Singapore - Chinatown

After the return from Palau Ubin, I go to one of the many Chinatown health spas for a massage and reflexology. We are still feeling the effects of jet lag and the humid heat.

Before dinner we walk through the narrow streets of bustling, old Chinatown where we join a tour about early Chinese Singaporeans – how they arrived in ships not unlike the slave ships that came to the US, however, these people came voluntarily in search of a new life. Many did not make it. They had low paying coolie jobs – removing “night waste” from homes before there were toilets, pulling rickshaws and of course, for women prostitution. We saw the tiny “shop houses” – those two stories above the tiny shops that sometimes housed up to 100 people when they first arrived in Singapore!