What Do You Think When You Hear "Singapore"?

Before I came to Singapore I knew only a couple of things: Some American got caned there a long time ago. You can’t chew gum. It’s safe and clean. No guns. Government is very strict. It’s somewhere in Asia. The weather is warm. When Brian said Singapore was becoming a legitimate option for us, I had to go look it up on a world map to see just where it was. It is lots farther south than I thought. Only 85 miles from the equator and the year round summer heat and humidity prove it. I also didn’t realize the continent of Asia was so incredibly spread out and that it actually extended below the equator. Lots of people have emailed me questions about things here so I thought I’d answer them here on the blog. Just a compilation of my experiences living here and some online research mostly on the great Singapore Government website but I used a few other sources too. Singapore is a real “Fine City” First thing to know is that Singapore is a “fine city.” That common phrase has double meaning. It’s a fine place to live and work. And any little thing you do wrong will cost you in the form of a fine. For example, the ERP system is like a the EZPass Toll Road systems back in the states. Money is automatically deducted from your card as you pass through electronic gates on the highway or in parking garages. In the states you load a balance and refill it with a credit card set to autopay when you reach a lower threshold amount. Here you stick a smart card in a device every car has on the dashboard and it transmits and deducts from your card balance. You take the card out of your device and “top it up” as you go in or out of the grocery store at a machine like an ATM. It is also used for almost all parking garages in the country so the balance goes down quickly on ours all the time. Here is where the fine city part comes into play. If you are on the highway and forgot your cash card it isn’t a huge problem. Instead of paying the regular $0.50 road toll, you will simply be mailed a ticket for $10.00 to your house. So if you know your balance is too low for your trip you can always decide. Is it worth running home to get the cash card or finding a place to top up? Or if you are really in a hurry just pay the fine. Gum The most popular/quirky thing Americans pick up on with Singapore seems to be the ban on gum. It was really odd to get to the grocery checkout stand and see rows and rows of breath mints but not a single pack of gum. Before we moved I checked online to see what the rules were. Google brought me to tons of expat websites with write ups and opinions but no government sites hit the top of the search screens and I didn’t look any farther than that. They told me that it was illegal to buy or sell gum, but people could bring a few packs in for person in home use. Wrong. Since arriving I found out that there is no such allowance made for in home use of gum. I also found that going to the government website directly and searching for what you want quickly brings any answers I need. (I can only dream of laws being so easy to find and understand in the USA.) Bringing in any gum is a crime here. I have a friend here who took his kids and their cousins to Malaysia (a 15 min drive from my house). He bought a couple boxes of multiple packs of gum. Coming back across the border he was searched. Of course they found about 500 pieces of gum. The gum was confiscated and he was ticketed. If I remember correctly it was something like a $200 ticket for the offence but I won’t swear to that. It makes me laugh a little bit when I find gum in my house. I have found it as I unpacked the contents that came from my nightstand drawer. All three purses I own had at least one half eaten pack of gum. Those super-secret pockets in my winter coat that you only think to check when you are putting your coat through the washing machine. Ants even found one package in my scripture bag. I had to take my Bible out to the front yard and leave it there until all the ants crawled off of it. (I found the ants at bedtime so left it out overnight. Of course then with the humidity the pages were a little moist and wrinkly. Ugh.) It surprised me to learn that you CAN buy gum here. The government relaxed the ban on gum to include gum for “therapeutic uses.” You may buy gum from either a pharmacist or a dentist. They must write down your name, government ID number and how much you buy for their records or face stiff fines. (See? There they go with fines again.) Therapeutic uses include things like gum that claims to strengthen the enamel (the government regulation I read details the exact amount of ingredients that must be present to qualify for the medical exemption to the gum ban) and gum like Nicorette to help people stop smoking and things like that. Even though a pack only costs just under $1.00 I find it to be too much trouble to go to a dentist to get gum and I’ve broken my gum habit when I had my tooth extracted and had to wear the classy fake tooth retainer contraption for ten months last year. So it doesn’t bother me at all anymore to not have gum. I do however appreciate knowing that I will never find gum on my shoe, never stick my hand in someone else’s gum on the bottom of a table at a restaurant or have to see it on a wall. The only reports I can get on the reason for the gum ban was the cost and expense of gum clean up. From many, many, many internet sources I did find that the original gum ban was conceived as a response to the cost of cleanup. Most Singaporeans live in government housing called HDB, Housing Development Buildings. They are nice enough places, but the population density here is so extreme that the buildings even in the suburbs near us are often over 20 stories tall and can have multiple wings to house hundreds of families. With all those people crammed together, just a few gum littering folks can cause big problems. The streets and buildings are kept really clean, but gum was getting stuck and breaking the street cleaning machines. People were poking it in mail slots, elevator buttons and inside keyholes in the HDBs. It was also being found on bus benches, public tables and chairs, etc. The last straw for the ban is reportedly in 1987 when the public train system began operating. Public vandals began putting gum on the door sensors of the MRT trains causing disruption of the train service and repairs. In the busy train stations it was difficult to find the culprits. That finally lead to the ban. And there it sat for twelve years until the United States and Singapore began talking about free trade between the two nations in 1999. The gum company Wrigley helped push a deal through that relaxed the standards to include the “therapeutic uses” I mentioned above. According to the government website fines for your first conviction is a fine not to exceed $100,000 or imprisonment not to exceed two years or both.