One Fine Day in Singapore

If this is Wednesday, this must be Singapore.

The pace of this trip is hard to keep up with, but there's really no mistaking Singapore for anywhere else. 

The ship terminal looks like a ship, sailing.

For one thing, the preport warnings are completely different.  Eat and drink anything you like.  The streets are safe at 3 AM, even for women walking alone.  If you lose your passport, someone is more likely to chase you down to return it than to sell it. 

However, there are plenty of warnings.

You can't enter the country with gum.  Or an apple.  Or a DVD.

Or a newspaper.

No jaywalking.  No spitting.  No criticizing the government or disparaging religious or ethnic groups.  (Comedy clubs must have a tough time here.) 

And here's one I hadn't heard of:  no outraging the modesty of a woman.  This is one that's landed quite a few Western men in jail here.  Modesty of Singaporean women can be outraged pretty easily, evidently.

All of this has earned Singapore quite a reputation.  There's a popular t-shirt calling it "A Fine City" and another, with appropriate iconography, for the "I-Fine."  (In Viet Nam, it was the "I-Pho," although the soup pho is pronounced "fa.")

As it turned out, I got over the urge to chew gum pretty quickly and got down to the business of seeing the sights.  Singapore is no sterile Disneyland of a city—there are far too many construction sites for that.  You don't see much litter on the streets, but there's still underwear hanging on the balcony. 

Singapore has grown tremendously in the last 30 years.  They have reclaimed land from the sea, and they have built up as well, with a very impressive skyline.  There are a lot of very unusual buildings, like this one, a ship stranded atop three skyscrapers. 

Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Casino

There's interesting use of color, rainbow hues everywhere. 

Hindu Temple in Chinatown

Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, also Chinatown

In a multicultural society, there are many religious paths, and I saw a couple of mosques, a couple of Hindu temples, a Buddhist temple, and several Christian churches of various sorts today.  The Anglican church has stained glass windows of three prominent white leaders.  (Perhaps this explains why it's been destroyed by lightning twice?)

In this mosque, the layer of tiny dark circles under the gold dome is the bottom of bottles.  The architect collected bottles, then sold them to raise money to build the mosque.  I gather this was like getting your name on a brick, but without names.

On the other mosque, which is in Chinatown, there was a sign wishing happy lunar new year to our neighbors.

Somehow, it works.

Saints and sinners

I’ll see your Saint Ralph and raise you a Victor Hugo

We Unitarian Universalists are sometimes characterized as believing anything we want to, which is unfair and simplistic, but it is certainly true that we have an eclectic set of beliefs, gathered from religions traditions throughout the world, science, nature, direct experience, and a couple more sources that you can look up if you care to at uua.org.  Ralph Waldo Emerson figures prominently in the American history of the movement, and we fondly call him St. Ralph.

In Viet Nam, I have been introduced to a new religion called Cao Dai, the Esperanto of world religion, founded in 1926, it has between 3 and 6 million followers (depends on who’s counting), virtually all of them in Viet Nam or in communities of Vietnamese immigrants.  Yesterday, I visited the CaoDai temple in Saigon and watched the noon service.

So far on this trip, I have been visited religious sites and services for Buddhists, Moslems, Christians, and now, Caodaists.  I find it interesting and unsettling in equal parts.   As we peer into a chamber reserved for believers, or take pictures of believers engaged in the practice of their religion, I feel acutely what it means to intrude on something holy.  Like so many other things, I view religious sites through the lens of my own experiences and beliefs.  I try to understand the place of the religious practice in the lives of these believers, but I’m largely unsuccessful in putting aside my own skepticism.  Still, it’s particularly interesting to chart the course of a new religion.

Cao Dai is often presented as a made-up religion, an amalgamation of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Daoism, and social progressive thought.  If everyone believed the same thing, there would be no more wars.  Its roots, however, are in divine revelation—this all appeared to the founder in a dream.  But the world is full of cults whose founders claim divine revelation.  Which Kool-Aid is safe to drink?  When does a cult become an established religion?  (In this case, 1997, when the government of Viet Nam allowed its practice.)

Fitting in all the beliefs is no easy task.  The symbol for Cao Dai is the left eye, which is the eye of God, seeing directly to the heart.  In the creation story, there is one god, who creates the Mother Buddha, who is (like the one god) male, but in charge of the female side.  This makes equality of the sexes difficult, and in fact, the sexes are side by side, but clearly separate, in the service.  Women cannot be Pope here, either. 

Yes, there is a Pope and a Holy See.  But no competition for Benedict’s successor, I think.  There is also genuflecting and crossing oneself three times, and kneeling with touching forehead to the floor, and repetitive prayer chants and gongs.  Music carries the prayers to Heaven, where God lives, and where you will eventually live, too.

The temple is a colorful place.  The worshippers were almost all dressed in white robes, but the number of shoes by the door suggests they are not monks who live and work in the compound.  We were told the ones with white headdresses are in mourning (mourning periods are long, explaining the large numbers of mourners). 

As we left, I saw this picture of the three saints,  Sun Yat Sen, Victor Hugo, and a poet laureate of Vietnam in the 16^th century, Nguyen Binh Khiem.  No matter how I parse it, that one seems arbitrary.  I heard today at breakfast that Thomas Jefferson is also revered (of COURSE he is) and Joan of Arc in an important figure.  So it must have been hard to pick just three.

I would like to be more open to this religion.  I like the idea of finding commonalities among religions, of unifying people, of working towards love, equality, justice.  I root for the underdog in many things.  But the choreography of yesterday’s service might as well have been the Hokey Pokey.

Which is, after all, what it’s all about.

Tokyo Time

A day that starts with an earthquake and ends with a birthday party:  stay flexible and enjoy what comes your way!

I slept through the earthquake, and so did Yoshiko, but it woke Kaji up.  According to the earthquake tracker, it was a 5.1 magnitude quake north of here.  Welcome to the Pacific Rim.  

My first night, Yoshiko planned a schedule for each of my days here, in each case sticking to one subway or train line so that I can use a one-day pass for unlimited travel.  Tokyo has lots of lines which connect, but you have to pay separately for each.  Residents have the equivalent of the US EZ Pass, which lets them swipe their way through the gates.  The single day pass works much the same way.

Today was my Hibiya day.  Parks, shopping, temples and lots of walking.  Armed with a tourist booklet, Yoshiko's game plan, and a map of the system, I set off.  First stop, Tsujiki.  The plan was for the fish market, but I stopped off at a Buddhist temple on the way.  This incarnation of it was built in the 1930s, after the original was lost to fire and the replacement to earthquake.  It looks like the land , which was reclaimed from the sea, has now been reclaimed as a parking lot.  There were several tour buses there, but not enough people to fill them.

At the fish market, I wandered through the general market area for quite a while, finding out later that I had missed the fish market entirely.  By the time I figured out where it was, everyone was packing up for the day.  I couldn't figure out what was samples and what was food for bulk purchase, and did not see people helping themselves to samples, so much of the food remains a mystery to me.  One helpful vendor saw me looking at light brown, dried tablets and told me what they were, but I heard "scarabs" instead of "scallops."  I was ready to believe either one, but they were pretty clearly scallops.

I am very challenged in my sense of direction, the wrong way when I leave a store, so I had a happy time wandering the alleyways with only a vague idea of where I was.  Fortunately, Tokyo has a lot of city maps in the areas tourists frequent, so you can readjust and find a subway fairly easily.

After the fish market, I made stops by Hibiya Park, the government buildings, the Imperial Palace, the Tokyo Sky Tower, and a high end shopping mall/residence area.  I ran into three different groups from Semester at Sea, so I guess I was hitting the high points of Tokyo.

I found this statue in Hibiya Park, which is Tokyo's first "western style" park.  I guess that's why Romulus and Remus are making an appearance.

It looked like a lotto game to me.

My challenge for the day was getting some food.  Yoshiko left so much for breakfast that I wound up eating some of it for lunch, but I was determined to eat dinner out.  Yoshiko recommended Ueno, so I took the subway there.  Lots of restaurants have picture menus, and some even have plastic models of the food.  It is still pretty hard to tell what you're getting, but I am not a fussy eater.  So I picked out a restaurant and I picked out a dish, but I failed to notice that you have to first buy a ticket for your meal.  There's a vending machine at the front of the restaurant, where you choose and pay for your food.  Then you give your ticket to the proprietor, and he brings your food.  The table has hot stuff and hotter stuff on it, as well as water.  (Pickled ginger--it looked like carrots, but it was labeled ginger--and something that just had a skull and crossbones on the label.  I think the ginger was the hotter of the two.)

What I ate

I came home around 7, and the subway was packed with people.  I shoved myself in and spent the whole ride wedged between the crowd and the door.  I don't know how anyone could have gotten through the crowd to get off, and I don't think anyone did until the major transfer point.  Even then, the local was standing room only.

After you are about 6, it's bad form to tell people it's your birthday, so I wouldn't have mentioned it to Yoshiko and Kaji.  But when Kaji made my reservation for the bus, he had to give my age, so the word was out.  Because of this, Yoshiko arranged a party for my birthday eve.  She found a birthday hat with candles, and the bought a cake.  She and Kaji sang happy birthday and gave me a present of a wallet for my travels.  It was lovely to be remembered!  Then Kaji posted the pictures to my Facebook page, so all my friends back home had ample warning to send their hood wishes as well.  Happy birthday to me, my first one celebrated outside of the US.