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The Singapore Sling is a drink originated at the Raffles Hotel. Now if you want one there in a reproduction of the original bar, it will set you back $13US ($21 Singapore). It is a fruity, sweet drink that some find cloying.

Singapore works

I am continually amazed at how well things in Singapore work. Every detail seems to be thought through. Granted, some seem a bit over regulated, but the rules are for the good of all.

• No gum chewing. While you can have a few sticks for personal consumption, you are not allowed to sell it. Why the ban? Because gum carelessly discarded makes for dirty sidewalks and streets. Who likes to scrape off the yucky mass after stepping in soft gum?
• Uniformed men and women troll the streets cleaning up cigarette butts and debris. There is a fine for littering — $1000 — so there is very little trash lying around. The public trash cans are emptied regularly, so I’ve rarely seen one overflowing. (There are also fines for spitting, jaywalking and not flushing a public toilet.)
• To discourage people from driving and encourage public transportation, cars are assessed a fee for entering core areas during rush hour. How is this collected? All cars have an electronic meter that automatically deducts the fee when they enter the area. This is also how they pay parking fees — at the entrance your time is noted and at exit your fee is deducted from your electronic meter. Very efficient. No long lines waiting to pay parking fees.
• Even bathrooms have an efficiency I wish would be adopted in the US. When you lock your stall, the outside shows a red “occupied” symbol. When it’s vacant, the symbol is green. This saves women from having to stoop to see if any legs are showing underneath the door.
• There’s a $1 deposit on Metro (called the MRT) tickets. When you buy one you pay $1 more than the fare needed. When you arrive at your destination, you insert your spent ticket into the machine and it dispenses $1 back. These tickets are then reused. The MRT is clean, graffiti-free, air conditioned and on time.
• No bicycles are allowed on the downtown streets. I’m imagining this is not only for safety but for traffic flow. However, bicycle rickshaws are allowed in certain tourist sections.
• There are few horns honking on the roads, unlike India where it seemed de rigueur to honk at every opportunity. Singaporeans seem to like quiet. Even the motorcycles are quiet.

India is so varied it is hard to make a general declaration about “India is ….” Parts were strikingly beautiful, sadly filthy, touching, wrenching, perfumed, stinky, funny, poignant, etc. Most countries have some variety, but India has extreme contrasts. And the volume of people makes the ends of the continuum pronounced.

Here are a few more experiences that stood out for me, along with some more pictures, not necessarily specific to the stories:

• Using your head

A woman in a beautiful saffron-colored sari, working on a construction site, held an inch-thick woven pad on her head. A co-worker then placed a 30-pound rock on it for her to carry to the masons.

• Camel corral

(The pics here are of the City Palace in Udaipur and the Floating Palace. The latter is on an island in the middle of Pichola Lake. Udaipur has about 500,000 residents.)

I entered the Kanika Herbal Beauty Parlour in Udaipur, India not knowing what to expect. It was a 6×10 room with a large mirror atop a counter with two chairs along one wall, several shelves crammed with unrecognizable beauty products, and a sink and bench along the third wall. The fourth wall is the glassed shop front.

The Taj Mahal is on the cover of a book about places you must visit before you die. And here I am in Agra, the city of the Taj.

Our group is to visit it at 10:00, but several gals went the previous day at sunrise and said it was magnificent at that time of the morning. So my roommate and another pal decided to go for it. We arose at 6:00 and hired a tuk-tuk to take us the 5-minute ride. We took off in the dark, down pot-holed alleyways with barely enough light to see the obstacles ahead of us. The driver takes us to the head of a passageway where a few people are walking. We try to get him to take us to the front of the Taj, but he refuses, and then we see a sign that vehicles aren’t allowed past that point. We set off on foot, lighted only by my small pocket flashlight.

Some random observations and stories about my trip.

Tuk-tuk’s eye view

We get around town in the 3-wheeled, motorcycle-engined “tuk-tuk” (pronounced “took-took”) — we surmise the name came from the ever-present horn tooting. The drivers get perilously close to trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, buildings, and cows, but so far we’ve not seen any in an accident. We think they all invest in frequent brake jobs! At stops women beggars thrust their hands inside wanting money for their nearly naked babies.

I’ve sprinkled some tuk-tuk-eye’s view pics in today’s blog.

We have noticed sometimes school children wave to us as our bus passes. We feel like celebrities no one has heard of, even though we're not in a rock star-size…

India has been described by friends who've traveled here before as a land of contrasts. They were not exaggerating. I've traveled to third-world countries before and seen cardboard shanties next…