So, back in Singapore. I arrived at 4:30-ish Tuesday afternoon after a door to door journey that took about 22 hours. There were a couple of trains from Sheffield to Manchester airport; a couple of planes from Manchester to Singapore; and finally a very comfortable transfer in a Mercedes from Singapore airport to my hotel.
Having arrived I looked after some housekeeping stuff. I needed all of the following things: some cash; a local sim for my phone; a pass for the Singapore MRT (the Metro); and I also needed to collect my ticket for the Chingay parade. I knew from last year’s visit that there was a shopping mall (City Square Mall) over the road from the hotel where I could get all these things. Later in the evening I went back to the mall to eat, at one of the many food outlets there. I was tired and jet-lagged and not feeling adventurous, so I picked ‘PastaMania’ and had a very enjoyable mushroom soup and ‘creamy chicken’ with penne pasta. Together with a bottle of water that came to S$15.90, or about £8.50. I’ve found that you can certainly eat very cheaply in Singapore (you can also eat very expensively), but that alcohol is always expensive. Unless you stick to the ubiquitous Tiger beer, and in a popular tourist hotspot even that can be pricey.
One of my aims this year is to visit a number of places I didn’t get to last year, and this morning I went to the first of these: Kampong Glam. Historically, this was the centre of Malay settlement in Singapore. There are a few streets of old buildings consisting of South Asian ‘Shop Houses’, where the ground floor was devoted to business and the family lived above. However none of these premises seem to be doing what they originally did, most have become shops for local designers, or they are cafes and bars. Unlike a very similar area of Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia, they are all in good repair; indeed the area is very vibrant.
Alongside these streets of small buildings are a couple of much more major edifices. One is the Sultan Mosque. This dates from the 1840s (it replaced an older, smaller mosque) and claims to be both the oldest extant mosque in Singapore and the most important. It’s a very odd structure – despite being built to serve a Malay population its design is apparently based on the Taj Mahal, and it has an onion dome despite the fact that such a feature has no place in traditional Malay architecture.
I got a definite feeling from my guide round the Malay centre that the Malay culture is particularly under threat, and that the Malay language especially is not much spoken in Singapore. Of the nation’s ethnic groups, the Chinese (far and away the largest) are secure in their heritage, although even among them there are accounts of Mandarin usage dropping in favour of English. The Indian community is strengthened by the presence of so many Indian temporary residents. The Malay community, on the other hand, seems to be the loser. My guide, who said that she came from Malay ancestry – or had Malay ancestry – also said that she was Chinese, and certainly her name was Chinese. I get the feeling that as the Chinese and Malay ethnic groups mix, it is the Chinese who come out the stronger and the Malays who lose out. (That’s the impression I got – apologies to all concerned if I’ve got it wrong and have caused offence, which is not my intention.)
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