I had to take a 2 week work trip to Singapore and Hong Kong and took some pictures while I was there.

The flight from New York to Hong Kong went over Greenland and the arctic ocean so I took the opportunity to get some pictures of glaciers and the pack ice around the North Pole.

Singapore itself is a heavily urbanized island, much like Manhattan except it’s hot and humid in a way that only a place a stone’s throw from the equator can be and it is spotlessly clean. English is the primary language here and almost all of the stores and restaurants are familiar American brands. Most of this can be attributed to Singapore’s history as a British colony inhabited by an international mix of immigrants from China, Malaysia, and India, and its strategic location at a crossroads of the world’s shipping lanes. The good business climate here has resulted in many major international companies relocating their far-east headquarters to Singapore, headquarters that were likely located in Hong Kong before that city’s handover to China.

While in Singapore I managed to get some time out for sightseeing in the village of Pulau Ubin, a small island between Singapore and Malaysia. Most of the island is maintained as a national park and it can be reached via bumboats, small wooden motorboats that costs $2.50 each way leave whenever there are 12 willing passengers. The island is criss-crossed with mountain bike trails and most of the shops in the village rent bicycles ($2 per day), a very different atmosphere from the high prices and polish in the rest of Singapore.

Although Hong Kong was previously the undisputed business capitol of the far east and shares British colonial heritage with Singapore it is a very different place. English is spoken here but it is a secondary language. The central parts of the city are endless mazes of multi-story shopping malls, all with the same high-end stores, this is where mainland China’s rapidly growing middle-class comes to shop. The rest of the city consists of block after block of apartment towers, again much like New York City, except unlike Singapore it includes New York’s grittiness. The entire time I was in Hong Kong it was raining or foggy, this combined with the city lights lent the scenery an interesting atmosphere.

Tags: Cities, Aerial