Lara's Singapore Blog » Entertainment

At the movies: Singapore is My Home

Lara — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:02:11 +0000

We went to see The King’s Speech last weekend (excellent, and with a fun audience that laughed at the jokes), and in the interminable round of advertisements before the movie began, pride of place (just before the movie itself) was given to the Singapore My Home music video. This is a full-on production with all the local artistes [sic] they could locate, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, fireworks and lots of shots of the city at night. Plus a URL that would link you to the full 6-minute version should you desire to watch it on your IPhone. Ugh – yucky combo of orchestral swooping, the most drearily melismatic R&B vocals, plus hip hop. Why?
Because nobody wants to live here!
Singaporeans all go overseas for training, education, or vacations, and often stay there. Foreign experts leave after a few years. Why do they want to leave a country that has weathered the world recession really well, has smooth streets, terrific public sports facilities and water parks, great cheap public transit, and cheap and delicious food? Why is it necessary for the PR arm of the government to protest so much that Singapore is our home, no matter where we may roam? Why are there locally produced programs about how much Singaporeans abroad miss their home?
I think it’s a combination of two things: common perception that the government really benefits a small group of families vastly more than the public at large, and a lack of anything local people can really attach to. Singaporeans I know all regard public policies and politicians with an extremely jaded eye, despite this being the cleanest, most honest government in Asia – perhaps a hangover from decades of persistent government spying on its citizens, perhaps from the discrepancy between the Prime Minister’s salary ($3 million Sing dollars) and that of a taxi driver ($36 thousand Sing dollars), perhaps because they’re so close to the thinly veiled kleptocracies in the region that the jaded views of government has bled from Indonesia, Myanmar and Malaysia into Singapore society. But also I think from the lack of anything natural in Singapore that one can cling to as a national symbol.
Australia has the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru; the U.S. has a great heritage of national parks and extraordinary natural beauty that Americans can think of as their own; Parisians have the Seine and various Europeans share the Alps. Singapore is reclaimed from the swamps, and meticulously managed to avoid reverting to them. Can you build a national self-image around water management and dengue fever abatement? No – or at least they’re not trying to. Instead, the tedious mishmash of Singapore My Home refers to the one feature you can identify as historically important to Singapore, the river downtown. It shows up in the song’s refrain as “the river that gives us life.” Well, the Nile or Mississippi it ain’t, folks. The Singapore River has been channeled into a concrete conduit that runs through the main tourist part of town, and while it’s been cleanup up considerably, it doesn’t look exactly life-giving. Brown and sluggish with plastic bags floating in it, it’s not inviting for swimmers; nor are its banks in any way conducive to peaceful picnicking. Nobody but the very wealthy can afford the apartments near it. It’s not the home of fish, birds, plants, or of the people the government is trying to woo.
In a way it’s heartening that the propaganda arm of the government is so ham-fisted; their ineptness shows a much less cynical approach to manipulating the national mood than Goebbels, which we must all agree is a good thing.

Arab Street: Smoking Hookahs

Lara — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:51:26 +0000

It’s just tobacco, nothing more exotic. The tobacco is in a reservoir under the tray at the top, on which they place burning charcoal. The temperature of the tobacco is thus maximized without its burning to a nasty stinking cigarette-like smoke. You go to a cafe and rent a hookah, for a smoking session of 45-60 minutes, and scent the air around you like pipe smoke. I don’t know how thoroughly they clean the mouthpieces, but can’t imagine they harbor many live germs with all that heat going through.

Chinese New Year Girls

Lara — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:47:44 +0000

A grandmother and her young charges. The kids are very cute at this time of year.

Orchard Road: Shopping for Eyelashes

Lara — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:44:37 +0000

Singapore’s Arab Street

Lara — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:43:36 +0000

We have finally gotten around to exploring this part of Singapore; it’s where the old Malaysian rulers of Singapore used to live, next to the Sultan Mosque, below:

There’s a network of streets with traditional shop houses on them (very long houses about half a block deep, that are/were shops or warehouses on the first floor and living quarters upstairs), and they sell tons of fabrics – silks, Indian prints, headscarves, batiks – some to tourists, but most to the muslim women who need long-sleeved dresses and skirts to wear. And there are smoke shops, where people sit around smoking hookahs! The hookah smoke smells nice, like pipe tobacco, not like cigarettes, which tend to smell like burning trash. There are also very good middle eastern restaurants, including Lebanese and Egyptian, some cafes selling hot sweet mint tea in silver pots, a Turkish imports shop, and a really wonderful perfume shop, run apparently by a man and his two sons (tall and short, both smiling and sweet), who know all about combining essential oils to get interesting smells. (Yes, I’ve spent a bit of time in there.)

In addition to being the historic home of the muslim Malay rulers of Singapore, this area was also the home of islamic scholarship in the area, and the transportation hub for Asian muslims making the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. They would make their ways to Singapore from Indonesia and Malaysia, settle their affairs, and pack onto ships for Mecca (before flights became available and affordable). Some people made a nice business of organizing Hajj trips, and could advertise their services as “licensed pilgrim brokers.”

But not all Muslims who came to Singapore for the Hajj proceeded to Mecca. Plenty of them stayed in the area around the Mosque, and were dubbed “Haji Singapura” – pilgrims to Singapore.

And at the end of the street farthest from the mosque, there’s the Halal Swedish Bistro!

I don’t know what that means, whether your Swedish meatballs are certified pork-free or whether the smoked reindeer was properly bled before being smoked, but there you are. I ask you, where besides Singapore will you find a halal Swedish cafe?

Chinese New Year: Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Lara — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:32:47 +0000

Who says pink clashes with red and orange? These are the decorations at our local giant mall, and I like them! In fact, I’m trying to design a house in which I’d have light fixtures like this in every room.

Chinese New Year is a 15-day period in which you stage many family reunions and feasts, in a particular order: visit the husband’s parents on the first day, wife’s parents on the second, and grandparents, uncles and aunts in descending birth order. But in Singapore it’s a public holiday of just two days (the indians and malays man the transit systems and other vital functions while the chinese majority celebrates). This is in keeping with the practice of fairness in allotting public hoidays to each major religion: Christians get Christmas and Good Friday; Hindus get Deepavali and Vesak Day (although since Vesak celebrates the birth of the Buddha you can argue that it’s really a chinese thing, but that first Buddha was Indian, so I guess it’s fair enough); Eid-ul-Fitre and Hari Raya Haj to the muslims. Other public holidays are New Year’s Day and National Day.

Anyway we’re enjoying lazing around, so happy Lunar New Year, everyone. Prosperity, health and happiness to all!

Bali: Ubud’s Sacred Monkey Reserve

Lara — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:19:49 +0000

Monkey Forest Road in Ubud terminates at the Monkey Forest Reserve – well actually it doesn’t terminate, but joins Jalan Hanoman (the monkey hero of the Ramayana) and swings back into town. But at this southern end of the town you can enter the reserve, paying a modest price to do so, and with the option of buying bananas for the inhabitants. It contains a whole slew of monkeys; I’ve seen estimates of 340, and new ones are being born all the time.

Naturally, since it’s Bali it has to have sculptures, and the biggest one in the middle of the sanctuary is an ornate swimming pool or bathtub-cum-fountain for the monkeys. They like it and hop in and out, and push each other around in the water like other primates I’ve seen.

The walkway to the bathtub has a concrete berm on the downhill side, where the monkeys line up. They eat the bananas that people bring them, take naps, feed their young, and interact with people. This boy scampered from the entrance to the berm and invited the monkey to play by sitting on the berm:

Note that the monkey has a buddy who has refrained from climbing the boy. I don’t know if they take turns, or if they decided he wasn’t big enough for two, but at any rate they didn’t gang up on him, which was nice. Actually, after closer inspection I’ve decided the buddy may have been preoccupied with nursing her baby.

The monkey took it to a higher level….

Everyone’s happy, and we have a photo op for the boy’s mother. And me, of course.

Of course there’s a temple in the Monkey Sanctuary. It’s not dedicated to Hanoman, but it is definitely monkey-dominated, and I noticed that they don’t keep a lot of delicate materials in the most accessible parts. You can see here the large sheltered platforms that would be used as dance venues ifa dance were scheduled. Despite the monkey access they’re very clean, so they must have a pretty devoted attendant keeping them that way. Human visitors must wear sarongs and sashes (available at the temple entrance) and then they can take even more monkey pictures.

Outside the temple there are lots of monkey statues along the walkways that divide the temple precincts from the surrounding jungle:

These statues look unnervingly lifelike. For comparison here’s a live nursing mother with her tiny baby:

The only unlifelike monkey statue is the giant Hanoman at a different entrance, in an attitude of prayer that I didn’t see any real monkeys assuming; it must be Hanoman, as it’s wearing the sacred checked cloth sarong and has a wise and blissed-out expression appropriate to a devotee of Shiva:

The monkeys like statues as well as fountains:

Or maybe they just like climbing to higher places. One grabbed the end of my pink umbrella and was considering whether he should climb up it, and then up my arm to the top of my head, but I persuaded him not to.

And that’s the end of my Bali blogging. I’ve spent almost as much time editing photos and posting them as I did on Bali. Which means it must be time to go back and see some more!

Bali: Legong Dance

Lara — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:21:47 +0000

In Ubud, you can go to a different dance performance every night of the week. They’re given in the public spaces of the temples, and are sacred, but that doesn’t mean they object to selling tourists tickets. The dances seem to be generally concerned with retelling the Ramayana, or parts of it, so they’re intimately tied to religion. The styles of dance seem to be part and parcel of Bali Hindu culture (that is, 90% of the population does it on a regular basis), and we saw some boys practicing some of the moves in a space adjacent to the library. Anyway, we only had 2 nights in Ubud to sample the dance offerings, and the first one was the North Ubud Women’s Association Legong-style ballet of the Ramayana. This took place in the lotus garden of the Saraswati Temple (which if you recall we were staying in, or adjacent to). The orchestra, unusually for a gamelan performance, was mostly women:

They’re wearing matching formal traditional dress for the performance, complete with similar-styled earrings, flowers and hairpieces. The music itself is nearly entirely percussive: drums, gongs, and gamelans, with one or two flutes. Gamelans are xylophones with hand-forged keys set to precise tones, and those in turn are set in elaborately carved and gilded boxes, behind which the players sit. The players use metal hammers to hit the keys with amazing precision and immediately damp the reverberations with their left hands.
Note that the stage, in front of the gate to the inner temple, is set with flowers and cut-and-folded coconut leaf decorations. These are offerings to the gods, more indications of the show’s sacredness. Below, some gamelan players working in amazing unity.

Here are Rama on the left and Sita on the right. It’s hard to get a good still shot of a dance, but at least you can see Sita’s glorious costume and get an idea of the crowns. The bigger the crown the more important the character, so Rama wins, but Sita’s no slouch. Her dance movements included most of Rama’s, but with train management added – she had to find ways to fit gently nudging it to the side or rear to the rhythms. Both dancers had their fingers curved backwards, gently fluttering, for almost the whole show. I’ve tried that for about 30 seconds – it’s not easy.

Here the couple is chatting together affectionately at the beginning of the story. The Rama dancer’s eyes were wide and staring the whole time. It’s a fine story, including a bad guy, magic, children dancing as monkeys, golden deer and demons, and my favorite dancer of the evening, the monkey Hanuman (in Bali, Hanoman).

That’s him in the center, with his own version of a crown, right next to the drummer, and behind a couple of black-clad monkey kids, his henchmen and army. This dancer was electrifying, to me at least, both as the evil magician and as Hanoman. (I know he was the same guy because Hanoman turned up for the final bow but the magician didn’t.) I think the drummer here is actually the leader of the whole thing – he had to go through the ranks of the orchestra and learn all the other instruments before they let him touch the drums, and he sets the rhythms and keeps everything going. It makes a lot of sense to have the dancers so close to the orchestra. Here’s the ensemble at the end; they don’t bow, just place their palms together in the prayer and greeting gesture. They stayed put for a while so we could take pictures, then just walked off into the wings.
Little monkeys and demons in the front, slightly older golden deer in the middle, and human/godly characters in the rear. The costumes are gorgeous. Rama, the big crown on the left, turned up at a different dance the next night at a different temple, the same actor wearing the same costume. He was running late, and showed up 2 minutes before the dance began, riding a scooter in full regalia – probably got a late start at the central costume depot. My spouse says he looked regal, even on a scooter. I hoped I’d see him riding home from the dance that second night, but no luck. I did, however, see the man who’d been firewalking in a horse costume ten minutes previously, zipping along on his scooter through the center of town. What a cool place.

Bali Costumes

Lara — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:47:30 +0000

Like so many Asian countries, one of the wonderful things about Bali is that people wear traditional costumes as well as the ubiquitous T-shirt and jeans (or shorts). Herewith, some pictures of people in Balinese garb:

This man is wearing the Hindu turban (as opposed to the Indonesian muslim skullcap), with a peak at the front where the ultimate deity can perch when invoked. He’s also wearing a white formal shirt and a sarong. For temple use he’d also be wearing a sash, but this is not a temple – it’s a public water park built by a rajah in 1948. He’s not tending a sacred statue, but investigating the fountain-beast.

Here’s a family group at one of the fanciful bridge at the same garden (the Water Palace, or Tirta Gangga). Men and women both wear sarongs and shirts, with sashes.

A closer look at a young couple on the bridge in traditional garb. The girl’s sash really accentuates her figure, and her sarong is lovely. Flipflops are de rigeur. Sunglasses and cameras optional.

This girl is praying at the Saraswati Temple in Ubud. Sarong, sash, and T-shirt. Although we were told that T-shirts are not appropriate temple garb, I think that mostly means the usual tourist T-shirt, dirty, frayed, with ugly or commercial messages printed on it. Plain clean ones seem to be OK.

This man is in charge of motorcycle parking on the main street in the town of Ubud. He’s dressed formally, with a special colored cloth over his sarong. And of course his uniform, the official orange Parking Regulation vest.

Also in Ubud, a combination of traditional and modern dress.

When we went to the Ramayana dance at the temple in Ubud, it was sponsored and performed by the Women’s Association of North Ubud. Unusually, the army of gamelans and gongs was played by women, who did a tremendous job. And who all dressed exactly the same, even down to their earrings and the flowers in their hair. Pink shirts, blue sarongs and sashes, matching hairdos with artificial buns if they needed them. The gamelans are also spectacular; they are housed in the temple grounds and covered in gold, as you see. These dances are a sacred art form, so people dress accordingly.

Here are the dancers of the Ramayana at the end of the piece, and although the picture is fuzzy you can see the glory of the costumes, which are dictated by tradition. The little demons, monkeys, and golden deer were danced by kids, and I saw some of the gamelan players smiling towards them offstage, so I think they and the orchestra are all family. The extra blurry tall white costume is Hanuman, whose electrifying dancing was too kinetic for my camera to catch, and who seemed (appropriately) unable to stand quite still at the end.

Rama, the hero of this story, is the king you see with the highest crown on the left of the picture. This dancer also performed as Rama in a different dance the next night, at a different temple. Apparently these glorious costumes are kept in a central repository (and cleaner’s) in the town, and the dancers go there, put them on, and make their way to the dance venue just before the performance. My husband was lucky enough to see Rama arrive at the second temple on his motor-scooter, in full regalia. And apparently he looked regal even then. Alas, we didn’t get any pictures of dancers on scooters.

Hong Kong: Ten Thousand Buddhas Temple

Lara — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:12:25 +0000

I went to this temple in 1993. It’s still there, but there are a lot more Buddha statues. Now the whole trail up the mountain (some 460 stairs) is lined with life-sized gold-painted Buddhas in astonishing variety:

These are the ones you can see from the main pavilion about two thirds of the way up. And if you look down, you can see the ones who helped you up this far:

At this level, the main one that most people seem to be able to get to, there is a pagoda with a lot of seated Buddha statues. You can go up inside it, but it’s mostly a circular staircase and nothing else. There’s a restaurant; there’s a temple with the gilded corpse of an abbot of the local monastery in it – sorry, again no pictures inside the temples, which is just good manners – and there’s a small chapel to one side with arhats in it. The arhats are enlightened buddhas who have escaped from the cycle of reincarnation, but I have a feeling these have been interspersed with various Taoist heroes to spruce up the temple precincts (and appeal to a wider audience). There’s one whose eyebrows grow down to his waist, and others with various other attributes. But the one who caught our attention is this one:

Maybe he’s an earhat.

Anyway, they were painting this pavilion with the typical bright and beautiful temple decorations that you can see on a lot of fancy Chinese temples. I’d never seen temple painters at work, so I photographed them.

More arhats below:

Once you’ve completed your devotions or tourism at this level, you can follow the Buddha trail further up the mountain until you reach the top. At this level the trail ends and there are several structures: an old house that might have been the original monastery; two new temples, both air conditioned (! just like the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore’s Chinatown!), that contain many ancestral tablets, and maybe a few ancestral ashes, for worship and remembrance. One of these new temples has an enormous seated Buddha with a glowing stone bindhi in its forehead. If you watch long enough the bindhi changes colors, from red to orange, pink to blue, green back to red. It’s an LED. Again, alas, courtesy forebad the taking of photos.
But if you go outside and dodge the scent of stinky tofu wafting up from below, you can see a small red pavilion which contains a statue of the beloved abbot whose gilded corpse resides in the main temple area below. This area is adjacent to a Buddha-filled grotto, which is to some extent still under construction. Here are the golden Buddhas to keep the abbot company:

Here is the newly carved sleeping Buddha atop the as-yet-incomplete water feature:

Here is the lovely and popular GuanYin, the Goddess of Mercy, who when her scaffolding is removed will overlook the entire valley (will her bindhi change colors too?):

And finally, here is the sign in English that caps the entire experience for me: