Ah, Singapore. Everyone told me how boring and expensive you were, and I found you to be neither. (Well, OK, you are a bit expensive. I'm just clearly brainwashed from living in The Most Expensive City Ever, aka San Francisco.) 

I arrived on a flight to The Most Beautiful Airport in the World, aka Changi International on a flight on The World's Best Airline (Singapore Air) from Hanoi. Can I just take a minute here to talk about one thing that upsets me (yes, only one right now) and that is how basically every airport in the WORLD is nicer than JFK. Here we have people arriving from all over the planet, many of them for the very first time to visit the United States, land of the free and the brave, one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world, and our introduction to the U.S. is: "It sucks here." Yes, there are some terminals at JFK that are nicer than others, but when I flew to NYC last January, I arrived at Terminal 7, wandered through rundown dirty hallways trying to find a bathroom before waiting on the absurdly cold, absurdly unsheltered LIRR platform to head into the city. Everything looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the '70s, although the big bathroom was closed for cleaning. I finally found another tiny bathroom past baggage claim that had two toilets blocked off for cleaning, surly airport worker ladies shouting at everyone and each other, all manner of toilet paper and other trash all over the floor, and of course a queue of women waiting to use the one available toilet. One German woman came out of the lone toilet with a look of fear in her eyes and I wanted to say, "Yes, I feel you. I have been to the airports at Hamburg and Munich and Frankfurt. I get it. It will be OK. The rest of the country isn't like this. Just the subway. And the streets of New York City before trash day. But I promise, it gets better. Kind of."

Ah, Singapore. Where the temperature is a constant humid 85 degrees, where a gentle breeze is always blowing, where the traffic hums along and the sidewalks gleam and the living is easy. 

This has been a moment of calm in my SE Asia journey, a little moment to rest and recuperate, to stock up on a few things (hello, regular toothpaste!) and to actually have a minute to reflect and think.

When I first mentioned to people I was excited about going to Singapore, the normal reaction I got was one of surprise. "Singapore? Why do you want to go to Singapore?"

The list of things wrong with Singapore were as follows: it's expensive, boring, uptight, soulless, and really expensive.

And you know, maybe it is all those things. But if soulless means I can cross the street without fearing I'll be run over by a moto, and boring means I'm not clutching my purse afraid it's going to be ripped off me by a motothief, well, then a few days of "boring" and "soul less" is exactly what I need. If uptight means there's an efficient, air-conditioned subway networking the entire city, I'll take it. And if it means spending a little bit more to indulge in it, I am happy to open my wallet.