I like singapore too.. oh.. so very neat !!

Very clean and safe. I went to merlion at 11.30 at night me and my friend, two girl walk at night its just fine.

Even i do feel the "cold" side of singapore.. like if i were there i feel like i am working instead of being tourist… also the people are not very easy to smile.. not as friendly as in Indonesia or Thailand…

well.. always like that city… somehow…

Basically they're civilized in SG and you Indonesians are not. There are good and bad things about both sides of the coin. I can be very mean about Jakarta, but at least one feels alive there. OTOH, it's relaxing to be able to walk down the street and feel safe about it in SG.

Talkingcock.com is a pretty good website too.

Turning a bunch of Huaqiao into polite people and teaching Tamils to bathe – at the societal level is truly a massive achievement – just not sure if this brave experiment can withstand the momentum of History.

Re Walking: Couldn't agree  more! Given that walking around cities is also a function of climate, I've gotta recommend Bangkok in December/January – During these two months the climate is actually very pleasant – it's not raining and temperatures can get as low as the high teens early in the morning. Right now, everybody has done the pulang kampung thing for New Year and vehicular pollution and dust levels are down too. Bliss.

Re obedience training Overseas Chinese: As soon as you let the women off the leash, birth rates plummet. Obviously this goes for all races. I don't think this particularly worries old Harry as it gives him an excuse to keep importing mainlanders – and he thinks he can pick and choose the cream of the crop. But native born Chinese demographic death spiral, the gusto with which the Mats and Bintis reproduce, and the mass importation of mainlanders can't help but lower the general tone in years to come.

There's a definite hierarchy with Chinese. Mainlanders look down on everyone else (and are laughed at behind their backs for their  presumption), HK'ers and SG'ers are chalk and cheese, but can agree that Malaysian Chinese are country cousins, and everyone but everyone agrees that Indonesian Chinese are the most unreconstructed farm boy yokels (whether have made it rich or not). The Malaysian Chinese are often more Chinese than the Chinese – having preserved more traditions – which is kind of cute. Thai Chinese are a special case – there are multiple degrees and types of assimilation in Thailand, but there's no doubt that the Chinese here are most well integrated and accepted (largely due to no huge religious divide, obviously). I always say that the glory of Thai culture is that it has made Chinese both graceful and polite – a rare and wonderful thing. The downside is it made them even more ghost-ridden and superstitious, but that's a small price to pay for good manners and great Chinese Thai cuisine.

Malls: Speaking from an Australian perspective, malls in SG are great, malls in Australia are not. This is related to some subtle demographics issues which are not usually alluded to in polite conversation, but since I'm not polite, here we go: In Australia (and certainly US, too) most malls are down market and attract substantial numbers of the great unwashed. The wealthy + those who through snobbery or inclination would wish to not hang out with the smellies tend to shop in boutiques and rather specialised stores – often *not* located in malls or in CBDs. Quirkiness, individuality, etc. are the order of the day and help to constitute some kind of an unspoken language of signs which the cognoscenti can recognise in each other while the herd are walking out of department store with xboxes under their arms.

Another interesting example of this is that in Australia nobody with upper middle class or with any pretensions to fashionability would be caught dead in a Starbucks – it's just way too common, let alone any issues with quality of the coffee. It has to be an owner managed espresso bar to be acceptable. This is totally the opposite of the situation in Asia – where Starbucks is more in the Coffee milkshake / Status affirming / Woohoo I've fallen into a rerun of Friends although outside it's actually Surabaya illusion business – as opposed to a store which sells Coffee.

Well, Malls in SG ain't like that, are they? :P

hary said:

Singapore is extremely strerile. Clean, safe and boring. Don't forget how expensive it is. Worst of all, they all assume  Indonesian women, my poor wife included, is a maid… and treat her accordingly. They are not going to get their hands on my hard earned dollars.

I fail to see the attraction of Sentosa, where even the trees have been numbered and planted in str8 rows, and the musical fountain which is a rip off from Vegas. Is anything real and not man made and controlled on that little island?

The only attractive thing for me is their hawker centres with their variety of food. Everything else is so plastic and fake.   

Perhaps you love the cleanliness and the orderliness in Singapore, not sure you actually like Singapore.

My opinion only. 

… went there and none of them seemed consider me as maid.. hehe.. infact some woman that i meet at orchad said they really love my skin.. (hahahah !!!) and they are chinese.

Its expensive.. but the service is good. I wont mind paying more for clean and safe city to be honest.

Maybe everything so plastic and fake… but too much of everything like in indonesia and thailand sometime is a boooring too

i am not really really like.. just like it thats all.. not really..you know much much more…. than my beautifull swampie jungle..

@Patung:

I'll admit to having stood in a DPS check-in line in Brisbane and looked around myself in horror wondering 'where do these people actually live?' – some frightful stuff heads up to Kuta.

The last two times I was in Bali I noticed that around 2030-2100, some tour buses full of be-jilbabed East Javanese Kampung folk on holidays drove slowly along Jl. Pantai so that the occupants could get a good gawk at the semi-naked bush pigs out for their evening promenade. If it looked Hogarthian to me, one can only wonder what Marhaen and his good wife made of it.

Chinese can take any religion and turn it into a travesty which:

1) ensures wealth

2) placates ancestors

3) sees off troublesome ghosts

and bears little relation to the supposed deeper meaning of said religion.

The only way to make Chinese breed again would be to propagate a meme in which the ancestors were most displeased about the lack fertility.

The great strength of Chinese Civ is that they have survived the death of their gods. Presumably it's much easier in cases of the non-Semitic religions.

Dover Beach -> Kuta Beach in 160 years.

Have you read 'Spengler' over at Asia Times?

Possibly a bit of ergot contaminates Spengler's matzoh balls from time to time and sends him off into woop woop land where he has all kinds of weird Essene visions, but on the whole I find him stimulating even when he's reading far too much into what Ratzinger ate for breakfast.

Knowing Chinese like I do, I can't see much coming of house churches. Spengler also has a thing about Christianity in Africa. The idea of some sub-saharan African evangelical push back against Islam is interesting, but I'd be putting my money on the Tuaregs and friends – as much because of the political incorrect 'g' factor issue as anything else.

Mencius is teh bomb.