ideas: from the world

TRIP: To shake, or not to shake

SINGAPORE (DAY 3-4): Don’t shake hands with anyone. Ever. After almost 48 hours in Singapore, I feel I can speak with authority in offering this crucial piece of advice as a hapless foreign tourist. Nothing is more important. To shake hands is to have your fortune read, make a donation to a charity, feast in a restaurant, buy a suit, have a ‘massage’, or at the absolute least have a conversation that doesn’t ever seem to end. It is a vice-like grip; they look into your eyes and they smile and they talk about those cute kangaroos all over Australia and then they try and sell you something. The handshake gets tighter and starts pulling you in directions you don’t want to go. It opens up the floodgates, the handshake. And as rude as it might seem, it must be refused. Every time.

The Sucker Aussie tally? Well, there was the $60 I gave to the self-styled fortune teller – I’m not even sure how, really – and the $10 I gave to the monk and the $20 for curry and naan in Little India (it was a lip-burningly good tikka masala). And I very nearly bought a $650 suit.

I could only admire the fortune teller. This kindly old Indian fellow, he extends the hand and tells me what a kind heart I have (prophetic, indeed). He then asks me to write various things on a piece of paper, he starts telling me things I want to hear, we go and sit down, he hands me lucky rocks and magic cards and tells me I’ll live a long life if I never cut my nails on Tuesday or cut my hair on Saturday (or the other way round, I forget which, so death could be imminent), and then tells me I can pay either $50, $100 or $150 for all of this, and given my kind heart obviously I’d go with option C. I didn’t, disappointing him greatly and prompting (though I’m sure there’s no link) a warning that I could have health troubles later this year. Bad health troubles. (Will I cut my hair on the wrong day?) Thankfully, he’s willing to pray for me. And the more I pay…you know where this is going…the more he prays. Yes, of course I should have walked away. But the grip – he’s kissing my hand at this point – and the eyes – I elect to pay only $10 in prayers, not technically an option but even if it only bought one prayer I just hoped it would end the saga. He’s shattered, but releases the grip enough for me to escape. In my defence, he correctly guessed my favourite colour, he almost guessed my birth date (13 and 31 ARE quite similar) and I got a lucky rock out of it (I think it’s a dried plum seed). And it was my first day, give me a break.

As for the suit, had I wanted one I learnt reluctance and trying desperately to escape the shop are great bargaining tools. Just in trying to walk out I managed to talk down a $1300 one-pants tailored suit to a package including the suit with TWO pants, two tailored shirts, a tie, and a silk kimono (after telling him I didn’t have a girlfriend he settled on giving it to my mother) all for the grand total of $650! Because, you see I’m “a gentleman”. Plus delivery, ‘Harry’ pleaded. Plus my wife if you want her! My first born? My house? Please? Please Sir? (It would have been a beautiful suit: gorgeous Italian 100 percent cashmere wool, charcoal with a very funky pinstripe, red silk lining, just beautiful. But I’d probably have to wear the suit I have more first…)

I feel like I’ve had the east-west experience now. Yesterday, the Civic District and the riverfront. Which is, indeed, the height of British civility. Stately colonial architecture and snobby English tradition. The infamous Raffles Hotel (I have to go back for my obligatory Singapore Sling), the gothic Fullerton Hotel, the grand old City Hall and the neighbouring Supreme Court (both currently being transformed into the city’s new art gallery), the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, the National Museum building, old Parliament House, the Singapore Cricket Club – beautifully restored, timelessly elegant monuments to the Colony all. A slice of London without the 24-hour flight. Brilliant.

And today. Chinatown and Little India. Neighbourhoods so palpably Asian. Not in that touristy sort of way, but in that ‘this is where our people have set up and we’re going to make it feel like home’ way. They smell Asian, these streets, that pungent cocktail of spices and filth. They feel Asian, busy and bustling and a little claustrophobic; narrow streets with food stalls and markets and relentless spruikers like Harry. My favourite story: one of the cobble-stoned Chinatown laneways was known as Death Street because the Chinese set up houses where people would go to die; to die in a house is considered bad luck for the remaining residents. There’s something quite dignified about it, too.

The temples, Buddhist and Hindu, are garishly grand. I love finding a corner of them and watching the daily theatre – monks wailing until they’re blue in the face; babies being christened; couples being married; kids crying as their foreheads are dotted with paint; ordinary folk clutching insense sticks between their hands in prayer, bowing low to chiselled stone, eyes closed, their faces in pained expression as if they’re asking for the world. All while obtrusive, obnoxious tourists snap away around them. Not that any seem to notice. There’s nothing very censored or sanitised in this Singapore.

From the air it’s clear how much more of this city there is still to build. I braved the Singapore Flyer – the world’s largest observation wheel, gazumping the London Eye as only Singapore can – which provides stunning views of the Island to Malaysia, a landscape dotted with cranes and construction. Great swaths of land have either been bulldozed or simply reclaimed from the harbour to create almost a new city next to the old one. The city’s first casino and commercial/housing development is taking shape at Marina Bay to attract more tourists, more business to the city-state. The Singaporeans will not be bound by their own limited land borders.

I saw a musical last night at the Drama Centre Theatre, a two-year old hall set in the modern National Library, an original production called Sleepless Town. It won’t be coming to a theatre near you. Ambitious, certainly, but quite awful. But then, the locals laughed much more than I did. Tonight, to the magnificent Esplanade arts complex for a night with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra – supposedly one of the world’s best. I’m watching my first late-afternoon Singapore thunderstorm from my quite opulent hotel room, on the 31st floor overlooking Orchard Road. The lighething strikes violently. Once it stops raining I’ll walk down to the theatre, with my hands in my pockets. I’ve shaken my last Singaporean hand.

The story so far:

• DARWIN DAY 1-2: If you never, never go

© 2009 importance of ideas….