The last time I visited Singapore was in 1986 as a student in Shah Alam; a year before I left for Texas for further studies.
The impression I got then was that Singapore was a foreign country that is clean and modern ~ different from and more advanced than Malaysia.
At that time I was with three other fellow students; one was a resident of Johor Baharu, another a Sarawakian and the third was unidentified.
We stayed a night or two at his house in JB and then took a bus across the causeway to Singapore.
As soon as we crossed the causeway, I remembered that the landscape and infrastructure were distinctively different.
When we boarded a bus, we had to pay coins into an auto collect machine (no bus conductor). It was 1986, and boy, was I impressed!
So, in December 2010 (24 years later) my wife and I together with Michael Chin and his wife Damein, are back in Singapore.
After all those years, it is still the clean and sophisticated Singapore that I knew of from the previous visit. And it did not stop there!
Singapore has actually become so advanced that it is one of the world's top places to work, live and play.
We landed at Changi Airport and it was a very quick walk through the arrival gate, through immigration, through the luggage collection place, and finally to the taxi area, that I did not even remember how Changi looked like!
I only remembered a cramped, busy and dimly lit area where we took a taxi ride to downtown as fast and as cheap as we could.
We stayed three days and two nights in Singapore. After that we took a bus to Melaka.
NOTE: THIS THREE DAYS, TWO NIGHTS-TOUR COSTS RM1,500 PER PERSON.
