Shipwrecks, Hawker Stalls and Orchids: A dispatch from Singapore

I don’t know why the weather in Singapore came as a shock to me. I was last here in July, 2017, and it was 88 degrees and muggy. I’m now here in October, 2022, and it’s 88 degrees and muggy. The weather doesn’t change. Every month of the year, it’s 88 and muggy.

The only way I know it’s October is because the Starbucks menu has pumpkin spice lattes, even here.

We started our day not at Starbucks but at Bread Talk, a Southeast Asian bakery chain that Ardi loves from his childhood. After picking up subway fare cards, our first official stop was Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum.

Trade Routes, Shipwrecks, and Opium

The Asian Civilisations Museum is one of the four major Singapore museums, often eclipsed by the National Museum and the Singapore Art Museum. If you grew up in the United States and don’t have a good working knowledge of Asian history, it’s a fantastic place to begin. If you love maritime history, you’ll love it even more.

The museum tells of Asian civilisation (indulge my British spelling, will you?) through trade routes and shipwrecks. Religion, food, and language all spread through sea trade. In fact, the museum is filled with artifacts and objects d’art pulled from the bottom of the sea. Some of the artifacts, found in waterproof ceramic containers, are in such good condition they look freshly minted.

A small section talks about the opium wars and the role of opium in establishing the British Empire in the late 1800s. It’s a period I’d completely forgotten about, if I ever learned much of it at all in the United States, and I look forward to studying it further.

Something that grabs me while looking at thousands of years of trade in a broad context relates to our 21st-century conversation about cultural appropriation. My thoughts are incomplete, but for thousands of years, civilisations have stolen, appropriated, bartered, and built upon each others’ designs, goods, and cultural elements. It seems silly that we might be asked to stop now, and that certain design elements, relics, and music “belong to” only one particular group when the wind literally spread these things from east to west and back again.

On Hawker Stalls

Singapore is famous for its hawker centres, or hawker stalls. I’m a bit skeptical about their great reputation.

A hawker centre is, for most intents, a food court selling Chinese and Halal rice, dumplings, and noodles. Quality varies. I’m sure some of it is outstanding, but I haven’t found it. Most of it is on par with the indie Chinese restaurants at my local mall. Ardi and I grabbed some chicken with rice our first night here, and it was unpalatable.

And yet, I had some of the best iced tea with honey, ever, yesterday. And, it’s great fun breaking bread with the locals, who eat at hawker centres as a matter of routine and, I’m sure, know the best stalls.

Hawker stalls are probably most famous for being a source of cheap eats in a city that’s expensive. They have large picture menus that don’t mean much. Order three things, and the chef will likely tell you that two of them aren’t available, and a fourth option is better than the third.

Singapore Botanic Gardens: A UNESCO World Heritage Site

At the far end of the Orchard Road shopping district in Singapore you’ll find Singapore Botanic Gardens, one of only three gardens designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the only tropical garden to bear that distinction. It’s over 160 years old.

The tropical plants I know from the garden center at Home Depot apparently also grow in the wild in the tropics, and when they do, they become magnificent.

The botanic gardens grow on 200 acres of land, so we were able to explore only the main attraction, the National Orchid Garden.

I’m not a flower person, and I was impressed. I’ve never seen so many orchids growing in every direction. Hell, I never knew there were so many types of orchids—some growing to the sky, others so small taxonomists have to use magnifiers to identify them.

Ardi is a flower person, and was both delighted to find rare flowers and disappointed I did not know the taxonomies of plants like he did. “Did you learn anything in school?” he asked. The answer is, apparently, no, but I need to study the opium wars before I can memorize the genus and species of orchids.