City Guides

Connoisseur’s Guide to Singapore – An Island of Contradictions

Singapore
Written by Aksel Ritenis

Singapore

 

Connoisseur’s Guide to Singapore – An Island of Contradictions

Singapore is a monument to multiculturalism, mixing gleaming high-rises and colonial relics with their Asian charm.

Singapore is unusual but perhaps better, for the strict behaviour codes and norms actually enforced. Let us fill You in: fines for jaywalking, spitting, chewing gum, littering, urinating in a public place. Five hundred dollars is the current penalty which can be imposed, so be on your best behaviour! It has been commented that “an innocent American straying through these parts could go through about four grand in five minutes”.

“Cleanliness is still a ritual here, as is civil obedience and correct social behaviour. In some ways Singapore is still the sort of city that the Japanese would love to claim as its own were it not for the fact that beneath that fallacious self-image of rigid probity, Japan is a seething cesspit of fear, loathing, depravity and dysfunction (and all the more enjoyable for it).”

Singapore Singapore is also very straight-laced: the locals will give you a polite lecture about correct pedestrian deportment if you look as if you are going to amble across the pavement before the green signal, but the fact that critical jokey T-shirts (setting out the various offences) are on sale a is a welcome sign that the city is starting to laugh at itself, a something unthinkable a decade or so ago.

About the author

Aksel Ritenis

Axel is the Editor and Publisher of Connoisseur Magazine "for the Finer Things in Life" and has been the custodian of the magazine for over 10 years and leader of a team of freelance Journalists and Community Members who continue to make it all happen!-Join the Team at Connoisseur Magazine!

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