I’ve been here and awake for a little better than 24 hours. It’s best to keep an open mind in passing judgment on this tiny, influential, affluent, controlled Singaporean society. However, there are few lessons I’ve learned to date.
1. The best way to offend a taxi driver in this country is to offer him a tip.
2. Among the residuals of building a city for four million people in land that 40 years ago was still jungle, is that occasionally a stray python eats someone’s dog.
3. People are so polite, that curmudgeons like me are tempted to be rude, just to test them.
4. When crossing the street it is vital to remember that cars drive on the British side. Survival requires you look left-right-left, and not right-left-right. You get no chance to screw this up.
5. I’m 5’11 when I stretch. This is the first place I’ve ever been where I could start on any basketball team.
6. People here seem genuinely and deeply saddened by the death of Ronald Reagan. In fact, they seem to like America more than Americans do these days. But in most cases, they’d rather continue to live here.
7. When they retire, many Singaporean opt to move to new gated communities in Perth, Australia and southern China.
8. The leading source of world news is the Internet. The second source is TV-CNN followed by the BBC.
9. When people want to see jungles, mountains, waterfalls or swim in beautiful ocean—they visit Malaysia or Thailand.
10. The island is about the same physical size of where I live in San Carlos, CA. San Carlos where about 28,000 people reside. The population here as of 2001, was 4.2 million. The government seems to be encouraging increased propagation and is allowing sexiness to seep into its ads, or so I am told.
I have learned also that not everyone here is euphoric and not everyone wants to stay forever. There’s also a general consensus that societies this structured do not produce great artists—but I’m really in no position to judge, and that’s not the story I’ve come to cover. That story begins in an hour when Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) wines and dines a core of international press, as we begin their week’s effort to have us understand the benefits to IT worldwide that this city-state has to offer. We shall see…
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