Happy Birthday Singapore

Last week Singapore celebrated its 42nd year of Independence with the usual displays of military power, social consciousness and mass heart-grabbing. National Day is a Big Thing here; it’s seized upon by the government as an occasion to raise the sense of national identity and gel together the many different races and cultures that call this island home. To the outsider it can seem a bit bewildering, and if you’re a Kiwi like me the displays of military might are a bit startling and more that a little unsettling, to say the least. I know that this is a very small country squeezed between the less stable nations of Indonesia and Malaysia, but to see the sheer scale of the defence force here is quite unnerving. Included are some photos which I’ve shamelessly lifted from the website of The Straits Times.
This year the motto was “Singapore, a city of possibilities” and flags proclaiming this have adorned the entire island. The locals see National Day as a chance to demonstrate that they are “many cultures but one nation” and over a million National Day meals were served up at special get-togethers around the country. Countless local community events were organised too. However the culmination is the huge National Day Parade and show held on August 9.
This was the first year that the National Day celebrations were held in a new location, namely Marina Bay which is the piece of water near the entrance of the Singapore River, in the heart of downtown. (The former venue, the National Stadium, is being pulled down, a fate which befalls almost any construction over 20 years old here). A massive floating stage was constructed in the Bay and the organisers cleverly used the water, the stage and a nearby bridge to put on what was by all accounts a pretty breath-taking show. The first half is always taken up with the various branches of the military demonstrating their skills and equipment, while the rest is rather like the opening ceremony at the Olympics: lots of people doing coordinated dances, spectacular costumes, hundreds of school children singing, etc etc.

This year I decided to get into the spirit of things – kids love this sort of stuff – and try to get a look at what was going on. The tickets to the show are sold months in advance by ballot and squeezing in amongst the hundreds of thousands of people who crowd around the venue just didn’t appeal to us. However I was able to score tickets to a dinner cruise organised by ANZA (Australian and New Zealand Association) on a fantastic ornate Chinese junk. We cruised around the southern tip of Singapore and arrived just outside Marina Bay with plenty of time to watch the spectacular fireworks which were detonated both from the stage and from the roofs of the three tallest buildings in the city. It was a great night, and the kids were so excited that it made me feel a bit better about the rather ridiculous price.
We couldn’t hear the music or sing along with the local favourite songs, but after an evening spent focused on a little corner of this tiny South Asian paradise, we feel a bit more like Singaporeans too.