{"id":1000,"date":"2023-11-06T14:24:27","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T14:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2023-11-06T14:24:27","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T14:24:27","slug":"impressions-of-singapore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/postcards\/impressions-of-singapore\/","title":{"rendered":"Impressions of Singapore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Singapore is famous for its cleanliness and rule-abiding-ness. And for its money. It’s the financial capital of the East, a distinction built on the foundations of law and order and harsh penalties, and evidenced by the quarter of its population who are millionaires.<\/p>\n

The Singapore that I saw is all of those things, but that’s the window dressing. The real Singapore has nothing to do with any of that.<\/p>\n

Rather, Singapore is what happens when you take three ethnic groups and shepherd them into the 21st century under the canopy of a common tongue and a united vision. The result is tension between past and future, but not among citizens. Singapore is the battle between old and new.<\/p>\n

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Singapore Old and New<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Singapore’s Changi airport is like any other, but cleaner.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Singapore has moved the street vendors off the streets and into hawker centers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Fake, or pretend, trees at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay symbolize the country’s perceived artificiality.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The country’s major ethnic groups are Chinese, Malay, and Indian, and each group has its own section of town:<\/p>\n

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A modern Hilton Garden Inn forms the backdrop to a 19th-century Hindu temple in Singapore’s Little India.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Skyscrapers dwarf Kampong Glam, Singapore’s Muslim quarter. Now largely a tourist attraction, Kampong Glam is home to the early-20th-century Sultan Mosque and to a variety of shops, most of them by now repurposed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Singapore is the battle between old and new, the product of three ethnic groups shepherd into the 21st century under the canopy of a common tongue and a united vision. The result is tension between past and future, but not among citizens. It is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[217,13,220,218,216,221,219,36,63],"class_list":["post-1000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-postcards","tag-asia","tag-cultures","tag-kampong-glam","tag-malaysia","tag-singapore","tag-sri-veeramakaliamman-temple","tag-sultan-mosque","tag-travel","tag-travel-postcard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1014,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions\/1014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}