Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Sing with me

Singapore is one of the loveliest places that I have visited.
What makes it really a worthwhile place is that every attraction there is totally man made, with hardly any help from nature. Even the forests there are secondary rainforests.
The second largest island, called the sentosa, was a prison in the british time, which was later converted into a tourist attraction, to the extent that no one would even know that it had prisons there unless expressly told so.
And the whole thing came to , due to the vision of one great man, Lee Kuan Yew.
They hardly have any crime and everything works like clockwork. No wonder the citizens there are so proud of themselves and their country.
They have four national languages in Singapore: Mandarin script, tamil, malay and chinglish (english spoken by chinese).

We would need to understand and speak chinglish if we need to converse with the people of chinese origin there, which would be the taxi drivers, shop keepers, hotel receptionist, guides and just about everyone (except those in little india...but thats a story for another time).
The chinglish is spoken in a singsong manner with no words more than two or three syllables max. Please note that if spoken grammatically, it will not be understood, and do remember not to pronounce full words. For example you can ask a taxi driver "Mustafa can?" and he will promptly reply "can can"... which translates to "will you drop us at mustafa?"(Mustafa being a BEEG mall) and he sez yes. But ask him the full question, the chances are great he might give u a blank stare :-)

Coming to Little India. the only place in all of singapore that is, what dya expect, not so clean. I was told that the police and govt tried and tried and then decided to just let the indians be... Mera Bharath Mahan!!!
It feels just like any indian market. But ironically while everyone goes shopping there... no one wants to actually stay in Little India.

With Christmas just around the bend and Singapore was getting all set to celebrate in style. The Orchard street is the place to be at this time. God! but the place was beautiful. This street is full of malls and the whole place was covered in lights and santas and mannequins and what not. It reminded me of Las Vegas during Christmas time.

All in all, Singapore is a great spot for vacation and for those interested, some of the more memorable places to visit are: the night safari, the jurong bird park, the sentosa island with all its attractions (esp the songs of the sea, laser show) and be sure to go on a city tour to get a feel of the place.
U can also check out the Singapore travels site for more about Singapore.

Of course if u plan to stay more than 3-4 days, there is no guarantee your English might be able to weather the trip.
Bon Voyage!!!

PS: Ooops!!! Did I forget to mention that it is a great place for shopping. Be ready to lose a big chunk of loot there are at the various malls...esp on Jewellery and Electronics. :-D

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, very nice to read your blog. I used your opinion in my blog, where Chinglish is my main topic.

You can visit my blog, but better you can understand Chinese.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.

Anonymous said...

Hari, Angayum poi watch vaanginiya? thats what important

Anonymous said...

am i on the blue planet or somewhere in jupiter.... harini buys no watch from singapore! huh.

Anonymous said...

What did you buy for me?

- LS

Sanjana said...

Mohan, Remy: No watch :-(... I actually forgot to check for watches totally.

LS: Chocolates vangindu vandureken... vandhu eduthuko :-)