I have a very soft spot for Singapore. Back in 1997, the city-state was where we first encountered Southeast Asia (in fact, the only Asia we'd met at all up till then had been Russian Asia).




Singapore was also the place I began blogging. We were living there at the time, and if you start here, in January 2010, with my very first post (about breakfast), and keep working your way forward (there aren't that many posts; I wasn't nearly as prolific in those days), then you'll get a bit of an idea of what we got up to in the city-state itself, and during the forays we made to our near neighbours.

By early June, I was back in Melbourne, wishing I could live in two places at once... (And, boy, THAT feeling has never gone away...) Even in mid-July, 40 days after departure, I was still moping a bit.

Apart from a brief layover at the end of 2010, we didn't get back to Singapore until February 2012, at which point we were living in Malaysia. There was then a bit of a hiatus, when we became very Indonesia-focused. But once we had returned to Malaysia, trips to Singapore, both for business and pleasure, became at least annual occurrences, and October 2014, January 2015, September 2015, September 2016, September 2017, and August 2018 saw us journeying, usually on the bus, down to our southerly neighbour.

The reason for listing these visits (apart from giving me a handy reference point next time I want to revisit our Singapore experiences) is to show how odd it is that we've not been here for almost five years, and this is actually the first time the Lion City is featuring in Purple Tern...

Why? Well, 2019 became very busy, what with organizing to move to Sarawak, and figuring out the shape of post-work life. There was plenty of travel that year, too, but for logistic reasons, it took us via KL. And then 2020... Well, we all know what happened in 2020. We weren't able to travel again till the end of 2021, and even then, things were very restricted. You didn't want to do stopovers. You just wanted to get to your destination with as little paperwork as possible. That keep-it-simple principle persisted until this journey, when we finally felt able to say: yes, let's not just fly through, let's stop off.

Glad we did. It's still amazing. So green, so innovative, so thought-through... In many ways, it's THE way to do cities. With an extraordinarily high population density, it is still very liveable.

Of course, I recognize that my viewpoint is a very privileged one. We really notice the higher costs compared with last time round. Singapore has never been a cheap place to hang out, but it has ranked "most expensive city in the world" eight times in the last decade. It's not hard to imagine how this must burden poorer Singaporeans. And, of course, there are policies I'm not a fan of -- in particular the one discussed here.

Then again, few countries are keeping up with the needs of low-income earners at the moment, and there are things I'm not a fan of in every country I visit...

Anyway, let's get back to less abstract matters. Breakfast in Little India, for example:






This area has always been colourful, but the street art seems more vibrant than ever:






Other notable buildings:






From the traditional area of Little India, we walked to the always-evolving retail strip of Orchard Road. Never my favourite bit of Singapore, but handy for rehydrating with iced latte (the price for which, we realized, was Geneva-high...), shopping at Uniqlo, having a nice Filipino lunch for not too eye-watering a price at Inasal in Lucky Plaza, and visiting the roof garden at Orchard Central:



Despite jet lag and climate shock (it is still exceptionally hot here), it has been a very good day.