Singapore
We arrived in Singapore at 8:15pm, after a 17.5 hour flight from San Francisco.
Four full days in the city included two days of touring with guides who focused on history and food. On our own, we explored the Marina Bay area, land reclaimed from the sea where we found gardens, the ArtScience museum, striking architecture and the luminous musical Supertrees. We had cocktails on the 54th floor above the bay and in one of Asia’s Top 50 bars.

The City
Most of the sights in Singapore are within a 10–15 minute drive. The mainland measures just 31 miles east-west and 17 miles north-south. There are prominent colonial landmarks like the Fullerton Hotel (formerly the General Post Office), the Cavenagh Bridge made of Glasgow iron, and the Clifford Pier (now an elegant dining room, part of the Fullerton Bay Hotel, where we stayed).

Then there are striking modern structures like the Marina Bay Towers, with a 54th-floor bar/restaurant and pool, and the $68 million Helix Bridge.

Singapore is an easy entry point to Asia for monolingual English-speakers like us. We felt safe and able to navigate by ourselves in any part of town we found ourselves in. English is the official language for business, and almost everyone we met was fluent. In school, everyone learns English and at least one of the other common languages (Mandarin, Malay and Tamil).
The urban center is clean and attractive, and whatever you’re looking for is close at hand: museums, waterfront, parks and gardens, shopping and food, everywhere food. Our guides were proud of how Singapore has become a financial center with an educated workforce and with plenty of plans for development.
There is an extensive subway system, although we didn’t get a chance to try it. We used taxis when traveling by ourselves; Grab, a local equivalent to Uber, is also available. There are some electric scooters available for rent, but the government is moving to ban them from walkways. Although we saw a number of recreational joggers and cyclists, few people commute that way.
As you might expect from “Crazy Rich Asians,” there are plenty of designer boutiques, modern condo towers and glossy malls. But hawker centers are full of all sorts of people: German and Australian tourists, Muslim families, Indian families, twenty-somethings wearing Adidas and Calvin Klein. It’s easy to have a hearty, tasty lunch for a few dollars. People who look white don’t stand out as much as we experienced in Indonesia and Japan.
Gardens
Gardens by the Bay is Singapore’s primary outdoor space, like Central Park in New York but more curated. We visited its two conservatories and the curious vertical gardens called Supertrees.
The Flower Dome is the largest columnless greenhouse in the world, and on a Friday night it was jammed with families and twenty-somethings taking photos. The floral array changes — it was halfway to Christmas that night — but the permanent displays included African baobobs and gardens representing California, the Mediterranean, South America, and Australia.

Entering the glass-enclosed Cloud Forest, the first thing you see is a 98-foot waterfall, with a dramatic misty skywalk arcing around and down the mountain. The “hillside” was covered with ferns, orchids, carnivorous pitcher plants and begonias.
The Supertrees, measuring up to 16 stories, collect solar energy and rainwater and also serve as air intake and exhaust valves for the conservatories. Their trunks are covered in ferns, orchids and tropical flowering vines.
After dark, the light shows begin in the Supertree Grove. The one we saw was set to classic Broadway tunes.


The 160-year-old Singapore Botanic Gardens is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an explosion of orchids — over 1,000 species on display.

This gigantic bunch of mini bananas even impressed Mr. Desmond, our local guide.

Food
Eating is a national pastime in Singapore, so it was easy to pack a lot of food adventures into a few days. The menus ranged from rarified French cuisine to homestyle cooking from four traditions: Chinese, Peranakan (a distinct culture that arose from Chinese and Malaysian roots), Indian and Indonesian.
Our first stop on a guided evening food crawl was a hawker market where we sampled Mr. Lim’s fried oyster omelet. It looks like a scrambled mess, but the combination of tender oysters and wok-browned egg was addictive.

Next was this violently red dish, tulang merah, composed of mutton bones, ketchup and lots of chilis. Disposable gloves are provided, along with straws to suck out the rich bone marrow. (Raymond, our guide, demonstrated another marrow-removal technique, a quick wrist movement.)

A third quick cab ride and we were seated at a restaurant called Balestier, enjoying bak kut teh, long-simmered peppery pork rib soup studded with whole garlic cloves. The 30-year-old, third-generation chef offered us a sample of another house specialty, braised pork intestines. They were tender and flavorful, not at all what we expected from offal.

In a small neighborhood hawker market, filled with people watching South Africa beat England in the soccer/football World Cup, we ate a variety of satay — grilled lamb, pork belly, and chicken, dipped in delicious pineapple-peanut sauce.

The last stop offered a new dessert: chilled soy milk and bowls of cool, silky, slightly sweetened tofu, with sticks of you tiao (fried dough) for dunking.

Another day, while touring the Paranakan district, we sampled Nyonya meat-filled rice dumpings and sweet bite-sized snacks made from coconut and pandam. Mr. Desmond also found us some durian, even though it was not in season. The dessert layered the fibrous, strongly flavored fruit between custard and sponge cake. The flavor is hard to describe; imagine the funk of a strong cheese emanating from a mildly sweet torte. Bill thinks the flavor/taste is similar to that of sautéed onions that might be served on a hamburger: pungent and sweet.

Our guide made sure that we didn’t miss the hawker stall selling his favorite Hainanese chicken rice. The dish appears deceptively simple, just white-meat chicken and white rice; but the chicken is perfectly poached and juicy, and the rice is full of flavor, cooked with chicken broth, ginger and garlic.

Each morning, without leaving our hotel, we composed multiethnic plates from the lavish breakfast buffet. We enjoyed congee (rice porridge), laksa (noodles in spicy coconut curry), Hokkien fried mee (stir-fried noodles with pork and seafood), miso soup, kaya toast (jam made with coconut milk) with soft-cooked eggs, yam rice, roti canai (Indian flatbread served with lentil curry), dragon fruit, sambal (chili sauce) prawns, steamed buns filled with chicken or red beans, and steamed seafood dumplings.
We also dined more formally at two very different restaurants. Odette, one of the top-rated restaurants in Asia, had an imaginative and beautiful seasonal menu created by a French chef, Julien Royer. This spectacular dish is rosemary smoked egg.

On our last night in Singapore we enjoyed Chef Malcolm Lee’s fresh take on traditional Peranakan dishes at his Michelin-starred restaurant Candlenut.





More pictures
Here are some movies and more pictures from our time in Singapore (including some of the ones above).

