It’s been a surreal week in Singapore. It feels like Europe and the United States only just realized how serious COVID-19 is, with whole countries shutting down, quarantines, travel bans, the collapse of the stock market,¹ and everybody just generally losing their shit. Not entirely unreasonably — given the general slow ineptitude of many government’s reactions to the crisis, panic is understandable.

But I’ve spent the week in Singapore, which is … normal? Normalish? I don’t want to say unaffected, because there’s a lot going on in response to the Coronavirus, but Singapore reacted early and fast to the crisis, and the number of cases has been solidly contained. So the restaurants are open, the malls are packed,² people are walking around. There’s a lot of temperature scanners everywhere, and I’ve had to fill out a lot of questionnaires affirming I haven’t been to China or Italy in the last two weeks, but beyond that, there’s been minor disruptions at best.

Hence the surreal nature of the experience. I’ve been watching all my plans for the next month get canceled, one after another, and I’m reading reports from all my friends about going into lockdown and preparing to stay in their apartment for weeks if not months. Meanwhile in the past two days I went to an amusement park, met a friend for brunch, saw a movie,³ strolled along the waterfront, then spent an hour sitting in a crowded pub just chatting.

It’s not fair. I know it’s not fair. But self-quarantining in solidarity doesn’t seem like much of a gesture. So I guess I get to wander through sun-dappled gardens and ride roller coasters while just about everyone I care about on the other side of the world gets a part in the live-action version of Contagion. Lucky me.

I caught the bus into Singapore from Kuala Lumpur,⁴ and it was worth it just for the entrance along the harbor. If I’ve been getting a cyberpunk vibe from some of the places I’ve been visiting recently — bright, shiny skyscrapers sprouting from streets filled with mopeds and street vendors — Singapore is the arcology. It’s the cleanest city I’ve been to,⁵ and it’s filled with ridiculously new buildings and public gardens and malls.

My first day I wandered through the Gardens by the Bay, a massive engineered garden park on the waterfront. I was walking⁶ and ended up just meandering though the kind of sculpture gardens away from the waterfront, which meant I went from the calm, sane side of things (some rock gardens, a set of ornamental Dr-Seuss-looking plants) to the strange (a small lake filled with giant egg-like sacs, a giant sculpture of a baby floating just above the ground) to the utterly whacked out “Supertree Grove,” with 18 giant wire tree-like sculptures which can be used as a viewing platform or light up at night.⁷

Going further you’ll come across the “Flower Dome” and “Cloud Forest,” two greenhouses⁸ filled with a ridiculous array of non-native plants. The flower dome replicates a cool, dry Mediterranean climate, so it’s filled with an olive grove and baobab trees and gardens from California and South Africa and South America. When I was there large sections were given over to cherry blossoms.

The Cloud Forest is even more impressive, mimicking the cool, wet growing conditions of the upper reaches of a tropical mountain. And in fact it contains a 7-story-tall mountain, complete with a waterfall and covered with orchids and ferns and moss. The whole place periodically fills with mist, which is not a terrible idea to wander through if you’ve been outside in the heat for any length of time.

I feel like the Gardens by the Bay really captures something essential about Singapore. It’s shiny and new and expensive⁹ and immaculately groomed. It feels slightly unreal, is intended to feel slightly unreal, as an aesthetic choice. It’s a public space, in the sense that the public is invited to explore it, but not in the sense that the public is expected to collaborate on it.

It’s design from the top, in other words. And a lot of Singapore feels like that, almost like an arcology might. This is a lot of things: beautiful, delightful, breathtaking, astonishing. But it can also be standoffish, unwelcoming, even hostile. Things which might seem messy or fractious — street food, for example — are carefully shunted away to specific zones and controlled.

Admittedly, nobody asked the community what they thought of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty before throwing them up. The public didn’t consult with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux on the design of Central Park. But Central Park has had 150 years of different designers and managers since it was created, and it’s had time to blend into the city. The buildings ringing it, for example, are a mix of brownstones and mansions and public works. It’s a commingling of different intents and styles.

You can find that in Singapore if you look for it, of course. I was staying on Arab Street which is filled with shophouses and restaurants, and Chinatown has a lot of that kind of historical sense about it that all the new construction is lacking. And maybe with time the modern construction will age in ways that let the city breathe, that breaks up some of that uniformity which feels so stifling.

But until then, I guess you’re either the target audience for Singapore or you’re not. And I suppose I am — I can afford the restaurants and the bars and the sparsely-attended-due-to-Coronavirus Universal Studios amusement park. I drank the Singapore Sling at Raffles. It was a great week. I could easily see myself living there, for a bit.

But only a bit. Maybe it’d grow on me. But I think after a certain point, it would start to feel like you were living in someone else’s dream. Not your own.

Given how expensive Singapore is, I thought it might be fun to continue the cyberpunk theme and stay in a capsule hotel. On paper, these things are nearly perfect for me: cheap, with fast WiFi and the ability to seclude myself for hours at a time. More than that is often wasted on me. So I looked around and booked in to a place that looked okay with good reviews.

It was not exactly great. The thing to keep in mind with these places is that they’re minor upgrades from hostels, not minor downgrades from hotels. I’ve been to hotels with shared bathrooms before, so I’m used to that. I wasn’t prepared for the bathrooms to not be air conditioned — not so bad when you’re showering in the morning, but decidedly unpleasant when you’re trying to wash your face and brush your teeth for the night.

The place I originally booked into was basically just thick particle board creating rectangular spaces not much bigger than a pillow fort, kitted out with a thin mattress and an LED light. Which, fair enough. But the “door” was really just a window shade without a lock, and while they advertised air conditioning that turned out to be a small fan intended to circulate air into the hallway. So, sure, the hallway was air conditioned, but unless you left the window shade up you were likely to overheat, especially if you were typing away on a laptop for a couple hours.¹⁰

I quickly got sick of all that and the other people staying there continually propping open the door to the lobby, so after the second night I switched to a different capsule hotel, which I liked better. This was one of the “galaxy pod” hotels,¹¹ and their gimmick is the pods are all designed to look like space pods with space sleeping quarters on a space ship.

This at least had a real door with a lock on the pod.¹² But it had the same issue with air conditioning, and even more bizarrely had USB charging ports but no actual power outlets. I spent most mornings lounging in the entrance to the pod, power supply snaked across to the opposite wall, recharging my laptop.

So lesson learned, I guess. I’d still consider one again for a night or two, after very carefully reading the fine print. But a week was a bit much, even for a particularly nice one, and I’m just as happy to be getting back to a room with a door that doesn’t require me to rotate myself like a Rubik’s Cube just to get out of bed in the morning.

When I was planning all this back in January, I designed it so the next couple weeks were going to be capping the last of my trip through Southeast Asia by hitting every beach on the way back to Bangkok. I’ve still got a ticket from Bangkok to Oslo and from there to Helsinki.

That ain’t happening. I’m going to need to rebook them — and the hotels and other flights and pretty much everything I had planned for a month or maybe two or maybe even longer. That’s not great; not counting the day I spent yesterday I’ve been on my own for two months, and I really expected to be able to reconnect with some friends and some socializing for the sake of my mental health.

But even beyond that, I have no idea where to go. Returning to the United States right now seems the height of stupidity.¹³ Southeast Asia seems like the safest place to be. So I suspect I’m stuck in the region for at least a month. But even here I’m worried my options may be dwindling; just after I left Singapore the government announced anyone who enters after visiting an ASEAN country in the past two weeks is going to need to isolate themselves.

I guess I’ll just keep track of where the virus is, and who has it under control. This time next month, who knows? Maybe I’ll still be in Thailand. Or back in Singapore. Or, who knows, maybe South Korea will be back to something vaguely normal.

It’s a pandemic. Maybe the only thing to do is sit on a beach, drink a Singapore Sling, and wait for the end of the world.

Next: Bangkok (BKK) to Seoul (ICN)
Prev: Kuala Lumpur to Singapore

Footnotes

¹ And a good chunk of my retirement funds

² According to my friend, they’re only about half-full from their usual peak, which if true I am immensely glad I missed the peak.

³ Okay, the movie theater was pretty empty. But it was Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) so it’s been out for over a month already. I didn’t expect a crowd.

My pocket review: it was good, and it was almost great, but I guess we get to settle for good.

⁴ If you’re wandering about passport control you just pull over to a nondescript brick building, get off the bus, and get your passport stamped on the way out of Malaysia, then about five minutes down the road you get off the bus again and go through passport control on your way in to Singapore.

The bus company helpfully pointed out if you took more than 15 minutes to clear immigration they’d leave without you, but you could use your ticket to just catch the next one in 90 minutes.

⁵ This is a country that banned chewing gum, after all.

⁶ Singapore doesn’t really expect you to walk, at least not to that particular park

⁷ They’re also air conditioned, with a lifesaver of a small café inside, and bathrooms, if you couldn’t find those while wandering around.

⁸ Although, cool greenhouses, meaning they produce cooler climates rather than warmer ones for the plants within.

⁹ Both in terms of the cost of building them — roughly $750,000,000 (that’s US dollars, not Singapore) — and in the cost of seeing them, since the outdoor gardens are free but the greenhouses and Supertree Grove aren’t.

¹⁰ Also, the control panel (which featured in the picture on their listing) shows controls for a lock and a television and the air conditioning, none of which actually existed, so you’d have been excused for maybe expecting those things.

¹¹ There’s clearly a company making these things, since I’ve seen a number of them popping up all over the place.

¹² I mean, a halfhearted shove would have snapped the plastic and let you in, but at least you’d actually have had to make the effort.

¹³ I get the feeling America’s going to need every hospital bed they have. Why risk getting sick and taking one from someone?