DAY 489: Singapore is a hodge-podge of other cultures -- Malay, Chinese, Indian, British -- all masked by a sleek façade of modernization. The city-state has often been criticized, even by its own people, of having no real Singaporean identity. While Carol's boyfriend Zac described Singapore culture as "like Malaysia, just more Chinese," Singapore struggles to find its unique place on the world culture stage, other than its regular reputation of being a boringly clean haven for multinational corporations with business in Asia.

If you look for it, Singapore does have its own unique charm. Leading the charge to maintaining Singapore identity is the tourism board with their official tourism slogan, "Uniquely Singapore." In a TV commercial I saw in Ao Nang, Thailand, a spokesman for the "Uniquely Singapore" campaign defended the criticism that Singapore boorishly gets rid of the old to make way for the new; he said something to the effect that that is what Singapore is all about -- being a dynamic, ever-changing society.

One thing in Singapore that hasn't changed is its food. Carol's food tour continued that Saturday morning when she picked me up after my quiet morning of solitude in my home at the Walkers' Inn. Being of Cantonese descent, my native Singaporean former producer took me to her roots in Chinatown, a district that was just as spotless as the rest of the city. Carol poked the holes of her parking meter tickets to display in the dashboard, and soon we were off to explore her unique Singapore.

"Have you had laksa?" Carol asked me.

"I had it already. In Penang."

"No, it's different here."

"Okay."

She bought me a bowl for me to sample -- yet another meal she graciously paid the tab for. "Oh, it is different," I commented. There was different seafood and more coconut milk.

"It's uniquely Singaporean," she said. We rounded of the local cuisine with more dishes, from ji kwee to the famous Singaporean "mixed pig organ soup."

The cleanliness of Chinatown continued to amaze me as we wandered the neighborhood, passed the vendors selling things like dried sea horses, to Yee Wei's mom's shop (to use the toilet), to the resident Sri Mariamman Hindu temple, to the Chinese Heritage Museum where Carol traced her roots by family name. A visit to the Thian Hock Keng Temple and some more samplings of Chinese delicacies like heng yen wu (a soupy almond pudding) rounded out the Chinatown tour -- which was understandably more "Chinese" than "Singaporean;" Singapore was once a haven for Chinese refugees looking for a better life.

I WENT FROM THE LEGACY OF CHINESE HISTORY to the modern world of Singapore when Carol dropped me off at the Singapore Art Museum, proudly presenting the current exhibition, the portfolio of Singapore's own Russel Wong, celebrated international fashion and celebrity photographer of Hollywood glitterati, sponsored in part by the "Uniquely Singapore" campaign. The show was one main component in the tourism board's attempt to set the Singaporean identity apart from other places.

Walking from the museum through the downtown Colonial District -- home of many English colonial buildings like the classically fancy Raffles Hotel, named after Sir Stamford Raffles, the English "founder" of Singapore in 1819 -- I was on a mission to find other things that made Singapore live up to its tourism slogan. Many times I saw that Singapore was just like most places, but just a little different. For example, Singaporean teens hung out to do tricks and stunts with their BMX bikes, only instead of doing it outside, they (wisely) did it in the air-conditioned sub-passages of the city. Air-conditioned shopping malls in Singapore were more or less the same as anywhere else, but one mall, Suntec City, boasted the world's largest Fountain of Wealth, which invited people to circle it three times with their hands in the water for good luck.

While the memorial to victims of the Japanese occupation (1942-45) was not a unique concept at all -- most southeast Asian nations had been occupied by the power-hungry Japanese in WWII and had similar monuments -- the statue of the Mer-lion was. The half-fish, half-lion statue was conjured up by the tourism board and erected in 1972 to commemorate the harbor, but most likely it was invented so that chocolate makers had a shape to mold candies into and sell to Japanese tourists. (Concurrently, tourists posing like they were holding up the statue probably seemed like a unique idea to them; but I'd seen that behavior at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.)

Perhaps the iconic structure unique to Singapore was the new Esplanade theater (picture above), just opened in 2002. Since it's inception, the tourism authority has been pushing it to be the country's architectural icon, just like France's Eiffel Tower and Australia's Sydney Opera House, featuring it prominently in brochures and ad campaigns for outsiders to start making the association. However, just like with the initial introduction of the Eiffel Tower, the construction of the Esplanade was not a favored one by locals; everyone still wonders why the government would fund a big ugly looking thing that resembled a stinky durian fruit.

Only time will tell the popularity of the Esplanade; for now it has started its run as the architectural symbol of Singapore for touristy harborside photos, which I bought into.

"IS THIS HA EUN?" I asked over a payphone to the girl on the other line.

"Yes."

"This is Erik from Jersey. Do you remember meeting me last night?" It was questionable if the Korean-American girl who had once lived in Hoboken, New Jersey was too drunk the night before to recall anything.

"Yeah," she said, sounding out of it. "I haven't gone home yet. I'm still wearing the clothes I wore last night."

Ha Eun, Budi's "crazy" ex-pat friend that I met the night before, had given me her phone number to contact her to meet up that night at the Chingay Festival 2005, yet another obvious attempt of the Singapore tourism board to set the country apart from others. Billed as the "Parade of DreamS" [sic], the made-up Chingay is Singapore's big flashy street parade marking their made-up pinnacle of the fifteen-day Chinese New Year -- although from what I saw, they merely tried to rip off Brazil's Carnaval with many costumes and even a samba-sounding soundtrack. Chingay was of course a very toned down PG version of the rambunctious Brazilian Carnaval, but at least it provided Singaporeans with, if only for one night in the year, an opportunity to "go wild" -- by jaywalking and littering.

Big cocks celebrating The Year of The Cock (Rooster) rolled down the parade route on Orchard Street, which was normally crowded with people shopping at fashionable trendy shopping malls, but was now overcrowded with mostly everyone in town. It took a while for me to find Ha Eun and her ex-pat Hamburger boyfriend -- that's Hamburg, Germany, silly -- but I eventually found them with the help of a payphone.

"Woooo!" Ha Eun cheered out to the floats going by; she was a bit more "wild" than the rest of the people, rating the people going by if they were hot or not. However, the floats got to be a bit repetitive and very corporate -- a float to promote canned abalone? -- and with our tired legs from standing so long, we just gave up and left like many others.

My "Uniquely Singapore" night ended up being a Nude one, and by that I mean with dinner and drinks at the trendy Nude restaurant nearby. Dining with the ex-pats I saw that there was nothing really uniquely Singaporean about being at Nude -- it could have been anywhere -- until I ordered a really good Singapore Sling cocktail. Ah, the Singapore Sling; a cocktail named after the country couldn't have been more Uniquely Singapore. Well, it was more fun than a durian fruit-looking opera house anyway.

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