What has changed in Singapore and what hasn’t?

 

On our bus-ride in from Johor Bahru, we rode right down Bukit Timah Road into downtown, the arterial that I lived just off of during my time here in the spring of 2006.  I was able to point out to Cari the street I lived on, but barely; there was so much construction going on up and down the road, it was hard to tell where we were.  When we got here and went down into the subway, I discovered that they have added an entire new line since then, and are hard at work adding another that runs down Bukit Timah.  The new operational line, the circle line, runs from near NUS to the “Botanic” gardens, which is near where I lived.  I am so glad that this wasn’t an option at the time.  Not only did the city bus go directly where I needed to, but the last one left from the campus at about 10:30, which was perfectly fine by me.

When I was last in Singapore, the Marina Bay development was a grassy, perfectly flat field appended to downtown.  I think they had finished filling it in, and were letting it settle for a bit.  Now there is a huge, three-skyscraper sized hotel and casino, along with a mall that you can take a gondola ride through.

There are a ton of new housing towers around Singapore, and it seems like, based on our observations and conversation with my former classmates, that the recession didn’t really hit as hard, here.  They were all still in architecture, and neither they, nor their architect friends, had been laid-off or unemployed.

Thankfully, one thing that has not changed was the food at the NUS canteen.  I had been looking forward to going there for MONTHS, to see if the food was as good as I remembered it. 

It was, and even more impressively, it was the exact same price as it used to be.  $2 SGD gets you an amazing bowl of Yong Tao Foo soup, $2.30 if you want the Laksa broth (about US $1.50).  We picked out our ingredients and both enjoyed it immensely.  I shocked a professor who sat down next to us by saying how much I loved the food there.  I had to have both (to have to decide between the two would just be cruelty), and I was nearly bursting after the second bowl.