July in Singapore

Singapore River Eating and Shopping Area

I’m a few days into my trip to Singapore to visit my good friend and colleague Kim Huat Goh at the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University.  The flights here weren’t too bad, a 12-hour flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo and then 7 hours from Tokyo to Singapore.  The scare for H1N1 is quite high here in Asia; airport officials used heat (infrared) cameras to scan all passengers as we went through immigration at Changi Airport in Singapore to see if anyone was running a fever and I must have signed at least three different forms during the trip certifying I didn’t have any flu-like symptoms. Even the country’s mascot has been given a flu mask.

Singapore mascot wearing flu mask.

Singapore is beautiful: very clean, very tropical, very urban, and a unique mix of Asian and western culture.  Starbucks is everywhere.  Everyone speaks English, so there’s no trouble getting around. The weather is hot and humid, not ideal for a a guy from Minnesota, but not too oppressive either. Oh, and they drive on the left here – I wasn’t expecting that and my cab ride from the airport at 1 AM was a little nerve racking at first.

My first two nights I stayed in the Pan Pacific Orchard Hotel, in downtown Singapore.  Orchard Street is the shopping district and it is basically a multiple-mile chain of shopping malls, hotels, and restaurants – and all of the shopping malls seem to be packed with patrons all the time.  The population density is extremely high in Singapore, about 4.5M people in an area about the size of Minneapolis+St. Paul city limits.

Although this is a working trip, I plan to do a lot of site seeing over the next week and a half.  I’ve been to the Botanical Gardens and taken a boat ride up the Singapore River.  Items on the agenda include: Night Safari, Tiger Beer Brewery Tour, trying a Singapore Sling, and hopefully gettting to a S.League game or two.