The kids were up a bit late this morning. I looked at my watch and saw that it was 7:30. Then I realised that I hadn’t set my watch to Singapore time and it was really only 5:30. Doh!
Had breakfast at the hotel. There was an old fellow manning the egg station who turned out to be the head chef from what we could gather. The kids dubbed him “Cookie Man.”
After breakfast we walked from the hotel to the City Hall MRT station (about 3-5 minutes) to catch a train out to Tampines, which is out near the Airport. There are about 11 stops on the way so we should get a fair sort of a look at the country.
The public transport system in this city is quite impressive and seems to work quite efficiently. All the ticket booths are automated. Basically you just tap where you want to end up on a map of all the lines, tap another screen with how many tickets you want, it tells you how much money to insert and then spits out a small plastic (about the size of a credit card) computer chipped ticket. You then swipe that against a sensor to gain access to the platform through a set of gates. Once you get where you are going you swipe the ticket against another sensor and it lets you out. Bloody Brilliant and pretty much fool-proof, which is a good thing.
The first thing that struck me as we travelled on the train was the amount of high rise apartment buildings, mostly clumped together in complexes of 6 or more buildings. Most of them have parks, playgrounds and walking/biking tracks throughout the complexes, some have swimming pools, barbeque areas and community halls. Of the 4½ million people who live in this city, I reckon maybe 500 000 of them live at ground level. The other 4 million live at least 8 metres off the pavement.
The other thing that struck me was the cleanliness of the place. Very rarely did we see a piece of rubbish laying on the ground.
