It's a strange thing. I scoff down Sunday's breakfast and leave the house at 7:30am. I sit in a variety of moving metal cases, until I magically find myself at my hotel room, just in time for Monday's breakfast. I've slept only for about an hour. To all intents and purposes, Sunday evaporated.
Lift music permeates the public spaces at Changi Airport. Like everything in Singapore, it is spotless. I head down the spotless escalators to the spotless platforms to get on the spotless MRT. I get to the bottom, coffee in hand, only to discover the sign that promises a SG$500 fine for eating or drinking on the train. Unlike "No heavy petting", such things here are not an idle threat, so I turn around and head back up to find a bin. The Mass Rapid Transit does exactly what it says on the tin. It gets me from the airport to a 1 minute walk from my hotel in the heart of the city at a price that would barely get me to the end of the road on a bus back home.
For a Brit, the MRT map is a comforting glimpse of home. The colonial days are recalled in Admiralty, Queenstown, Commonwealth; the people who made it in Braddell, Raffles Place, Clarke Quay; the home-from-home of Dover, Somerset and Kent Ridge. The announcements on the train are made in clearly enunciated English that echoes the London Tube, including an almost verbatim "Mind The Gap". This morning, it's Monday rush hour, and my case just gets in the way. Luckily, the English sense of not causing a fuss appears to be an export to this island, and legs are bashed and toes squashed with little comeback. Opposite me, a tall lad looks even more tired than I do. He yawns, and his eyelids slide shut, until he slowly topples forward on top of the small lady in front of him. He jolts awake and offers a small apology before grabbing the hand rail. If this is the start of his week, it's going to be a long one.
At Tanah Merah, I have to switch trains, and it's at this point that I get my first reminder of the relentless humidity of Singapore. Weather forecasting is not an interesting job in this part of the world - it will be sunny in the morning, and it will rain in the afternoon. Every day, it is 30 degrees Celsius. Even the setting sun doesn't bring any respite. If you're lucky, it might dip to 27 degrees in the night. I never get bored of telling this fact: the record - record - low temperature in Singapore is 19.6 degrees. Benetton probably don't sell many jumpers here. The humidity makes sweat spring immediately to my forehead. It would surely be utter madness to attempt to run outdoors here.
Thankfully, the hotel offers a pool and a gym to negate the need to kill myself in the inhospitable climate. I arrive just in time to grab breakfast, at which point I note that the pool is right outside the restaurant windows. I will need to choose swim times carefully if I'm not to put diners off their food. My plan is to catch up on some kip before heading to the office, but something tells me that would be disastrous for my body clock. Instead, I realise that if I don't get in some exercise now, another couple of days will have passed, albeit in fast-forward, without exercise.
In the gym, the treadmills have TVs attached. Having no headphones, I skim around the channels trying to find one that I can watch without needing sound. Eventually I settle upon what appears to be a K-Pop version of Saturday Kitchen. The guests eat and drink behind a dazzling barricade of overlaid text, scrolling, static, horizontal, vertical, big, little, red, green, blue, pink, yellow. I have no idea what it says, except for the odd English word - "OK", "Wow", "Vicky". Still, everyone, presumably Vicky included, appears to be enjoying themselves enormously.
Next to me, an ageing Asian man plods away, just a little quicker than walking pace. The clock on his treadmill shows that he's already been going for 30 minutes. I hop on and strike up a good pace. I don't know if they're pumping oxygen in, but I feel extremely lively for a man working on little sleep. After 15 minutes, I promise myself to not push it, but the lad is still going. After 20 minutes, I'm ready to stop, but still he continues. It's getting personal now. I get to 5K in 26 minutes, his clock is now at 57 minutes, and while he's slowed down a little, he's still going. I give up.
And now it's all starting to kick in a litttttttttttttttzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....................
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