Singapore: The most courteous place on earth

Now when I got here I realized that people were really polite here. But I just found out there is a National Courtesy Campaign started in '79 launched by the Ministry of Culture to transition to a new Singapore and so also to be courteous to tourist for the tourism industry. Actually there were different courtesy campaigns prior to this as well! Well it's working. The mascot is this Singha the courtesy lion. There are signs on the MRT rail line telling passengers to let people get off first before getting on, and other things like that. People are very conscious on the train and bus of giving up their seat to people who need it more. People will open the door for you, they will let u go first in line. It's very interesting coming here from India. In India you have to fight for your life basically to get on a bus. Men never ever move their big butts out of a seat for any woman, if she has a kid, if she's old, I've never seen it happen.

So I've decided one of my goals in Singapore is to eat as much food as possible since I can't get this stuff in India! I went to this place called Laupa Sat again for lunch. It has all kinds of different vendors under this old victorian kind of bandstand thing. On the way I passed a Vietnamese place and thought, oh I should get a spring roll! Bleh, it was no good- still Pho Grand in St. Louis is the best. I'm not that far from Vietnam, you would think they would know how to make it! Anyway I went on to Laupa Sat and had a Korean dish for lunch- pimimbap. It had rice, bean sprouts, some other vegetables, beef and egg. Yum. I saw a Long John Silver's here, and I totally love fries with their malt vinegar, but they don't have the vinegar here :( There is a nice riverwalk area with a bunch of restaurants along it, so I went there. Everyone is trying to get u to come to their place. There are all these seafood places with tanks of live lobster, enoooormous huge crabs, live frogs. Ha, the Indian places tried to get me to stop, again I was like no way in hell. There was one place called 'haldhi' which means turmeric in Hindi. If you read my earlier blog, you will know about the multiple uses of turmeric. Needless to say I did not eat there. The meal ended up being ridiculously expensive :( 45 singapore dollars which is like thirty US dollars and the worst of all almost 1500 rupees! bleh. I had some kind of fried crab roll that was not good and mango chicken that was just ok. Then they were going to charge me .5 dollars for a wet wipe that was set out on the table when i got there and 1.50 for nuts that they brought to me. Well I argued them out of that at least.

My friend here at the hostel is from Singapore and she says I should try a Durian. Well, I don't know if I'm up to it yet. The smell is supposed to be horrible for this fruit and it's banned from hotels usually b/c of the smell. So I tried a bite of Durian ice cream. Well, the smell did precede it...and the first taste was a little bit garlicky almost...it got a bit sweeter, but not enough for me to like it. I ordered Lychee flavor instead which was a much better choice. On the way home I stopped in a grocery store and was looking around. They had some...interesting Pringles chips flavors. So I bought one that was grilled shrimp flavor and one that was....Blueberry and Hazelnut!!!! The shrimp one is good but the blueberry is very weird. A little sweet but still salty.

Finally after walking around for forever, I even looked yesterday, I found this big Merlion statue. That is like the symbol of Singapore...after all that it was kind of anti-climatic.Ha.

But I did go to the Asian Civilizations Museum..ok mostly to take a break from the humidity but it was a really awesome exhibit. They had a whole one on Indian jewelry that was amazing. They had these enormous carved emeralds!