Smitten with Singapore

Singapore gets a bad rap in the travel and backpacker community. It’s not as gorgeous as Thailand, as gritty as Vietnam, as groundbreaking as Myanmar. Plus, of course, it’s wildly expensive, on par with New York and Tokyo amidst a subcontinent of cheap places to live. I’d read that there wasn’t much to do and didn’t want to blow my budget, anyway, so I just planned for four nights here.

What a mistake.

It’s true that it’s expensive. It’s also true that this city is a food paradise, and I’m on cloud nine.

I arrived in Singapore pretty beat. Although my flight from Kuala Lumpur was only an hour, I was starting to get tired of my backpack. Maybe it was my new obsession with purchasing kaya, the delightful coconut jam of Indochina that was weighing my Osprey pack down. Or maybe it was just feeling a little bit of a travel slump in Malaysia. It was definitely partly the ridiculous humidity of Singapore, which walloped me in the face as I emerged, squinting into the Singapore sunshine in the hipster enclave of the cutely-named Lavender neighborhood. For all of these reasons and probably more, I wasn’t feeling 100% when I checked into my hostel.

But you know how sometimes you just have a feeling about a city, even before you arrive? It’s like crushing on someone just by viewing his Facebook page. I had a feeling that Singapore and I were going to get on just fine.

So I shoved my pack in my locker, showered, and went out for an evening wander. Within minutes I was parked at a hawker centre, blissfully tucking in to a plate of prawn hokkien mee, a Singapore favorite with shrimp, squid, TWO KINDS OF NOODLES (carb heaven!), a tiny calamansi citrus to squeeze over the top for umami, and if I’m being honest, probably some kind of secret pork in there. It was sweet, salty, seafood perfection. And it was $3.50 USD.

Back in the 90s, Singapore made all of its street vendors move to hawker centres to clean up the streets. This is kind of a bummer for street life, but kind of a boon for those of us who can now walk into one place and sample Singapore street food to our heart’s content. It’s like a food court on steroids.

Reenergized, I continued on my brief tour of the local foods. Within just a few blocks, I’d refreshed with sugarcane juice, picked up some more pandan kaya (sorry, it’s just so. good.), and snacked on fried carrot cake, a Singapore delicacy that is nothing at all like American carrot cake: radishes panfried with egg, garlic, and scallions, served in “white” and “black” (with soy sauce) varieties. I tried both, of course.

With every step I took, I saw new food stalls that I wanted to come back and try. My bliss escalated. I went back to my hostel, and a fellow traveler asked me what I was looking forward to doing in Singapore.

“Eating,” I replied, and went to bed dreaming of the raucous hawker centres that awaited me in the morning.