The heat is on
From the moment you exit Changi airport, the heat hits you like a wall of superheated steam and your face begins to melt like a dapper Nazi gazing at the Ark of the Covenant. The air, much like Logan Paul’s Prime Hydration, is made up of mostly water and a handful of chemicals, leaving you frantically scrambling for some kind of surface to ascend through for a breath. And the sun? Well, the second your plump and unprotected flesh is exposed to its ultra-violent rays, the cooking begins. You are, for all intents and purposes, a pork and lemongrass dumpling in a traditional Singaporean bamboo steamer. A slightly chewy, very meaty, and brothy snack for the first hungry local that smells you cooking. The last thing you will hear will be the snapping of disposable chopsticks.
…The last thing you will hear will be the snapping of disposable chopsticks…
Now, if you picked up on the rampant facetiousness of that paragraph, well done my friend. You are a shrewder individual than I. As that is honestly what I believed would be my equatorial holiday fate. A ‘truth’ I garnered from the innumerable fear-mongering posts on Trip Advisor, Facebook groups, and blogs Google served me when I queried it with ‘Just how hot is Singapore and will I die from it?’ And I believed every word, like a damn fool. Pencilling in a holiday schedule that circumvented the hottest time of the day with indoor activities and retreats back to the hotel for afternoon showers, and opening a new Amazon tab to load up my cart with insulated water bottles, battery-powered handheld fans, cooling towels and sodium tablets. Do I feel good having helped fund the Bezos – Sanchez divorce, sure. Need I have? Not really. Because I soon learned, upon stepping out into the cornflour-thickened Singapore air, that not only were these posts all varying degrees of exaggeration, but they were also insanely subjective.
So, allow me to propose a new rule: Let it be known across the land if you find yourself in a travel forum and would like to comment on the weather of a country you have visited, you must follow the internationally recognised format for written or spoken weather observations (FWOSWO – We’ll workshop a better acronym before it gains traction). The basic premise is thus: Full Name – you don’t get anonymity here, this isn’t AA; followed by your town’s mean maximum and minimum temperatures. For example ‘My Name is Phillip Elder and I come from a town with a mean maximum temperature of 31°C in summer and mean minimum temperature of 5.4°C in winter’. Furthermore, banned antecedents and adjectives will include but won’t be limited to: ‘really hot’, ‘especially humid’, and ‘particularly windy’. Commenters will be encouraged to pull out a thesaurus and give any number of alternatives a spin, with additional points awarded to those who paint us a vivid verbal picture. For example: ‘In Singapore: Day one you will rate attractions by the quality of the air conditioning, sighing heavily, moaning in pleasure upon entry, flapping your sweat-covered over-shirt like the waterfowl do – Day two you will brazenly claim to be doing ‘just fine’ with the heat, but still take great pains in following the shade line cast by oddly shaped buildings, oddly shaped trees, oddly shaped statues, and oddly shaped English tourists – But by day three, well, you will confidently stride out of your hotel room in a white t-shirt, raise a middle finger to the sun, and head to your destination with gusto. Better, right? From this, one gets a real sense of how someone from the city of Penrith, NSW genuinely coped with the Singaporean heat. You can feel confident possessing the knowledge of my town’s mean temperatures and, should you be from, say, Minnesota or Dubai, you might better be able to judge if my body’s acclimation would be similar enough to your own to justify spending $100 of your own money on Shengdu fans and Coolzone towels before your trip.
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