Ranch Report: The Singapore Sling

A trip to the Tropics is both eye-opening and inspiring

I would not get to travel internationally at all if it were not for my daughter.

My first trip out of the U.S. (not counting Mexico, because it’s right by Texas) was to France. My daughter was a study-abroad student there at Sciences Po and had an apartment in Paris, so Diann and I went for 10 days. It was incredible! (Please click the hyperlink to Sciences Po to see what a bad-ass university it is.)

Up in one of the MANY castles in France

Then, after graduating college, she moved to Australia, where we visited her four times over 10 years.

At Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock.

So it was that we were given an opportunity to travel to Singapore by our Rotary Club in Fort Stockton. And again, I have my daughter to thank.

When she was a junior in high school she was selected as a Rotary Exchange Student for St. Nazaire, France. Because the Rotary Club of the Park Cities was sending her abroad for a year, I thought I better join the club, which I did.

Fast forward 16 years and I am now the president-elect of our Rotary Club in Fort Stockton. We have a fund to send the prez-elect to the Rotary International Convention every year, wherever it is. Getting the chance to travel to a new land, I jumped on it like a duck on a June bug.

This year’s Rotary International Convention was in Singapore, a place I’d never been before. I phoned up my college buddy and frat bro, Michael Beck, to ask his advice. Michael had spent more than 10 years in Jakarta, Indonesia, working for a major oil company and had visited Singapore often, so I picked his fertile brain.

First, he told me that Singapore was even more humid than Houston, so wear light clothing. He also said that it is a very expensive city (Crazy Rich Asians was set there) so I should try to eat at what they call “hawker courts”: food stalls around a bunch of picnic tables. Shop for souvenirs in Chinatown where they are cheaper. Lastly, he said that I should bring an umbrella and a water bottle. “Drink plenty of water!” he admonished. So, forewarned and forearmed, Diann and I left the ranch and drove to the Midland airport to begin what would be a 30-hour trip.

It was a beating to put it mildly. Two weather delays because of storms in Denver and three flight changes. Longest leg was from San Francisco to Singapore: 17 hours in the air. (I followed my usual practice for long fights: two Tylenol PMs and a red wine.)

We got to our hotel at 8:30 am. Check in was not until 3:00 pm.

This led to our first interaction with the people of Singapore. The girl at the desk (Marie) could not have been nicer. She asked us to sit in the lobby while they got a room ready for us. We were in it by 9:00 am!!!
We had purposely arrived two days before the convention started so we could get acclimated to the jet lag. After a shower, we headed out to Chinatown.

Even if it is not raining, most residents carry an umbrella for the shade, and for good reason. Temps are 98 degrees!

Shopping in Chinatown, where everything is cheaper!

There are several things fascinating about Singapore, but the main one is that they have only been an independent country since 1965. (Until 1959 they were a British colony.) The other is that they are 77% Chinese, 14% Indian, seven percent Maylasian and two percent “other.” This meant that for the first time in my life I was a distinct minority. But the people could not have been nicer. Very polite and always in a good humor (lots of smiles!) Even the fast food workers!

This guy was excited that I was from Texas! He had just purchased a smoker made in Austin.

That’s the thing I’ve noticed in my limited international travel: People in other countries may not like Americans, but they LOVE Texans.

After two days of being “on our own” we were ready to start the Rotary International Convention. It was held at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Convention Center. This place is like Las Vegas on steroids, and is the archetypal Crazy Rich Asians hangout.

First off, it is the tallest structure on the island, so you can see it from anywhere.

Second, when you get up close, it is a HUGE imposing structure. Three towers.

This is just the lobby for the FIRST TOWER!

And, it has an infinity swimming pool on top!

We then made our way over to the adjoining convention center, where 14,000 Rotarians would be gathered under one roof. The biggest crowds I’d ever been in were at football games, but that was in a stadium and this was all indoors.

The first thing I noticed is how PROUD folks in other parts of the world are to be Rotarians. I mean, we just wear a Rotary pin on our lapels out here in West Texas, but over there, everyone was DRESSED UP in their Rotary refinery!

Top to bottom: Africa, The Philippines, India, Mexico and Japanese Rotary members (with Diann) sporting their Rotary convention attire.

I have to confess that everyone’s optimism, politeness and overall positive attitudes were infectious. To quote Elvis Costello, “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?”

But it wasn’t just the Rotarians. Everyone in Singapore seems to have a much better outlook on life. Maybe it’s because 82% of them live in public housing, subsidized by the government. That means that everyone has a home!

The Singapore government sells them apartments/condos in the public housing high-rises for 1/3 of the market value. But these are not the public housing units you think of in New York or Chicago, or on the TV show Good Times. These are nice, clean buildings, with playgrounds and schools nearby.

A public housing unit, on the beach, with an adjacent playground and park.

The idea for this approach came from a Singapore ex-pat named Liu Thai Ker, who replaced squalid slums with spacious high-rises. After graduating from architect school, he worked in New York City for the noted architect, I.M. Pei. In 1969 Ker was tapped by the Singapore government to return to his native country and help with the housing problems. He carried the memory of the slum-like public housing in New York City and was determined to avoid that fate.

As the public housing following his vision began to be built — and its success to be recognized — Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, gave Mr. Liu an ambitious goal: resettle everyone still living in the slums by 1982.

By 1985, virtually every Singaporean had a home.

There is an excellent article about Mr. Ker in the New York Times. It describes his vision for every citizen to own a home, and how he got them there. There may indeed be homeless people living in Singapore, but we never saw one in the 10 days we were on the island. I wonder why we can’t do that in the U.S., but I already know the answer.

One of the earliest public housing units designed by Liu Thai Ker. It’s only four stories tall, but has an art-deco look you don’t see in housing projects in the States.

The best advice Michael gave us was to eat in the “hawker courts." There are more than 120 of them scattered throughout Singapore. They are a collection of food stalls, surrounding an open area with picnic tables. Almost all of the meals they serve are $5 apiece. By comparison, the lunch at our hotel was $38! Luckily for us, there was a hawker court right across the street from the hotel.

A hawker court in Singapore.

A great meal of beef, pork and noodles for just $5.

Singapore’s wealth comes from its location as a major shipping/transit port. It receives tons of cargo from the east and the west, where it is transferred to ships going the rest of the way around the world. This means that sellers don’t have to ship their goods completely around the globe, but halfway. The island is surrounded by hundreds of ships, waiting to transfer their cargos.

Just a single view of the ships waiting to unload. They surround the entire island-nation.

When asked what my favorite thing was, I have to say it was two musical concerts. The first was at the Chinese Cultural Center in downtown, where we heard a concert by TENG, a group of composers that uses instruments manufactured after World War II from whatever materials they could salvage. They are also trying to create a “Singapore sound.” On the night we attended, they had commissioned four composers to write original works that represented what they thought a Singapore sound should be. It was very different, but very good.

After the concert the musicians posed outside the hall for photos.

Here is a YouTube link to one of the songs they performed that night, “Concrete Jungle.”

The other thing we enjoyed was a concert at the Rotary House of Friendship by school children playing on instruments made from bamboo! How they got these sounds I have no idea, but they did.

The kids are alright! Students from the Greenwood Primary School lay down the sounds on bamboo.

Somehow Singapore has found a way to blend four distinct cultures, Chinese, Indian, Malaysian and “other” while permitting religions from Hindu to Muslim to Confucianism to flourish. As I said, this was the first time in my life that I’ve been in a distinct minority (2%), but somehow they have found a way to make it work. One of the oldest Hindu temples is in Singapore, and yet we also saw women wearing the hijab all over the place.

The Sri Mariamann Hindu Temple, built in 1827.

Maybe their tolerance comes from years of living under the boot of colonialism (the British…again!) and then the brutal occupation by Japan during World War II. I got a sense of what this has done to their psyche in an exhibit of post-WW II cartoons at the Chinese Cultural Center.

I don’t know about you, but that comic panel set me to thinking, especially those first two sentences.

Lastly, there are a lot of things about an international Rotary convention that are pretty cheesy, like all of the speakers dancing up onstage to rock music, or the leaders having their wives sing. (It was like a John Lennon and Yoko Ono metaphor.) BUT, the good that Rotary does and the service its members perform is not to be laughed off. I witnessed 14,000 people genuinely trying to make positive changes in their parts of the world, and who can put that down?

Crowding into the ballroom for the closing ceremonies.

As I said, the trip was both eye-opening and inspiring, but I don’t know if I will return. The extreme heat and high humidity made anything outdoors just a beat down.

93% humidity is a bit of a shock for someone living in the West Texas desert.

But we DID get a chance to go to The Long Bar inside the Raffles Hotel and have a Singapore Sling at the very spot where that cocktail was supposedly invented.

At least the Brits did something right.

The Long Bar in Raffles Hotel, a very Brit kind of place!

This is a mojito. (I drank my Singapore Sling before I could take a photograph of it.)

As always, if you like my stuff please subscribe. And it you want to support my work consider becoming a paying subscriber.

Adios from the tropics!

We are now safely back home at the ranch.

I leave you with the words of the great Mark Twain:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

(Full moon the other night at the ranch. Good to be home!)