Singapore is known as quite a safe city and on the whole crime is something that you rarely see or hear about.
In fact, the local rag which is the Straights Times http://www.straitstimes.com/Home.html is probably the single most boring read for exciting news that I’ve ever seen. If you used it to lay the bottom of the canary cage the bird would take one quick cursory glance at the dull and dreary headlines and promptly launch itself into the nearest cats jaws rather than the alternative of being subjected to having the world’s most boring locally penned headlines staring right back at you between ones supercilium.
Now, the online version might be a little more juicy in the gossip stakes than the printed version, but if my favourite sub story which I once read, on what I must only guess was some horribly mediocre news free day was the absolute ripping catch of “Boy arrested for dangerous wheelie”.
Now call me fuddy but it really must have been some wheelie.
After reading this and digesting the full 2 inch piece I ended up picturing young kids up and down the halls of the HDBs reading this and muttering lines such as “respect dude...” or whatever young wheelie respecting kids mutter these days.
How is it that such pointlessly banal news stories reach the front pages here? That’s not to diss (see, I know the street language) the great skill and obvious newsworthiness of performing two wheeled stunt trickery but it’s simply the truth that not that much actually happens here of noteworthy substance which would be splattered all over the papers back home.
Having been brought up in England and having spent most of that living in London I spent many an evening home on the tube reading the local horrors of the day and assessing the probable likeliness of me being blown up/stabbed/becoming a scientologist before the imminent arrival of the Tooting Bec stop.
Not only did I grow up with said stories of death, destruction and deplorable deeds of dastardliness but I even had the ultimate torture of having to read the Daily Mail. It’s a wonder I didn’t turn out some deranged middle class conservative f*ckwit having to read that drivel through my most impressionable years. Talk about telling your kids not to do drugs. I’d personally have focussed more on the lines of don’t read this sad sack of shit excuse of a newspaper and becoming a complete twat.
Most UK headlines are made up of either the shock and awe type or focus primarily on a large pair of tits of either the silicon enhanced type or a pair of the political type. This is where things take a turn here. Large prominent breasts are generally not that much on show here and given that there is only one tit in the political hierarchy here, it does cut the number of likely stories down a tad.
The other major contributor is crime stories. Back in Blighty there are folks up and down the land too scared to come out of their front doors because of the delinquent mobs of alchopop fuelled hoards roaming the streets and bashing people over the head with their rolled up extra thick free CD, garden supplement included versions of the Daily Mail.
It’s a dangerous place I can tell you.
Not in Singapore though. As crime is relatively low, at least serious crime anyway, there is a bit of a gap in the market of things to pen. I’m not saying that violent or serious crime does not happen here at all, but you do feel like it’s something that has been removed from your daily consciousness. Having grown up in what some people refer to as up and coming areas of London I can safely say that the street wise edge that you develop as you go about your day is slightly subdued here.
A great example of this and probably the main reason to this story is something that we’ve all done many times before and was something I’d done for the first time since I got here.
Whilst on an evening out pre intoxication and wearing what were politely described as “Rupert Bear Shorts” I egressed a local taxi on my way to the next watering hole. All good so far but my fan dangled short pockets were a little bigger than customary and I deposited my mobile phone apparatus on to the back seat of the taxi.
I noticed this about the exact same nanosecond after I closed the door and the taxi sped off at what I can only imagine was the requisite 88 miles an hour as the taxi seemed to break the space time continuum and simply vanished. It was only missing that special effect in Star Wars where all the stars go blurry when Han Solo presses the button to go into hyperspace and they all disappear in a whoosh.
I’d have shouted some expletives and jumped up and down in the comical fashion that is associated with such conundrums of stupity but a six foot odd guy swearing out loud and jumping up and down in “Rupert Bear Shorts” outside Satay Heaven might just have edged the wheelie story to page two if the passing paparazzi had seen me.
Lucky enough I was with someone who had a spare phone so I dialled my number, but to no avail. Thinking bugger, there rides of to 1955 my perfectly good iphone, I wonder what they'll make of that. I tried calling it a few more times over the course of the evening with some of the finest courses of Satay that I’ve ever had. More on the joys of Singapore Satay another time...
By about the 10th time, a guy answered the phone to which I babbled without pause that I was the owner and that I was a dick for losing it and that if he could return it to the drop off point I’d be most grateful. At this point you see I was a little tipsy
At this point, he explained that he was not the taxi driver.
He did however explain that he’d found it in the back of the taxi and was giving it to the driver to return. After about another 10 calls trying in my best Singlish to describe myself and where I would meet the driver it did in fact finally turn up about an hour later. Where in the world would you get a random guy give a random taxi driver a $500 phone and expect it to arrive safely? As I walked back to my Satay I could not help but smile at this and think that although the day to day news in the papers might be a little on the dull side it would be something I could easily cope with.
Low crime is not no crime they say, but it does make you think that the world is not such a bad place. There are some good folk about. We just need to spread them around a bit more finely.
If that means that I live in a place where bad things don’t happen very much and that the worst outburst I’ve seen yet was somebody realising that they had 11 items rather than 10 in the 10 items or less queue then I can probably stop worrying about half the things that I’ve spent half a lifetime learning to worry about.
I guess that some deeper thought is deserved on to why the social make-up is actually this way. Why is crime is so low? Why is it that people respect the laws more than I’ve seen in many Asian countries? What makes this small place so unique whilst neighbours and foreigners alike seem to make such a cock of it in their own back yards? The deeper questions are the one that I’m looking forward to figuring out.
This week though, I shall mostly be trying to perfect my wheelie technique.
Monday 18 October 2010
Monday 4 October 2010
Jakarta for a day
This weekend I found myself on a plane to Jakarta, which was a bit of a last minute jump on an airplane and see what it’s like at the other end type trip. Now, Jakarta is not a place you really think of as an exotic city break type destination I agree. The Lonely Planet guide book is even more cruel in that it says that Jakarta “...is a hard city to fall in love with” I can kind of see what they mean, but if I only spent the next year or so travelling to exotic places with wonderful beaches, great monuments and museums with rich tapestries of colourful history then I’m pretty sure I’d be seeing a one sided view of this great continent.
Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and is in Java. Now, I never knew this until I looked it up, but it’s the 12th biggest city in the world, which is no small feat.
The other big fact about Jakarta is it rains all the time. I don’t think it ever stopped the entire time I was there. So much so that to cross the road during a seriously hard downpour, I had to take my shoes and socks off, roll my jeans up and wade across four lanes of kamikaze traffic Indiana Jones style ,although being minus the whip and the hat. Probably minus the debonair good looks too but that’s a private joke between me and a couple of friends at home.
Jakarta is also not the prettiest city in the world either. In fact, you could say it’s one of the ugliest. Although, it is sorting itself out and becoming much more generic in the number of shiny glass malls that are springing up all over the place. Normally when I do a trip like this, I’d gem up on tit bits of factual information about the place, or at least have some inclination about the social make up of the place, but on this occasion I failed to do any of this. Even so, there are not really many things to gem up on over Jakarta that you can’t absorb anywhere else in Indonesia, which is a place I’m going to be spending a lot of my time over the coming year. In fact, I’m back in a few weeks already to knock off two of my top ten dives that I want to do. More on that another time though.
Jakarta is touted as being a pretty unsafe place these days. After having spent 5 years of my life living in Brixton in South London it take a bit more than a bit of rumour to faze me, so I was not too concerned about this. Although seeing metal detectors at the front of hotel foyers is something I’ve seen many times before, it did make me realise that this is still a place that has had its fair share of trouble in the last few years. Besides the obvious threats of people wanting to blow up the All You Can Eat continental buffet counters of mid range business hotels, the rest of the city is comparatively safe. Indo people are some of the friendliest I’ve ever met and simply love to chat to you and have a natter. This is even more so when you go shopping at some of the local malls. There is none of the incessant “You wanna buy DVD???” or “Lalf Loren Sir?” to which I was already mentally preparing to compartmentalise into my white noise part of my brain.
In fact it was quite the opposite and actually a very pleasant experience all in all to go shopping in the local district of Glodok, which I highly recommend.
Glodok is the main Chinese influenced market area in Jakarta. It’s a bit of a visual onslaught and not really for the faint hearted. It’s a very traditional old street market with local fruit, seafood and every other manner of delicacy from skinned frogs, live bugs to small birds in cages being sold for god knows what. It’s all opposite an open sewer with houses backing on to it in a scene not a million miles removed from the Dickensian scene of Oliver Twist with the slums of East London in the background. I spent half the time expecting the Artful Dodger to jump out from behind a stack of half filled ships barrels and cordon me with some rhyming slang patter about it being a decidedly tricky but right old larf on his manor or something.
It was actually quite a laugh wandering the roads around here and as rough looking and strangely smelling as it was it was a good experience. I’ve not learnt much Indo yet, but hearing Ole (Hello) every few feet, often accompanied with a very toothy grin was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon.
After this little escapade and after getting completely drenched yet again in another horizontal flowing rainstorm I chanced upon a local mall named ITC. This was a quite an old fashioned street mall, mostly for locals and pretty much void of any toursist. In fact, I was the only Caucasian there at all - and being slightly taller than the average Indonesian, I did cause a few stares and sniggers from the predominantly female crowd. The joke for me here being that a size 36 pair of shorts can be found (albeit slightly dodgier than the strict quality control that Mr Ralph Lauren would typically allow out his front doors) but can not be found for love nor money in Singapore.
I should really have taken some more pictures here. I think I need to get over my typically British anxiety of photographing random people doing things.
Another odd thing about Jakarta is just how screwed the traffic is there. The city sprawls over 30 miles in every direction but still has no MRT, no subway, train network and a woeful bus network. All the small tuk-tuks you’d see in Thailand and India have been been banned from the roads, so nearly everyone drives cars on roads untouched in the last 10 years. It takes forever to get anywhere and I came within a whisker of missing the return flight home after an epic 90 minute journey to travel 10 miles through town to the airport. How people get around daily I’ve no idea. You’d need the patience of a saint.
So in summary, Jakarta was a great place to visit for a day or two. There is absolutely no real reason to go there apart from to transit to somewhere else. It’s grey and it’s scruffy. The locals stare at you in a friendly and welcoming way and speak the most odd language to you like you have been speaking it all your life.
It’s the Birmingham of Asia.
Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and is in Java. Now, I never knew this until I looked it up, but it’s the 12th biggest city in the world, which is no small feat.
The other big fact about Jakarta is it rains all the time. I don’t think it ever stopped the entire time I was there. So much so that to cross the road during a seriously hard downpour, I had to take my shoes and socks off, roll my jeans up and wade across four lanes of kamikaze traffic Indiana Jones style ,although being minus the whip and the hat. Probably minus the debonair good looks too but that’s a private joke between me and a couple of friends at home.
Jakarta is also not the prettiest city in the world either. In fact, you could say it’s one of the ugliest. Although, it is sorting itself out and becoming much more generic in the number of shiny glass malls that are springing up all over the place. Normally when I do a trip like this, I’d gem up on tit bits of factual information about the place, or at least have some inclination about the social make up of the place, but on this occasion I failed to do any of this. Even so, there are not really many things to gem up on over Jakarta that you can’t absorb anywhere else in Indonesia, which is a place I’m going to be spending a lot of my time over the coming year. In fact, I’m back in a few weeks already to knock off two of my top ten dives that I want to do. More on that another time though.
Jakarta is touted as being a pretty unsafe place these days. After having spent 5 years of my life living in Brixton in South London it take a bit more than a bit of rumour to faze me, so I was not too concerned about this. Although seeing metal detectors at the front of hotel foyers is something I’ve seen many times before, it did make me realise that this is still a place that has had its fair share of trouble in the last few years. Besides the obvious threats of people wanting to blow up the All You Can Eat continental buffet counters of mid range business hotels, the rest of the city is comparatively safe. Indo people are some of the friendliest I’ve ever met and simply love to chat to you and have a natter. This is even more so when you go shopping at some of the local malls. There is none of the incessant “You wanna buy DVD???” or “Lalf Loren Sir?” to which I was already mentally preparing to compartmentalise into my white noise part of my brain.
In fact it was quite the opposite and actually a very pleasant experience all in all to go shopping in the local district of Glodok, which I highly recommend.
Glodok is the main Chinese influenced market area in Jakarta. It’s a bit of a visual onslaught and not really for the faint hearted. It’s a very traditional old street market with local fruit, seafood and every other manner of delicacy from skinned frogs, live bugs to small birds in cages being sold for god knows what. It’s all opposite an open sewer with houses backing on to it in a scene not a million miles removed from the Dickensian scene of Oliver Twist with the slums of East London in the background. I spent half the time expecting the Artful Dodger to jump out from behind a stack of half filled ships barrels and cordon me with some rhyming slang patter about it being a decidedly tricky but right old larf on his manor or something.
It was actually quite a laugh wandering the roads around here and as rough looking and strangely smelling as it was it was a good experience. I’ve not learnt much Indo yet, but hearing Ole (Hello) every few feet, often accompanied with a very toothy grin was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon.
After this little escapade and after getting completely drenched yet again in another horizontal flowing rainstorm I chanced upon a local mall named ITC. This was a quite an old fashioned street mall, mostly for locals and pretty much void of any toursist. In fact, I was the only Caucasian there at all - and being slightly taller than the average Indonesian, I did cause a few stares and sniggers from the predominantly female crowd. The joke for me here being that a size 36 pair of shorts can be found (albeit slightly dodgier than the strict quality control that Mr Ralph Lauren would typically allow out his front doors) but can not be found for love nor money in Singapore.
I should really have taken some more pictures here. I think I need to get over my typically British anxiety of photographing random people doing things.
Another odd thing about Jakarta is just how screwed the traffic is there. The city sprawls over 30 miles in every direction but still has no MRT, no subway, train network and a woeful bus network. All the small tuk-tuks you’d see in Thailand and India have been been banned from the roads, so nearly everyone drives cars on roads untouched in the last 10 years. It takes forever to get anywhere and I came within a whisker of missing the return flight home after an epic 90 minute journey to travel 10 miles through town to the airport. How people get around daily I’ve no idea. You’d need the patience of a saint.
So in summary, Jakarta was a great place to visit for a day or two. There is absolutely no real reason to go there apart from to transit to somewhere else. It’s grey and it’s scruffy. The locals stare at you in a friendly and welcoming way and speak the most odd language to you like you have been speaking it all your life.
It’s the Birmingham of Asia.
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