The whole town's made of iron ore

The obvious musical reference sure, but a classic and one that I couldn't get out of my head for nearly all of our 14 hour layover. But unfortunately the lawless sailor town that this song describes is long gone (probably never existed) and instead we found an extremely clean, organized, and very sterile city filled with skyscrappers, businessmen, closed circuit cameras, and insane (and insanely strict) laws. Which is very different from the other Southeast Asian countries we have visited. A sampling of these insane law include being a gay man, chewing gum, spitting, not flushing the toilet, using someone else's wifi signal, feeding pigeons, and of course drugs...which will lead to "hanging on the Tuesday after you are convicted".

Singapore is a city-state, meaning it is a country that is made up of only the city of Singapore. It's the only country in the world to be given its independence against its will, when it was booted from Malaysia out of fear of its too large Chinese population. Going back to its early days as a sailing town, Singapore has long been an international city with a melding of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and western cultures, but at the time the Malaysians worried that the majority Chinese population would undermine the Malay rule and opted to expel Singapore it from their country. Singapore sure showed them though because the city-state is now one of the wealthiest, cleanest and most educated countries in the world – although it is also criticized for being a boring, stale and uninspired place (something the government is trying hard to counter).

We landed in Singapore in the afternoon and caught the subway out as soon as we could to make the most of the limited daylight we had. The subway is, as you would imagine, super clean and efficient and yet still cheap!

We had planned on seeing a lot more than we ending up seeing, but our first stop of the Gardens by the Bay was far larger and more impressive than we had originally expected. It is filled with beautiful and unusual plants, but the most iconic part are its solar powered "supertrees", which light up beautifully at night.

Planet by Marc Quinn - a massive naked baby sculpture in the Gardens by the Bay

We also ventured into the Cloud Forest, which is an Academy of Science-esque indoor tropical rainforest.

We then got some food at one of its hawker food stalls, which offered a range of foods from Indian to Costa Rican. Afterwards we headed over to the nicest Chinatown on the face of the earth. We never really enjoyed visiting Chinatowns but we always seem to go anyways. I didn't like this Chinatown much either, but for an entirely different reason than any other one I've visited: it just seemed like a boring douchebag bar area. It was super clean, empty and mostly consisted of lounges, wine bars, etc. You get the picture.

Chinatown

Chinatown

This was the extent of the non-airport Singapore that we saw. We had hoped to see Little India, which we read was more interesting, but we had to catch the subway back out to the airport before it stopped running.

The airport is probably the nicest airport in the world. It has a free movie theater, swimming pools, orchid garden, koi pond, and a 40 foot slide. It was a great place for a long layover, and would have been a great place to sleep at, if the cleaning crew didn't follow us around to steam vac whatever area we happened to be trying to sleep. We had to move several times and never really got more than an hour of sleep at a time – but so it goes with airport sleeping...even in the best airport in the world.