It felt like the “work chic” and “party dress” pages of a BCBG catalog had sprung to life with thousands of women around me.

Not that their styles are particularly trendy. But what they lack in daring they compensate with good taste and elegance. What I saw was an excess of fine fabrics, tailored pants, uber-feminine dresses and hardly any jeans. The accessories were always smart and exact.

It’s also no handicap that the women had, in great numbers, slim bodies on which anything looks good. The financial district, in the heart of the city, is where men and women triumph in the looks department.

It was fun doing a street fashion shoot. Many women, by modesty of shyness, didn’t want to be photographed. But I like to think that with or without their participation, I gave a nice ego boost to women who are probably seldom recognized or complimented, inside or outside their borders.

[View with PicLens]

Singapore is that kind of city.

Here are our favourite pictures from our week spent there. Click the bottom-right button to see it in full screen.

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Why settle for three square meals a day when you can have five or six?

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Only tourists should be allowed to lose their money pointlessly in a casino.

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Durian is revolting until you spend money on a good one. Then it’s divine.

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A jingle by an a cappella trio announcing the next train goes from charming to irritating after exactly six jingles.

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The Dim Sum Dollies, the stars of a campaign by Singapore’s rail authority to promote courtesy through repetitive a cappella jingles.

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Extreme cleanliness is good for business, apparently.

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There are people willing to spend $20,000 on a piece of ginseng root.

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With just the right amount of housing quotas, free speech suppression, religious bans, and severe penalties for defying them, you can foster racial harmony.

There’s nothing wrong with drinking a $200 wine with a $4 plate of Hainanese chicken rice.

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Buddha’s tooth is under constant video surveillance.

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Can! Can, can, can!

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What a farce. Singaporeans take their pleasure very seriously. Venture past the tourist trail of Chinatown, the malls of Orchard Rd. and the overpriced cafés of Sentosa Island and you’ll a city contending for a spot among the great capitals of fun.

If you’re there, don’t miss these delights:

Seafood at East Coast Park

The food stalls at East Coast Park specialize in the fruits of the ocean. You’ll find dozens of hawkers serving up local specialties like chilli stingray, pepper crab, and prawns, along with Singapore classics like satay and fried oysters.

Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

Singapore’s Chinatown doesn’t really deserve the name. It’s too clean, too orderly, too colour-coordinated to be a Chinatown. But it’s centrepiece, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, is a treat. The main floor, the worship hall, is intensely ornate, while the upper floors offer exhibits on Buddhism.

The namesake display, the Buddha’s tooth relic, is enclosed in a sealed shrine. Holiness drips from the walls.

Cable-skiing at the lake

Actually, before your seafood session, work up an appetite cable-skiing at the lake on East Coast Park. It’s like water skiing with robots instead of boats. You’re pulled by a rope attached to a cable system that rotates continuously around the lake, passing over jumps and ramps.

It costs $32 SGD for one hour and is loads of fun.

Asian Civilizations Museum

The Southeast Asian backpacker trail takes you through several countries of contrasting cultures. This museum does a fine job of putting it all together, giving your trip a historical and cultural context.

Pulau Ubin

A short bumboat ride from the mainland is Pulau Ubin, a little island that reminds Singaporeans what nature looks like. Spared from the bulldozers of condo developers, it’s a leafy getaway where the sound of crickets and cicadas take over from engines and horns.

Visitors can rent bikes to explore the island, eat some decent seafood, and see the Chek Jawa wetland a mini-ecosystem of anemone, algae and crabs that shows itself at low tide.

Five-star street food

A national dish of Singapore is the Hainanese chicken rice, and few serve it up better than Five Star Chicken Rice on East Coast Rd. near Kantong Village. Locals and expats swarm the sidewalk tables and order portion after portion of the slow-cooked bird.

But the area is a big eating hub with lots of other quality cheap eats. Try the laksa at 328 Katong Laksa a few blocks away.

Free luxuries

At the time of writing, the Marina Bay Sands, a mammoth shopping-casino complex was still under construction, but some shops open for business. Some of them offer generous free samples of luxury foods.

Like Yummi House. They specialize in high-end honeys from around the world. One pot costs $120 SGD. But they will gladly dissolve a big spoonful in hot water, chill it with ice, and give it to you for nothing. It’s exquisite.

Next door is a tea shop with tea sets priced in the thousands. Again, enjoy some samples on the house.

Big desserts

In the Chinese neighbourhood of Bugis you’ll find Ah Chew Desserts, a landmark with locals. (Notice a big focus on food? Get used to it in Singapore) They serve delicious sweets like grass jelly, bean curd, and several flavours of shaved ice with fruit.

It’s at 1 Liang Seah Street #01-11

The most fondled Buddha in Singapore is in Bugis.

Cosplay café

This one is more for the blokes, but girls can have some fun as well. In Chinatown, there’s a cosplay café where girls dressed as characters of Japanese male fantasy dote on you through the night. Clients can have their food hand-spooned to them by these girls, for a frugal $1 a bite.

The A87 Café and Bar is at 108 Tajong Pagar Rd.

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No-one ever goes hungry in Singapore. No-one’s ever given the chance.

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Act 1, Scene 1

They call it street food because you can vaguely see the street from your table. Lau Pa Sat is the main “hawker centre” in Singapore’s financial core, an old market converted into a food court with close to 50 stalls spanning Asian cuisine.

Each stall is neatly enclosed with glass and a luminous sign showing pictures of their fare. Desmond, a local lawyer we befriended, negotiated the clutter of tables and humans with ease despite his wheelchair.

“The first order of business is to find a table,” he counseled.

A tall order. The place was mad with the lunchtime rush. But I spotted an empty table among the throngs. How civilized, I thought. They place a wet napkin pack at each place of an empty table.

When I quickly took a seat, a severe Chinese man shook his finger while barking something in Singlish. I knew it was Singlish because Wikipedia told me they sometimes add urgency to sentences with “lah” or “mah”.

“That table isn’t free,” Desmond said. It’s Singapore custom, we learned, to reserve a seat with napkins while you shop for grub.

Act 1, Scene 2

“So what’s the local specialty,” I asked Desmond while eyeing some red lacquered ducks hanging seductively from hooks at a nearby stall. I could almost taste the Chinese five spices.

Lawyers are good at reading body language, and Desmond promptly ordered one. He wheeled himself to a neighbouring stall and ordered two more dishes: fried oysters and char kway teow. Then he dropped by a fritter stand and bought three battered and fried bananas.

Singaporeans are in a hurry. Always an appointment to catch, people to see. Unlike their Southeast Asian neighbours, you rarely see a Singaporean just sitting around. As such, they don’t have much time to eat, which is why they generously lubricate their food to reduce chewing times.

We felt like we had made out with greasy frying pans, but it was all very tasty. The duck, especially, was stupendous. There was food left on the plates. Two bananas uneaten.

“Shall we get something else,” Desmond asked. We politely laughed at his little joke. His face turned puzzled.

Singaporeans don’t joke. Not about food.

Act 2, Scene 1

Late nights mean late breakfasts, so we usually hit the streets around noon with bellies full. But when we hooked up with a gentle Singaporean boy we hosted in Montreal via Counchsurfing, he was hungry for lunch.

“There’s a place here famous for carrot cakes,” Daniel said after we met at a hawker centre in Little India. “Want some?”

“Get some for yourself and we’ll have a taste,” I replied.

He vanished for five minutes and returned with two plates. One had a stir-fried mess of white starchy cubes, grated carrots, and spring onions. The other was the same thing, but blackened by soya sauce.

Those are carrot cakes.

“When I was younger, I liked the black one more,” he said. “Today I prefer the white.”

Indeed, the white one was more savoury, loaded with garlic and spices. The black brother was notably sweet. Both were fantastically greasy.

He excused himself again and returned with rojak, a fruit and vegetable salad topped with peanut sauce.

We left two-thirds of each plate untouched. Any more would require an emergency stomach pump or bulimia. “Should we get something else,” Daniel asked.

Okay, they like to mess with tourists, we thought. It’s the national prank. You gotta have some outlet among all this order, all this cleanliness, all these rules.

Daniel got up, and again, after five minutes, returned with two bowls. One was filled with a black jelly-like noodle with ice cubes. The other a white, airy cream. Grass jelly and bean curd.

Both desserts were left 80 percent intact.

Act 2, Scene 2

The cash register at Ah Chew Desserts randomly selects a customer for a chance to win a second treat. I was chosen after paying for my almond paste with sesame rice balls and Daniel’s mango with sago pellets.

The owner told me to insert a rubber ball into a glass case filled with pegs. Quantum physics and gravity would then bounce the ball around until it fell into one of eight slots on the bottom. My ball fell into “Grass jelly with fruits”.

The owner then stamped the back of my receipt: valid for a free dessert up to 30 days from date of first purchase. Awesome. I could come back tomorrow.

Five minutes into my tasty almond paste – more of a cold soup, really – a waitress brings a bowl heaping with grass jelly and cubed pineapples, strawberries, and watermelon. She demands my stamped ticket.

“What,” she asked incredulously when I told her I didn’t want it right now. “You’re only having one?”

A hawker stall in Singapore. Every seller is given a letter grade on cleanliness.

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Act 3

Il Lido is a restaurant at the Sentosa Golf Club, a rich man’s playground at an islet south of Singapore’s mainland. We went as guests of local lawyers and entrepreneurs we befriended.

Desmond, a consummate lover of fine wines, suggested we all order the tasting menu, as he had brought four wines to pair with each course.

It started with a slice of pan-seared tuna, then two grilled scallops with crispy prosciutto, followed by tagliatelle with tomato lobster sauce, beef tenderloin steaks, and finished with lava cake and ice cream. Capuccinos and dessert wine for the cap.

In Singapore, any discussion, no matter how arcane, will inevitably turn to eating. Everyone’s an expert. No one is ambivalent. Consensus: the food was average and portions too small.

The backpackers were bursting at the seams, but abstained. We didn’t want to appear weak.

The bill came. There was little arguing over who pays. One person volunteers, and the rest vow to send their shares over internet banking.

One of the guests looked at me and said, “Do you want some real food now? We’re going for dinner. There’s some good beef noodles there.”

Politely declined. The next day, we heard the three who went ordered five dishes.

Epilogue

Declining food in Singapore is is as effective as asking a computer to hurry up. Insisting is just as foolish.

It’s a city that is a country and has no countryside, no ancient mythologies, no history as a nation older than 190 years. Food, brought by its three main ethnic groups at a variety, cost and quality unrivaled anywhere else, is what unifies them.

Food is how Singaporeans express affection. It is how they honour guests. It is what they know best.

It’s the foreigner’s task to channel his bewilderment – and upset stomach – into flattery.

And if he wants to be stinking rich, figure out how these people never get fat and make a pill out of it.

No Chinatown should be this clean.

Singapore’s Chinatown doesn’t even look like a Chinatown. It’s a trendy neighbourhood in the North American West Coast with some noodle joints sprinkled in. Instead of noisy fruit markets, chaotic grocery stores and a glut of no-frills restaurants, you see lines of 19th century houses with matching bright colours.

It’s what you assume would happen if everyone in China developed OCD. Or if they made the collective decision to became gay.

Take Tajong Pagar Rd. An old neighbourhood once deemed fit for demolition was preserved and made into shophouses. They were all painted differently in harmonious colours and populated by cafés, spas, and boutiques selling trendy fashions and quirky home décor. The kind of shops you’re glad exist but would never really buy from.

The kind of shops you find in Montreal’s Gay Village of Toronto’s Queen St., parts of which are fabulously gay.

It’s a Chinatown of cognitive dissonances. You’re in a city dominated by the Chinese in the epicentre of Indochina and you get a Barbie shopping village.

Not to say that it’s bad. Strolling around its little coloured streets is a perfect activity in the city. You see where Singapore is trying to nurture an artistic side to its buttoned-down prudence. It knows that creative economies will lead the world this century. Fostering a cultural side that lures imaginative types is a strategic move, no different from shifting their economy from manufacturing to financial services in the 90s.

Walking around you reach the neighbourhood’s centrepiece, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, a four-story complex that results when Buddhists have heaps of money. I’ve never seen Buddha statues so expertly lit and ceilings so delicately patterned.

The entire complex is open to visitors, including the Buddhist Culture Museum on the third floor (very nicely curated), the rooftop garden, and the namesake display, a hermetically sealed room with an ornate gold shrine holding a tooth of the Buddha.

The shrine is off limits, but a camera offers a continuous video feed of the tooth on a large flat screen. Not a close-up photo of the tooth. A live camera feed.

As it is, Singapore’s Chinatown is great if you love food, shopping, and tourist refrigerator magnets. Just outside the temple is a strip of souvenir stalls selling T-shirts, postcards, and miniature cheongsams for babies.

It’s all very adorable in a planned-out, harmonious way. Not at all what you’d expect a Chinatown to be.

You are tempted to ask: how is the country so clean if its main ethnic groups – Malay, Chinese and Indian – aren’t exactly famous for their urban tidiness?

You may also wonder: why are there so many Indian men with Chinese women, but not vice-versa?

And you might ponder: with all this focus on the newest and biggest, is there any care for the past? Is there something we can call a culture?

Singapore does that. A city-state that in less than 50 years of autonomy has earned fame for exaggerated rules and practical living, for extreme cautions and consumer freedoms, for career worship and dirt-cheap pleasures.

And those are just the contrasts you see on the surface.

First blush

Singapore greets you with a brash downtown district, which like any major city, is crowded with towers competing for phallic pizzazz. It makes sure you don’t miss the Marina Bay Sands integrated resort, which dominates the harbour with its three corset-shaped towers topped with a silver surfboard.

Beside it are the two giant durian-shaped performance halls, a floating soccer stadium, and the unfinished aquarium, which looks like a robotic claw waiting for something to fall onto it.

The city is definitely in a hurry: the Sands casino is open for business and so is half the shopping mall, which is still dusty as the other half finishes construction. It wastes no time declaring its favoured demographic: Gucci and Ferrari are front and centre. Further in you’ll find stores selling $140 SGD pots of honey, $2,000 SGD tea sets and one traditional Chinese herb emporium with ginseng roots going for $38,000 SGD, complete with display case.

This is a place that likes to show what it’s got.

Mixed people

The second thing you notice is the ethnic medley, something unique to Southeast Asia: well-dressed and coiffed Chinese, Muslim Malays with their headscarves, coffee-skinned Tamils, and a generous sprinkling of white expats scurry about downtown.

It’s a harmony long ago enshrined in policy, when the nation’s founders mandated racial quotas in public housing in order to prevent ghettoes. It worked, but only to the point of avoiding hate and conflict. You rarely see a Singaporean of mixed race.

Street names and food stalls abide by this disjointed diversity. You’re walking along Lavender St. and take a left on Jalan Besar, and maybe happen upon a restaurant that lists chicken biryani, nasi goreng, and tomyam soup in the same menu.

Selectively uptight

Instructions for washing hands seen in a public restroom

Contrary to its neighbours, Singapore has lots of rules that are actually enforced. The law against chewing gum gets all the fame, but only for being unusual. In daily life, it’s hardly an issue, since gum isn’t sold anywhere.

The U-turn signs are far more revealing. Instead of telling you where you can’t make a U-turn, these signs indicate where it’s permitted. U-turns are outlawed until given amnesty.

One may also marvel at signs in public bathrooms explaining the seven steps to proper hand-washing, detailing rubbing methods so involute, they sound like advanced yoga poses.

But in the middle of all these regulations that make European nanny states seem anarchic, there are breaths of liberty. You can buy a beer just about anywhere and bring wine bottles to any street food stall.

Any drug use is strictly punished and dealing carries the death penalty. If you smoke weed outside the country and get tested positive upon your return, it’s jail time. Yet prostitution is fully legal and regulated. The city has several red-light districts, most famously the “Four Floors of Whores” at the Orchard Towers.

Shrug and bear it

Singaporeans love to complain about Singapore. They agree the rules go a bit too far. They know it’s silly to try to hard to protect people from themselves, as in the glass fence that keeps commuters from falling into the subway tracks. A few enlightened ones might even say all that extravagant shopping and dining serves as a distraction from their boring, work-centered lives.

But ask them about Lee Kuan Yew, the man who dreamed up every policy that made Singapore what it is, and it’s mostly praise.

In return for the obsessive-compulsive society, they get a safe city with fine comforts and an agonizing selection of great food. They look at their neighbours and see that there’s no perfect society, but what they were dealt is pretty damn good.

Next post: the “gritty” neighbourhoods.