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.
“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 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.