SINGAPORE

After a 7 hours flight I arrived in Singapore in the early morning. The first thing that you notice, after the heat and humidity that you feel immediately, is the green: Singapore is a super-green city, full of parks, gardens and plants everywhere, even among the high buildings of the CBD and on the side of most of the roads.

Then you notice how easy and cheap is to move around with the public transportation. Everything is very well connected as they try to destimulate the use of cars with a very good public transportation, reasonably cheap taxi service and very high taxes for buying a car (200% import tax + about 30-45.000€ tax just to get the licence place - so calculate how much would you pay your car there!!). But there are still so many nice and expensive cars.

The food is amazing here and you can eat really well spending a couple of S$ in the food courts. The specialties are sea fruits, crab, fish heads (!!)...What I really enojy here is having fruit juices, squeezed at the moment in front of you and for just 1-2 S$. The first one I had was the dragon fruit as I was really curious to see what does it taste like and I can say now that it is really good.

The fuits looks:

and it has small black seeds in. Great colour :-).

But the most important fruit here is the durian, the smelly simbol of the city (they have even built a music auditorium in its shape).

The smell is so bed that it is forbidden to take it in the public transportation or in some shops and bars.

And here they are very serious with fines and there is no fine for less then 1.000S$ (more then 500€). Everything is controlled by the state. You pay a lot for alcohol, cigarettes, cars, casinos... Everything the state doesn't want you to do, but don't want to prohibit, is extremely expensive. And other things like drugs is punished very severly. They still hang people on Fridays! But the result is a very disciplined city, completely safe and well organized. Probably the only way to put together without troubles the main three cultures that live in the city state: Malesyan, Chinese and Indian (about 30% each) + about 10% of foreigners. More from me another day......