SINGAPORE TALES

I arrived late afternoon, the familiar route from the airport into the city, its high-rise buildings catching the last of the sun: All gold and bronze. Across from the highways is Singapore Marina Bay Sands Hotel like some stranded concrete canoe on top of three thirty-story towers.

Singapore with its humidity and warm dampness to wear like a tee shirt. 

Checking into the Raffles Hotel

The Raffles Hotel gracefully restored, eye-wateringly expensive and my home for the next four days. The hotel’s rooms and public areas that reach up to the sky, all the furniture dark and old; a counter point to the white walls and corintheanan columns. The polished floorboards outside my suite stretch in to infinity.

The Raffles Hotel, home to writers like Somerset Maugham. Each night a piece of writing is left on my pillow - Impressions of this place written by other writers as if to challenge me to collect my thoughts. 

Singapore is even more modern and cleaner and more prosperous than when I was last here.

East treats west

On Friday evening after work I meet friends in China town, affluence spills out on the street colliding with awesome slimness that totters on high heals. 
East treats west.

Saturday afternoon and it is time to travel back to the airport, down the boulevard of palms and gum trees, their branches like the white limbs of some old hag. At the airport are processed with a smile and onto another plane and take off to Bombay.

Each day at the office, twenty-two floors up, I look down onto the Marina Bay all spread out, ordered and proportioned. Small tour boats move across the bay like insects on the water. One feels they must radio controlled by some higher being. The whole view is as if it is some architect’s model, polished and full of ambition.

Farewell to The Raffles Hotel