The Stark Reality of Living in Singapore

Crowds crowds crowds...how I hate them. But they are an inevitable reality in Singapore. Today my family decided to head out to explore the new Ang Mo Kio hub. Parking proved to be a nightmare. We took 15min to enter the underground carpark and another 10 min to decide that it was IMPOSSIBLE to find a parking spot. As a matter of fact, the number of parking places available was -11. This is because a lot of people decided to park illegally, ignoring the threats of having their cars towed away.

Since the wait for a parking spot was daunting, we gave up and proceeded to a nearby multistorey lot. The bottom three floors were COMPLETELY full, not to mention that the person in the car behind us was ungraciously tooting his horn and revving his engine. OK so you drive a Honda Civic VTI...we all know you can go fast...but is there a need to rush when you are in this squeezy carpark full with 90 degree turns and a lot of other waiting cars? We eventually parked on the fifth floor and discovered that there was no elevator!!!You must understand that my parents are really old and five levels is too strenuous a climb for both of them. Why doesn't the government then install an elevator? They haven't because it is stipulated that parking lots ABOVE five levels WILL have an elevator...and this one just happens to have five levels. What's worse, when we reached the overpass, we found that both the escalators were not working. Luckily there was a pedestrian crossing or else my parents would have made a lot of noise.

I will try not to go out in the weekend, if I have to. The place was flooded with people. Now there's a stark reality of living on a tiny island with over 4million people. The food court was crowded even at 9pm and it took forever to find a seat. My mum even got screamed at by an old woman who wanted to chope the seat for her daughter. After dinner (which was overpriced and bad), we bought some pastries at a nearby bakery (seriously $1.30 for some charsiew biscuit is a rip off, like eating gold. I don't know why people are still buying it as though it costs $0.50). I think business is good because the economy is good ....oh well.

By the time we decided to take a walk around, shops were closing so ALL the people moved to the giant "carrefour-like" NTUC below. It was difficult to navigate a path when wheeling a trolley and my mum soon gave up buying her oranges because the lines were so long at every counter. We decided that it is perhaps worth it to buy stuff at Cold Storage in order to avoid the long lines and the crowds of people. I am surprised that my mum made this decision because she usually wants to get the most value-for-money deal. I guess there is some marginal utility derived from the shopping environment and this NTUC has just exceeded her tolerable crowd limit. This is why some people would rather shop at Target rather than at Walmart.