That’s what’s for breakfast.

Boom. Singaporean breakfast, served up at Freshly Baked by Le Bijoux.

Check out my review of the place here ‘cause that’s not what this post is about.  Not in particular anyway.

What I intend to talk about is a little different than your traditional blog about food. So let’s see how this goes.

Singaporeans take great pride in their foods, but in a weird way I haven’t seen before. At least in my experience when someone says their culture takes pride in their food, you would normally associate this with a hunched over grandmother working in the kitchen all day serving up massive portions of food for every person who is even remotely connected to the family.

But in Singapore the culture is remarkably almost exclusively an eat-out society. Meaning for breakfast, lunch and dinner the average family has food made elsewhere besides their kitchen. It’s pretty obvious to any observer here in Singapore because every other shop or building is a restaurant and there are so very few grocery stores on the island.

Even when I was looking for room shares, there was a substantial amount of rooms that explicitly stated you aren’t allowed to cook in them.

Going out to eat (Or getting take out, as one of the first things you are asked at the counter of any restaurant is “Eat in? Or take out?”) is a very streamlined process. There are two types of places to eat.

The first is a “hawker” market, where generally there are a bunch of tables and chairs set up inside a large circle of food stations. Here you can go to anyone of these stations, order your food and then go sit down and they will deliver your food to your table. Eat all you want then get up and leave, they clear your table after you leave and the meal itself is generally under $5 SGD. That’s a pretty good freaking deal no matter where you are. And the food is good, actually really good and seeing as at every hawker market there are a ton of shops with a ton of different food items, you’d have to be inept to not find something you find palatable.

The second place to eat is a traditional restaurant, except here outside dining is pretty much standard. Although the restaurants cost a bit more than the hawker markets, you do have the option to eat in aircon. And they generally have smaller portions than the hawker stands do so you can get more than one dish to enjoy a whole bunch of flavors.

I personally have eaten out every day I have been here. (Except that one buffet debacle.) And I have not once had a bad meal, and considering that I really don’t know what I’m ordering 90% of the time that’s a pretty good success rate.

Heat

First thing I thing that comes to mind when I try to verbalize what it is that defines Singapore is heat.

That’s right, heat. Getting off the airplane is all fine and dandy, you have nice aircon (that’s the colloquial term for air conditioning, yes air conditioning here is so important and used SO often in everyday speech that Sinaporeans have to abbreviate it) right in the lobby and by baggage claim. And then you walk outside and you get hit with a wall of humidity.

I’ve been to humid places before, but this is like walking in the rain humidity. Walking in the rain if the sun was out and blasting every square inch of your un-shaded body with what I can only assume is a toned down version of Superman’s laser vision.

It’s like the hottest day in NJ, but every day of the year. That’s because Singapore rests 200km (that’s about 120 or so miles, they use the metric system here) above the equator.

See right there, wish I had seen that before I left, then I would have packed some sunscreen. Or a hat.

Another tricky thing here that I’m slowly learning is that you’re going to get sunburned, learn to deal with it. I wear long khaki pants and a long sleeve button down shirt to work every day, only stay out in the sun for at most 10 minutes at a time (you learn to love the shade and the MRT or subway) and still I have god awful sunburn on my back and shoulders. I’m as pale as they come so I’m not too surprised about sunburn in general, just the fact that it can bake me through my shirt.

On the bright side I’ve only been here for a week now and I am almost completely used to the heat, or atleast I have learned ways to stay out of its ways. Trick is to learn from the locals. For the first two days I was amazed that no one in Singapore was sweating, and I was walking around looking like a gang of six year olds had attacked me with super soakers. But after a lot of trial and error I found out the system.

1)      To stay in the shade when you need to walk outside.

2)      Take the subway

3)      Always find a reason to go inside a store.

The shade seems obvious but the trick is simple there are shaded walkways on each side of the road next to the shops, these all have fans going full blast.

Explaining the subway is a little trickier. While normally you wouldn’t think the subway is a great place to cool off you would be wrong. The subway or MRT in Singapore is the best system of public transport I have ever seen, plain and simple. There are stops everywhere. And it’s not confusing to use at all, everything is in English (actually everything here is in English, normally anything government related is translated into the four major languages here and English in one of them) and the system is really easy to get, as long as you can read (it’s also color coded, directed with arrows and they even have verbal cues in all four languages… yeah it’s hard to not know where to go)

That last one is a mixed bag because sometimes you just need a break from the sun (For me it’s more of an issue that I might burst into flames like a pasty vampire). If you get lucky you can get into one of the many mixed shopping centers, which have restaurants and shops galore and not look like a total fool while you cool off. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case and sometimes you get stuck wandering around like a fool in a hawker market. A Hawker market is a place where you can go to get extremely delicious food for outrageously low prices (normally a good price is anything below $5 SGD which is about $4 US). So you look kinda weird sweating and out of breath, and not buying any food.

I’m sure there are better ways to avoid the heat, but when you need to wear business casual clothes there’s not really too many options out there. Nothing better than going to an unknown climate completely unprepared, but then again learn from our mistakes. Our sweaty, sunburned mistakes.