singapore, today is your day. for today, you turn thirty-nine years old. today i wear red and white for you as befits a patriotic mentality. and today i will join thousands upon thousands more in a huge grandstand to watch fireworks and people in kilts. perhaps even cheerleaders. because that’s what you get on your birthday, singapore. multinational celebratory antics.
singapore, i am realizing, is not very asian of a city. it’s got such a diverse population and they try so hard to be westernized that the whole sense of a different culture’s traditions have fallen away. like flak from curry.
on the other hand, as asian cities go, singapore has a serious leg up on the border town of johor in malaysia. shit that place was shitty. so dirty and smelly and full of leering men after the cleanliness of singapore. singapore used to be dirty, mind you. but then ministers make little off-hand comments like, ‘let’s hire an otter to be our litter mascot and create huge advertising campaigns about keeping our city clean,’ or ‘maybe in 10 years we could have a river which is the proper river color instead of this putrid yellow color.’ and the thing is, see, that these things work here. when they decide to make improvements, oh boy howdy do they make them. i’m pretty damn sure that you couldn’t get the majority of americans to participate in a keep our country litter free movement. dirty hippies.
which is not to say that i like singapore better than america. because i don’t. singapore, in my mind, is not the kind of place that i would want to live. it’s too…hmmm. well maybe just because it’s a big city and i don’t like big cities.
um, happy birthday singapore!
p.s. crap. singapore’s birthday is actually monday, august 9th. which is the day i am currently in here in singapore. it’s noon in fact. well. heh. stupid time west coast zone. whatever.
Dumbass,
Did it ever occur to you that a good old cane beating now and then does wonders when it comes to keeping a country clean?
Jesus you are naive.
Cane beatings pale in comparison to a disappointed, sobbing Native American staring at litter.
We had a girl from Singapore in our dorm. She was pretty Westernized, and she chewed gum. Also, she had a typical 1954-era American name, and was cute as can be.
they gave me a fun pack at that national day parade! it’s full of fuckloads of fun.
plus, the people next to me left a bag of trash under their bench seats and no one caned them. it was amazing. perhaps even unprecedented in all 39 years of history.
happy birthday, singapore. I’ll always remember the time we drove all the way to arizona in one night, just for kicks. wacky. you have been a #1 friend.