Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.
I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…
The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.
Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.