Maybe it's because I've never been to New York City or Beverly Hills before, but Singapore felt like a city that chose all the 'best' stuff and threw it into a single location. Back home you'd walk down the street and see shops or maybe a mall. In Singapore you have malls next to each other like we have stores next to each other, each one with insanely high-end products that I can barely afford to look at much less buy. I don't even know how people make enough money to keep all these places in business. Still it was fun at least looking around and pretending that the almighty dollar would see us through. This was the first part of the trip where it felt very close to home and yet very far away. It was also the first place where we decided to just embrace the tourist path since there were so many great things to do and see.
The thing about Singapore is that you are well aware of how strict they are on things. When flying in they tell you drug trafficking has a mandatory death sentence. While you're free to have a good time and spend money on most anything you want, it felt like if you step out of line the punishment would be severe and possibly done as an example to everyone else on the consequences. It's hard to know which parts of their system is doing the most good, but whatever it is everyone who lived there kept talking about how fast the city is changing. It felt like it was slightly in the future, so it's interesting to think about how it will look in ten years.
We've entered our final portion of South East Asia, with our last country being Indonesia, which will be very different from Malaysia. I'm not sure what to expect because every time we get used to something or some place, we leave it. It's strange knowing that after all this time we've only hit the halfway point of our total holiday. In some ways it's felt endless and in others it seems to be going by so quickly. Strangely enough with the help of Facebook I still get to see what my friends are doing and wish I hadn't missed out on something. It's hard to not think about where you aren't. Time moves so fast though it won't be long before I'm looking back at this trip and wondering how it got behind me so fast.
