So I made it to Singapore three days ago. Quick quiz for you, no checking, mind;
What country is Singapore in?
Is it part of an archipelago, part of the mainland, or a seperate island?
What exactly is Singapore?
I couldn't quite do the answering of that until I got here and saw the maps, y'see. I also just be a-watching Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End so me speech be a mite piratey at present. I've got a beard getting towards Cap'n Sparrow's at the moment, perhaps in compensation for the injustice done to the rest of my hair by the hairdresser the other day.
A demon with the thinning scissors, she seemed to have thought i'd look better as a twenty-something balding man - she's gone and given me a receding hairline look, which is a bit new.
My temples have been shaved back and graded beautifullly so it looks like I'm losing my hair prematurely and what is left of the stuff up top - and she was over zealous with that too, it's twice as short as I asked for in places - has been thinned all over. For a guy with very thick hair I feel a bit Samsonesque at the moment, all I bloody wanted was a little trim.
It's impossible to get a low-level mohican in Asia, I swear.
Anyway the answers, as most of you probably knew in a vague way, is that Singapore is an island right next to the mainland, Malaysia being the country, and is an independent republic recognised by the United Nations as a country all of it's own and one of the very few city-states left in the world. The island is the country which is the state which is the city which is the nation which is the island, as it were.
But of it I have seen close to bugger-all. This caused me a lot of distress the past couple of days, as I had my first case of jet lag since starting this trip and slept so late (2pm, 3pm, utter madness!) for three days in a row that I felt like a damn fool that I had wasted half my time in this most famous and enigmatic place.
A major contributing factor to my inactivity has been the fact I'm in a dormitory and no-one but me in the whole world it seems likes to wake up early. The curtains are certainly never left open overnight, my main means of acheiving anything in life because I wake with the sun and am fully ready with it - I'm one of those incredibly annoying morning people - so the dorm life sees me easily in bed until 10, and then that's it, I'm screwed, because if I can lie in those extra couple of hours it'll be another 4 or 5 until you can lever me away from the duvet with a crowbar.
Daylight is my friend - if I ever want a proper job again, at the very least. So dormitories and the sharing of facilities and the general lack of total individual control over one's environment - least of all the right to stagger about from bed to toilet and back naked if so desired - are becoming rather annoying for me to say the least. Call me an individualist.
Just one of the inherent dangers of travelling I suppose, but wasting 3 days out of 5 in the city it does seem rather a shame. But then again if the zoo is cool enough tomorrow (later this this morning, in reality) I might have to stay an extra day or two. If I can afford it.
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Singapore is, as you may have heard, not a cheap place to stay, eat, drink or do anything much really. There are about two and half Sing Dollars to the pound, but a small can of beer from the 7-11 costs at least $2.50, a 6-pack of Heineken is $18.50 - and those are just little 330ml coke-can-sized cans and you can't get drunk on less than about 20 of those things.
Now of course there are, apparently, more things in the world than beer. A sandwich runs out of the 7-11 (I use it as a base comparison, there are cheaper and dearer places of course) at about three bucks, cereals and milk and crisps and chocolate and everything else roughly translates to about the same number of dollars as it would be pounds in the UK, with just a little more on top, although strangely the one thing that's cheaper is coffee which works out at about a quid for a small jar, plenty cheaper than back home. I have been replacing percentage-based drinks with tea and coffee for a day now already as is sometimes my (fortunate) habit.
A meal in a cheap place - a streetside eatery or low grade slightly greasy restaurant - costs about $3 - $6 which makes it about the same pro-rata as an expensive, pretty upmarket place in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia et al. Not ideal for those of us used to the former kind of price scale.
An absolutely average restaurant like what I patronised this very afternoon charges about $6 for a very average dish of noodles and $14 for anything with meat in or otherwise generally main course-ish. I spent $22 for a basic meal of really just one course and a cuppa tea - which makes it pretty harshly worked out for even the English pocket as that comes to just under £9.
A pub meal costs less and you get a great many more flavours, on average, and probably at least a half of lager in there with it too.
And it is all too easy to find restaurants that charge $50 for a steak, or anywhere from $30 to $80 for any main dish and none of which are any more than an average kind of place by my reckoning.
Bit of a buggeration if you like anything but street food or convenience store food. And even the thought of anything stronger to drink (bottle of wine at $40, bottle of Brandy at $135) is so unnerving it's enough to turn a man to tea.
So drink is the real bugger of the thing, and therefore it should be good for me here ;o) I haven't had anything for 24 hours now so that makes it;
Singapore: 1 ~ 0 :Tim
in the Nescafe & Brooke Bond sobriety championship league, so far 
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A little word is needed here just about 7-11 stores, because they do offer so much at all hours of the day, oh yes they do.
It is, I suspect, the closest thing to being in America without having to leave Asia, the experience of walking into a real genuine full-scale hardcore 7-11. You think you know what it's like from places in England? Think again!
You walk in and all thought is removed from you, you posses no free will any more only the ability to swap currency for cholesterol and sugar.
The staff welcome each and every customer with a cursory and distinctly false "welcome to seven-eleven sir/madam" and offer an equivalent and equally dispiriting "thank you for shopping..etc." much as any poor soul who has to trot out sycophantic script does.
There is a self-service drinks machine to your right at exactly arm's length from you as you enter, and before you exert any mental control or discernment you are reaching for a Big Gulp cup the size of a small car and even though you've registered the price (something like $4.50) you carry on with the automaton act filling your 2-litre-plus plastic syrup receptacle with coke and fizzy grape and sprite mixed into an anonymous slush, and the machine has Big Gulped you into a steady chain of purchasing that sees you leave the shop with a 6-pack of small beers costing £12, 3 different microwaved products (pizza slices, burgers, ramen noodle trays) all cooked by the super powerful in-store microwave right next to the whore of a drinks dispenser that started it all, and you find that a simple trip to the shops for a bottle of water (which you failed to purchase because it wasn't within the promotional conveyor belt that seized you from start to finish) has cost you $40 in local money, around £16, and none of it is in any way necessary.
Such is the power of the seven-eleven. I'd swear there was some voodoo involved or something; wouldn't be surprised to see chicken blood and feathers pouring out of the head office meeting rooms and conference halls if I ever visited
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And then of course there is the matter of House, the American TV series with Hugh Laurie as a yank, doing a pitch-perfect accent no less, and generally being utterly captivating throughout.
And so I love Hugh Laurie. He may have heard that from Stephen Fry during their long and superb collaborative career, as the latter fruity half of the partnership might just have had one too many one day and confessed all 
Goodness knows the makers of House think he's an awfully handsome chap by the way they write the show, making his grizzled, semi-lame angry-man the object of many a female's affection - but regardless of that he is fantastically amusing however you slice it. Maybe that's what it's all about after all
I've watched so much of it without a rest (one whole season, every episode almost back-to-back) that I find myself adopting a massively sarcastic, analytic view to pretty much everything I see. Hell, I'm even walking with a limp sometimes when I'm thinking particularly sarcastic thoughts (in an American acccent no less) - these things, when I find things like this that I really like, they do tend to go to my head a bit
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Anyway the zoo opens in 5 hours, I've only got to stay up for another 3 and I can start my morning routine, and so I'm just off the to 7-11 for a couple of hundreds slices of pizza and a gallon of carbonated grape juice 
