19 - Singapore Trip Tips
Here it is - a brief summary of the things I learnt going to Singapore!
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Get a Citibank card to withdraw money from. NAB - your traveller card sucks and you should feel bad. I felt bad getting a CRAPPY EXCHANGE RATE that even my Amex could beat. Come on guys. Get better.
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I thought we could go to multiple hawker centres in a day, but even just going to one filled us up! You can buy like 3 meals at one place for a dirt cheap price and become incredibly full :D (Didn’t stop us continuously eating during the whole trip…)
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Orchard Road is a great place to go shopping, but also to see people join in stupid (but lucrative) competitions. The one we saw was sponsored by Subaru - stand next to a car with one of your hands stuck to it, and do nothing. Last man standing wins. Every 6 hours you get a 5 minute break to eat, drink, piss, shit - whatever you want. When we got there, there were two people left, and they had been standing out there for 76 hours. THREE DAYS STRAIGHT. But he won an 80k car so who’s the real winner here?
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Gardens by the Bay is an incredible location. Go to the domes first, and then finish off with watching the light show. We accidentally went to the domes last so watched the light show from far away, missing the music! Oh well - another excuse to go back :D
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Anywhere you’re looking for souvenirs, don’t worry if you miss ‘em. Jewel at Changi Airport literally has every type of souvenir you might need to get. Fish skin, fancy chocolate, different flavoured chips (like hainanese chicken rice or singapore chilli crab chips or peking duck flavour chips (?!))…they’re all at Jewel!
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Budget half a day to walk around Jewel. It’s an incredible space at an airport - we were there 5 hours before our flight and we STILL didn’t have enough time there.
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Go to BooksActually in Tiong Bahru if you like books (thanks Bev for the recommendation)! It has a host of great prose written by Singaporean authors and published by an indie publisher ‘Math Paper Press’ which is from Singapore!
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It’s really hot so take your time in malls through air conditioning. Takashimaya Department store was a highlight for us on Orchard Road. Everywhere else cost too much!
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Use Grab or PT wherever you go. Dependent on where you live and where you want to go, PT can be very cheap and easy to get around. If not, Grab is a great way to get around the place. Often cheaper than taxis, except in peak periods of the day.
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You might be forced to get into a taxi due to Grabs not coming out to you / are taking too long…in which case make sure you don’t get into a taxi with a conservative uncle taxi driver who takes one look at you and identifies you as Chinese and proceeds to berate you for supporting the Hong Kong protestors after a brief hesitation answering his questions about the protests and telling you he’d shoot them if they ever came to Singapore and how stupid they are and how the white people are funding the riots and how we should speak Chinese more than English because ‘we can’t let these white people push us around’ and get real mad and you fear for your life and then you get a sliver of triumph when you slam his door after he drops you outside your AirBNB and angrily asks if you slammed his door and you say no.
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They sell fish from vending machines. I don’t know what to do with this information.
Chat soon :)
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Zomato Gold - I got this on the Black Friday sale recently for $24 (thanks Dru!) and have already used it twice - once for drinks, once for food. It’s essentially a buy one get one free for a bunch of surprisingly good restaurants! Went to Shimbashi where Dru showed me how amazing it was (tho we accidentally ordered 2 sakes each…)
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Good to Great - a fascinating business book from the early 2000s that tried to distil how good companies became great ones. They did define this in a way that was focussed on stockholder returns, but the principles were still fascinating - stuff like focussing on who actually gets on the bus, and then giving them the freedom to do things; facing the brutal facts of your organisation while still believing that your effort can help you be successful, and making sure that your organisation knows what it can be great at and focus relentlessly on that thing. I read it more as a self-help type book, but it was great nonetheless. Some of the companies (like Fannie Mae) were found out not to be doing that great during the Financial Crisis so…take it with a grain of salt!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Why Almost all Advice is useless - this is an interesting short piece about taking advice and making sure it’s relevant to you…it’s not a very new idea but it’s a well written piece and summary. I am definitely a victim of spending inordinate amounts of time looking for advice from others, reading about how they’ve succeeded or done something great…but really, it’s about how it can be useful to your life.
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New Google URL shortcuts - typing “doc.new” or “playlist.new” will now allow you to perform certain actions - opening a Google Doc or creating a new Spotify playlist. I think this is a simple but cool new innovation of how we look at what URLs can do - they aren’t just “addresses” to get to certain webpages, but can also be used as actions. I wonder what else we could do with that…
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A phone company run by drug traffickers - one thing I have always been fascinated by is innovation in crime. I remember reading about the fact that hackers were starting to focus on user experience for their products because they would sell better; recently they even had Black Friday specials!! Here, we have a deep dive into the world of a phone company that was building encrypted phones for drug traffickers :O This is a super interesting read!