had ads for children. No, not ads aimed at
children--ads for adults saying that nothing is as fulfilling as having
children. They are concerned that they will be outnumbered by the
Malays so they run the ads for upscale audience saying that richer
television owners should have more children.
October 26, 1990: This is really it. We have now packed our bags
for the last time. Next time we open our bags we will be home.
Breakfast was at the hotel next door. We could have had it at the
Bencoolen but the hotel was sos crewed up in so many ways, I don't think
we dared. I was able to order Indonesian style, which was quite good.
Very spicy, but I like spicy food in the morning, and we finished off
with pineapple chunks that were quite good. Steve, Evelyn, and I then
set off for Little India. The neighborhood looks like something out of
old Johore. Like the Chinese were brought to the United States to build
railroads and today are a major community, the Indians were brought to
Singapore to drain the swamps and clear the jungles and today they have
grown to be a major political force in Singapore. Like the Chinese they
are also distributed on streets pretty much where they came from in
India.
Serangoon Road in the morning is a feast of smells. The shop-house
restaurants are serving breakfast. Big flat drum-like grills are baking
bread. You pass by the noisy buildings and they are making and
packaging spices and a variety of spice smells fill the air.
We passed the Perumal Temple. This is another temple with a big
gopuram. That's the six-layer pyramidal structure over the doorway.
The guide book says it is twenty meters high. We tried to go to the
Gandhi Memorial, but it was closed. We might have kicked our way in and
thrown rocks at the windows, but we decided to be non-violent.
In the nearby Arab quarter we visited the Sultan Mosque. This is a
big mosque with onion-shaped doors. Again Evelyn had to don modest
apparel by putting on a robe and shawl. It is an amazing sight to see
Evelyn modest since it definitely is not her natural state. If they can
perform miracles like making Evelyn modest, perhaps there is more to
Island than I realized. Just kidding. Ha, ha, ha. Hey, I have the
deepest respect for Islam. Yes, sirree! Great religion, Islam. That's
what I always say. Besides I am just one little guy and hardly worth
the efforts of anything like a death squad. Oh, yes. And Evelyn, I am
just kidding too. You followers of the Ayatollah don't have to dispatch
any death squads either. Sheesh!
We had to walk around the mosque to enter it. Of course, it is
situated so that when you pray you face Mecca. I don't know how
accurate that is. With mosques they are probably careful. At the
Puduraya they had qibla arrows on the ceiling in each room. Extending
the arrows in two of our rooms I calculated that the true location of
Mecca was somewhere in the bus station downstairs.
Entering the mosque you see in front of you what looks like a clock
with six digital times of different times of the day. Of course, these
are times to pray. A Muslim prays five times a day. So what's the
sixth time? We asked that on the way out later to a friendly man who
was asking where we were from. Apparently there is an interval in the
morning during which it is forbidden to pray. I don't really understand
that, but it is close to being an explanation. The main sanctuary is
for Muslims only but there is a second floor you can climb up to and
look down from either side. It is funny to see a religious sanctuary
with big clocks at the front, but presumably exact time is important.
Leaving we stopped to look at the clocks and one of the believers asked
about us and where we came from.
From there we headed back to the hotel to meet the others and to
check out. As we walked the skies turned dark and we knew we'd probably
not get back to the hotel before the rain let go. True enough, we had
another torrential rain. We ended up sitting in the entranceway of a
bank huddled hiding from the rain. Under the same shelter was a woman
who talked with us about travel. She says she used to travel a lot but
found it difficult. Now she finds it much easier to send her spirit
traveling now that she has learned to share God's Holy Light.
Apparently someone in Japan discovered how to share God's Holy Light and
now the movement has over a million followers. I guess sending your
spirit traveling would be a heck of a convenience. Each time there was
a bolt of lightning she said, 'Thank You, God.' It was not clear if she
was thanking Him for sending the lightning or for not hitting her. She
gave us a nice brochure showing wholesome, successful people sharing
light by holding their hands cupped like parabolic reflectors. If they
were emitting light it was not showing on photographic film. Maybe it
was a frequency that film does not capture. The woman said that she
comes to Singapore several times a year to study the sharing of light.
That is a problem because the Singapore government does not want to let
her in that often. I am not sure why she didn't just come in
spiritually and leave her body home. It is her spirit she wants
educated and it is her body that needs the visa from the government.
There probably is some very good reason, like the body was needed to
carry money. With the weather as gray and ugly as it was, it would have
been nice to have a little light, but she wasn't in a sharing mood
apparently. Eventually she went away which, incidentally, was just fine
with us.
Eventually we got a cab to the hotel, joined the others, checked
out, and went to the noodle house across the street for lunch. We took
a double-decker bus to the cable car station for Sentosa Island. This
is a recreation island of about a thousand acres. It is supposed to be
a very pleasant place to visit with a host of different recreations.
There is a fort to visit; there is swimming, boating, jogging, roller
skating, and tennis. There is a maritime museum. There is an
underwater world with tunnels to watch the sea creatures.
To get to the island you take a cable car high over the water. The
cable car goes in two directions from the World Trade Centre (not as
impressive as the one in New York). It goes to Mt. Faber in one
direction and to Sentosa Island in the other. We took it and paid to
get onto the island. We took a nature walk. There was lots of flora
but very little fauna. Unlike the jungles of Northern Thailand, this
really looked like what we think of as jungle. It looked a bit like
Kong's Island from King Kong. From there we were going to see a
butterfly collection that Steve was excited about. However, when Steve
discovered the expensive admission price had an additional surcharge if
you brought in a camera, he soured on seeing the butterflies. Instead,
we took the monorail around the island. From there you can get a better
look at the island. And what we discovered was that the island looks
tacky. There is sort of a phony 'lost civilization,' there is a plastic
dinosaur, there is a sort of artificial lagoon. Fort Sentosa is real
enough but still quite touristy. We sort of soured on Sentosa and took
the cable car back. Our ticket included a cable car ride to Mt. Faber.
That provided an okay but not all that impressive view of Sentosa Island
and some of Singapore. It also had an overpriced souvenir shop. We
returned to the World Trade Centre and took the bus back to Orchard
Road.
A fancy hotel with the unfortunate name 'The Cockpit Hotel' had a
culture show of local dancing at 7 PM. We decided that would be a
fitting final activity. Before the show we went out for dinner. We
found an al fresco restaurant and decided to try it. They had a singer
who sounded a lot like Elvis Presley. When we actually saw him he
turned out to be Chinese. Binayak and I each ordered a local specialty,
chili crab. It was crab served in the shell with a chili sauce over it.
That made it a real mess, but it was tasty.
The show at The Cockpit included a drink. Presumably it was to be
a Singapore Sling. This place claimed to be the home of the Singapore
Sling. We had heard that the Raffles Hotel was the real home of the
famous drink, but the Raffles was closed for another year or so due to
renovation. Maybe they leased out their title for a year or two. I got
a pineapple juice instead.
The show had Malay, Indian, and Chinese dancers. It opened with a
Malay rice planting dance done to a sort of rock beat. Really
disappointing. The steps may have been authentic but the music
certainly was not.
Next some Indians came out and did an Indian dance. That was
reasonably well done.
The two young Chinese women came out and did an excellent ribbon
dance. I have seen the ribbon dance before. It looks not too difficult
but on reflection keeping eight feet of cloth moving so it does not
collapse and dancing at the same time is probably pretty tough. The two
women had an incredible grace.
That was sort of how the evening went. When the Malay dancers were
up, nothing was serious. They would play a traditional song on folk
instruments and it would turn out to be 'When the Saints Come Marching
In' or a Japanese tune. They would have audience members coming up and
dance with them and one apparently drunk Japanese tourist (though I
don't rule out the possibility he was planted in the audience) would get
up and clown around. They did a pole dance with bamboo poles slapping
together. That normally would be impressive, but it should be noted
that they slapped the poles only on alternating beats, giving the
dancers more time to get their feet out of the way. The Malays were
pretty amateurish.
The Indians did a good job, though I do not know as much about the
nuances of Indian music. The Chinese, who unfortunately did only two
dances, were very good. In fairness finding Chinese women who can dance
their national dances well is probably not all that difficult. The
Chinese take a great deal of pride in their culture and a high
percentage of girls probably start learning the classic dances from an
early age. In China we went to a kindergarten and young girls danced
there with a grace you will not see in this country in children of the
same age.
So that was about it. We walked back to the Bencoolen and got our
luggage and grabbed taxis to the airport. We thought our adventures
were pretty much over but fate still had one curve ball to throw us.
Our plane was at 7 AM the next morning. That meant we had to check in
at 5 AM. We could have slept at the hotel for 31/2 hours, but that
hardly seemed worth it. Evelyn had heard there might be day rooms
furnished with beds at the airport, so she called and sure enough, it
was true. So our plan was to rent day rooms at the airport.
My worry as we headed for the airport was that we would get
separated and not find each other. Evelyn and I were in one cab; the
others were in another. That turned out not to be a problem. It did
give me a chance to tell our cab driver, 'Follow that cab.' I always
wanted to do that. That's supposed to be a cabbie's dream of adventure.
Unfortunately, our cabbie hadn't seen the same films. He just went
anyway he pleased at the airport and we arrived a few minutes apart.
That was not a problem; it was fairly easy to find each other. Evelyn
went off to verify they had day rooms.
Fortunately they did have them just a short walk away.
Unfortunately they were in the secured area. You needed a boarding
pass to get to them.
Fortunately we were flying so we should be able to get boarding
passes. We just had to get them a little early. Now where was the
Northwest Orient desk?
Unfortunately there was no Northwest Orient desk or desks for any
airline. They used common check-in facilities. One hour it would be
Northwest Orient; later another airline would be there.
Fortunately the airlines do set up early at the check-in so we
could get our boarding passes early.
Unfortunately that means getting them about 4:30 AM. It was now
about 10 PM.
Well, gang, we've done it to ourselves again. Are there hotels in
the area? Will they have rooms? Evelyn wanted to open the beach mats
and sleep on the floor. I think Barbara was in favor of going to a
hotel. I still believed in fighting jet lag by staying up all night
before a long flight anyway. And Evelyn can sleep anywhere--she has no
pride. The two of us said we would stay, but the others were free to
go, of course. I guess they all decided that by the time they found a
hotel and settled in, it would be too late to get any sleep. We decided
to do a little final shopping and then find someplace to sack out for a
few hours. Well, as it turned out, all the stores closed just as we
were getting to them.
There was one cafeteria that stayed open all night. After a while
we settled in that. The sign going in said, 'No studies allowed in this
part of the cafeteria.' That was puzzling. I assumed they mean that no
polls could be done. Not so, as we were to find out.
October 27, 1990: We settled into our seats and some of us grabbed
some food. I got an oriental noodle soup with slabs of meat and fish.
Off to the side there was an area with a bunch of teenagers. I
couldn't figure what high school kids were doing in an airport at 12:30
AM. It turns out they were studying. They come to the airport because
there is food to buy and they don't have to be really quiet and they
were there studying until about 4 AM on a Saturday morning. I took a
look at their books and they looked very technical. I think what I was
seeing was spherical geometry. I am not particularly confident that our
students are anywhere nearly as well-educated or dedicated.
Well, the night went faster than I had expected, with various
people sacking out at various times. I think I fell asleep for about
fifteen minutes but I mostly kept myself awake.
There is not much to tell. A little before 5 AM we checked in and
Binayak got another hassle from the officials on leaving. Our plane
took off pretty close to on time. They served us a small breakfast,
showed the film The Freshman, and gave us a very good lunch. It seems
that flying from Singapore to Tokyo they figure they have a lot of
Japanese on board so they offered two bland choices and something called
mataguchi. That was a styrofoam bento box filled with Japanese
delicacies. There were green noodles, omelet, pickled vegetables,
wasabi, etc. I think there was also a shrimp ball. Good stuff. I
think it was not going well and then five Americans seated in a row all
ordered it. We had an hour or so layover in Narita. Back on the plane
for the long trip from Narita to New York.
The flight back to New York was not greatly eventful. Lunch was
fish or steak. Evelyn got the fish but thought it might actually have
been chicken. I got the steak and thought it was terrible.
Unfortunately, there was no mataguchi choice.
The movies they showed were Bad Influence, which I thought was
pretty lousy, and Men at Work which was stupid and lousy and luckily I
fell asleep on it. They also showed The Secret Life of Ian Fleming and
Pink Panther just in case we slept through them on the way.
The flight was, of course, a very long one, lasting about fourteen
hours. Toward the end someone came around asking Binayak to go with
him. Binayak never returned. We looked around for him when it was time
to get off the plane but no Binayak. The crew professed to have no
knowledge about what happened to him. Evelyn wouldn't stand still for
that. She asked how somebody can be taking people from their seats with
nobody knowing. The stewardess, who was on our trip out as it turns
out, said he'd already gotten off the plane.
They loaded us onto a van. There was a rather large fellow (not
fat, but large) carrying a script for Fiddler on the Roof. I asked him
if he was going to be in some production. No, he was the dance captain
for the production that was soon to open on Broadway with Topol. We
talked about the various versions of Fiddler. He thought that Topol was
hard to work with. You could not tell him anything.
We were getting more concerned about Binayak. Passport control was
for us a walk-through. We passed a guy who looked at our pictures
quickly and checked that we were the same *** and race as the person in
the picture.
Luggage was a struggle, as always, and while we were standing there
Binayak joined us. It was unclear why they took him and put him in the
front of the plane, but when we landed he just walked off. It gave him
a head-start through the line. He had to go through a more difficult
check and his head-start got us all out quicker, which might have been
the idea. We piled all our luggage on a cart. Customs asked to see
Binayak's luggage. We said it was at the bottom of the pile. They
waved him through.
It was funny--everyone else seems to have fallen asleep in the limo
on the way home. I was able to get pictures of each of them asleep.
That was just after I woke up one of the times. It was the most
comfortable place we had been in 48 hours. When we got home I kept
myself up till midnight and slept till 7 AM, about the most normal hours
I'd slept since well before the trip.
So what was the best country? Hard to say because we rushed so
much through Malaysia and Singapore, but certainly we found the most of
interest in Thailand. I would say this mode of travel is far more
exhausting than would be a guided tour. It was, however, cheaper (the
whole trip for two cost about US$4600 for absolutely everything
including film and developing), and it is by our mistakes that we
learned the most.
Second only to our trip to China, this was the best trip we've
taken. There were minor conflicts, but considering how different we all
were from each other, we ended up surprisingly friendly. We got home
Saturday and Monday night we all went out for pizza. As I write this we
have been back 23 days from our 24-day trip. It has taken that long to
complete this log. Tonight the five of us again had dinner together and
showed each other our pictures. For the last three and a half weeks, I
had lived halfway between Asia and home. Half of my mind and thought
shave been in this log. Now, at last, for the first time in seven weeks
I am really home.
T H E E N D
Copyright 1990 by Mark Leeper
--
Mark R. Leeper , (908) 957-5619 Fax: (908) 957-7014
Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs - MT3E-433, 200 Laurel Ave, Middletown, NJ 07748
Homepage (inside firewall): http://www-gbcs.mt.lucent.com/~leeper
Outside Lucent firewall: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6960/
Or for info try your WWW search engine on 'Mark Leeper'
Read about this trip from Evelyn's perspective
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