I spotted them first. Two women at the edge of the rooftop, where the buildings of Colombo met the ocean, wrapping up their drinks, getting ready to leave. I nudged Nilan and we hurried over with our beers, asking if we could take their seats as they were heading out. “Yes of course,” they said cheerfully. “Hope you have more drinks. Please enjoy.”
They were Singaporean. I told them I’d always wanted to visit. They asked what I did and before I could answer Nilan jumped in and said I ran an education company that helps people improve their English. “That’s awesome,” they said, and asked if I was going for startup work. “Yes, hopefully,” I said, “but I’m not sure. I’ve never been overseas before.”
They shared advice and places to check out, but with the ocean wind and the music coming up from below I could only nod, catching maybe half of what they said. It didn’t matter. About an hour before this conversation I had told Nilan about my plans to visit Singapore soon. Nilan was someone I had bumped into randomly at a coffee shop a couple of months earlier and turned friends with. And now here we were, talking to two Singaporeans on a rooftop in Colombo. I wasn’t sure if it was confirmation bias or the universe just deciding to be obvious about something. Either way I booked the ticket nine days later. I was twenty one, and it would be my first time leaving the country, alone.
I wasn’t sure whether to call Singapore a work trip or a life trip. It gave me both.
I must have eaten so many dishes without remembering their names, visited so many places without knowing their history or story. I spoke to strangers who shared recommendations for food, places to visit, told me about their lives, but I ironically forgot to ask what their names were most of the time. I was looking for spontaneity. Sudden things that I would recall for the rest of my life. Things I’ll look back and think of one day while playing Radiohead in the background to make it nostalgic. It was too much to remember each and every bit of what happened, and some moments were too good or too crazy to write about here. What I decided to jot down were the things that felt significant, life wise. Most of these observations and stories were written on bus and MRT rides, in the little minutes I had while eating, in between meetings, or just before I went to sleep. I’ve tried to put them together in order as much as possible. The business meetings and the work I did in Singapore, that’ll probably come another time.
“Thanks machan,” I told the young Uber driver, grabbed my two backpacks out of the car and headed into the departure terminal. I’ve never had much reason to own a suitcase.
At the departure gate, after checking in, clearing immigration and security, I found a seat and watched. A child was crying somewhere nearby. A group of kids were taking turns messing with an announcement mic in the corner while the lady in the blue Sri Lanka Airlines saree checking tickets kept telling them to “please go to the back of the line.” A woman in the queue was holding a clear bag, tickets visible, with a bright red Singaporean passport facing up. Damn, that looks like it holds some power, I thought. The air felt calm. I had expected to be nervous, it being my first time leaving the country and all, but something about all the local travelling I’d done over the years seemed to have worn the nerves down. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
The plane felt like an air-conditioned bus from Colombo to Galle, which I suppose is all a plane really is at its core. The man next to me was in a yellow shirt. “Tour ekak da yanne?” he asked, are you going on a tour? “Ow, first time,” I said. He asked how long. Two weeks. He seemed surprised when he heard the duration of stay and I wondered why. We got talking. He was in the textile trade, bringing clothes in from Bangkok to sell here. I asked how business was. “It’s alright,” he said, “but slow, for everyone these days.” At some point the captain came on the speaker. “My name is Ravishan,” he said, and the rest got swallowed by our conversation. Something about that announcement sent a brief set of goosebumps down my spine. I’d watched Flight with Denzel Washington not too long ago, and didn’t want to think about it.
I’m finally on an actual runway, I thought to myself. In startups, runway means how long you have before you run out of money. This was a different kind. The plane moved and lifted, and I looked out the window like a kid seeing candy for the first time, the tiny lights of Colombo shrinking from miles up.
Sleep deprivation hit like a wall as I walked through the jet bridge into Changi airport, still adjusting to the brightness and the colors of everything.
I watched the person in front of me at the automated passport gates and copied what they did. Since Sri Lankans had visa on arrival I saw the majority of the crowd going through with ease. I tried scanning my passport a couple of times but the machine didn’t respond the same way it did for the others.
“Name,” the officer in front of me said after asking for my passport. “Dilina Prabhath Yapa Bandara.” “How long are you staying.” “Fourteen days.” “Why are you here.” “For tourism,” I said, knowing that was probably wrong English. He asked me to name five touristy places, which caught me off guard. I blurted out Merlion, Universal Studios, and threw in a few names of the events I was attending. The questions kept coming until he finally said, “Go with my colleague.”
By then everyone from my flight had already scanned through and disappeared into the other side of the airport. I was the only one left standing there.
I sat between two other people on a row of chairs, each of us waiting to be called. When my name came I went to a counter where a second officer, who was Chinese, spoke with an accent I had to concentrate to follow. He asked the same questions as before, but this time he also asked what I did. “I’m a director of a company in Sri Lanka,” I said, and handed over my printed copies of everything, my accommodation booking, ticket, passport, and business registration. He went through them carefully while typing on his screen. I stood there and looked around, taking in Changi out of curiosity rather than anxiety, which surprised me.
“You only come here for holiday,” he said finally, eye to eye, and handed everything back. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, whether it was a warning or a clearance, but I thanked him, wished him a good day, he wished me one back, and I walked through.
I was quite bummed out by the situation, not sure whether to consider it a bad first impression. But someone once told me to have the memory of a goldfish. I moved on.
Shan was already at Changi waiting for me, my friend who I had met a couple of times, once online and once in person. We strolled through what felt like a utopian airport, took train rides, and toured through malls and buildings that seemed to repeat themselves endlessly. Gucci. Louis Vuitton. I wasn’t fully sure where I was going or the names of places as I was still taking everything in. At Marina Bay Sands I ran to the Apple Store like a kid, with a globe-like structure sitting in the water nearby. I thought about how much Steve Jobs had obsessed over the design of the first Apple Stores when I read his biography.
At some point Shan made me figure out how to move around the MRT on my own, asking me what next when I was mid-journey. It was a good lesson, learning how to move through a new city in a day, without the privilege of cheap Ubers like back home.
Hostel check-in was at 3pm in Lavender, where I was crashing for the first couple of days. When I’d first heard the word I thought it sounded like an air freshener. I had to walk through quiet streets with a mix of old shophouses and newer buildings to get there.
I napped for thirty minutes and headed back out to Orchard. I took the MRT halfway and wasn’t sure how to use the bus for the rest, so I walked. It took forty minutes, past mall after mall, Gucci again, Louis Vuitton again, H&M, until I couldn’t tell them apart anymore. But there was something about seeing those stores at the corner of every street the way you’d see Fashion Bug or Cool Planet back home.
Being in a foreign city alone, not entirely sure where I was going, and worrying whether my card would work or get declined, brought back something specific. It reminded me of the feeling of first moving to Colombo, sleeping under a desk at a co-working space for eight months with seven identical black t-shirts and no plan except to keep building. Same feeling, different city.
I was supposed to meet a Sri Lankan founder at Ion Orchard at 8pm. Instead I got lost inside the mall and spent forty more minutes texting him trying to find an exit. We eventually changed to meet at a Shake Shack, where my only objective at that point was to find a way out. Over fries and a Fanta float, basically Fanta with ice cream, I heard about his experience going through Antler and what he was figuring out now for his company. I took my first double decker bus home and slept like a baby in my tiny corner dorm bed, having walked close to 20km on foot that day.
It was early morning when I walked into my first ever Starbucks. “Espresso tall,” I said.
The barista looked confused. “Sir, espresso is a shot. Do you want a single or a double.”
“Sorry, single,” I said, shakily. The irony being that I drink espresso almost every single day back in Sri Lanka. Something about being in a foreign Starbucks made me forget everything I knew.
I rushed to grab a corner table to catch up on work I had missed out on with my team at JustEnglish. From across the room the barista called me. I didn’t hear him so I went back to the counter. My card hadn’t gone through. My heart sank for a second, the specific fear of being in another country with a blocked card and no way to call the bank back home. It turned out I just needed to select the currency and confirm on the screen. I sat down and got back to work.
A couple of days in I overheard the girl working at the hostel speaking Sinhala over the phone. I was pretty sure she was Sri Lankan but hadn’t found the right moment to say anything. Finally I decided to talk to her. “Oya Sri Lankawen neda?” — are you from Sri Lanka? Her face turned. She was shocked. She said she thought I was American because of my accent, but she’d had her suspicions because of my Waves slippers, which were a Sri Lankan brand. She had moved to Singapore to do her degree in hospitality, had been working at the hostel for almost a year and a half, and was heading back soon. The living costs were crazy, she said, and she wanted better opportunity back home. She had been sending money to her parents the whole time. The conversation went on and I learned more about her life. She was the first Sri Lankan I bumped into unplanned in Singapore, and something about sitting there listening to her made me realize I had been doing this the whole trip without thinking about it, sitting down with strangers, asking about their lives, and being genuinely interested in learning more about their life.
Walking down the street one morning I overheard an American talking to a Singaporean. A friend of his was selling something, I didn’t catch what. “How much,” the other person asked. “800k,” he said, and they kept walking. Damn, that’s a lot of money, I thought, and kept walking too.
At the MRT station I got stopped. I had picked up a duffle bag at a shop a couple of days in and a woman officer asked me to open it and show her what was inside. “Clothes,” I said, smiling. She shone her phone flash in, checked my backpack too, and waved me through. A friend had once told me the story of a Sri Lankan who had overstayed their visa by six months and I wondered briefly if that was why I was being checked. I wasn’t sure if it was true though. I brushed it off.
I found the North Bridge Road Market and Food Centre near the hostel one afternoon. Generally the malls were young and polished, all glass and branded stores and people who looked like they were going somewhere. Here it was old and worn down in the best way, with elderly people in wheelchairs and on crutches, some sitting bent over their drinks and taking their time. The display boards of the hawker shops looked old. It was a different world from the malls.
After four days in Lavender I moved to a hostel in Chinatown.
Something which bothered me when I first got here was that people don’t smile when you catch their eye on the street. Except the girl at the noodles shop when I was in Chinatown who probably wanted to make a sale.
I stumbled into Jazz at the Esplanade one evening, the kind of thing you find by accident and end up staying for. Between songs the lead singer said something that stuck. “You don’t have to look for love,” she said. “Love comes from within.” I stood there for a moment with that.
I was scrolling through YouTube one evening when a video about laksa came up. I realized I had already had three in the past few days since Amerie had introduced me to it when we first met. The algorithm knew before I did.
Somewhere in the middle of the trip I found myself thinking about rewatching Anthony Bourdain’s Singapore episodes and Crazy Rich Asians when I got home, just to see how differently they would hit now that I had actually been here.
At 7:24am one morning I took the earliest MRT I had taken in Singapore, heading to a meeting. The carriage was silent with bright lights, and there was a man in a white collared shirt with his eyes closed. Everyone else was on their phones. I hadn’t managed more than six hours of sleep a night since I had arrived and I envied him.
I wondered at some point whether people here would judge me if I had colored hair and tattoos. I had seen people like that around but hadn’t been here long enough to know. It is something I have always thought about doing. Maybe not the tattoo, I would rather not commit to something that permanent. Or maybe that is exactly what I am supposed to learn. More risk. Living with my own decisions. I wasn’t sure.
Since landing I had walked more kilometers on foot than I would have ever considered walking back home.
After five days in Chinatown I moved to a hostel in Little India.
Some nights in Little India the alleyways filled up with people sitting out on the street. Walking through one evening I caught a quick glance into what looked like a nightclub, with women dancing in a dark room with purple lights. Right as I passed, a truck driver spat on the street. I kept walking.
I noticed in Little India that when a police car drove by, nobody crossed on a red light. The moment it turned the corner, everyone crossed. I watched it happen more than once.
I had a butter chicken with two naans at a spot that had a Michelin Guide sticker on the window. I only noticed the sticker after I had already ordered. It didn’t tingle my tongue with any particular flavor. The naan and butter chicken from Alma’s back home was better, I thought.
A man in his fifties at the hostel was complaining that the bed felt like a pigeon nest. I agreed and told him I was in the top bunk too. We had been talking for less than thirty minutes and already had plenty in common. He told me Sri Lanka was a paradise when I mentioned where I was from. I asked him what his favourite food was. “Mi goreng,” he said, and told me there was a good spot nearby. My next meeting was at 3pm and I had time to kill, so I put on my bag to go explore and he asked if he could show me the place. “Let’s go,” I said.
The first questions I asked him were about what he did for work. He had worked at an oil company. He was married with three kids, and when I asked how old they were he said pretty old. The answers came fast and that was enough for me.
We walked through Little India where he pointed out shortcuts and explained the Indian heritage site, and we passed multiple stores. Eventually we walked into an old looking mall with a sign at the entrance that said no outside food or drinks. The smell hit before anything else did, the kind that makes your stomach react before your brain catches up.
I spotted a Sri Lankan stall and went closer to check if they were actually Sri Lankan. The uncle there, who was wearing a pink collared shirt and had a mustache, looked up. “Enna enna,” he said, what do you want? My reflex kicked in before I could think. “Ammatasiri uncle Sri Lankawen da?” — uncle are you actually from Sri Lanka? He said “monawada oneh” — what do you need. “Man passe ennam ayeth,” I said, I’ll come back later, and headed to the bus stop with my new friend to catch the next bus to my meeting.
I had been to Mustafa Centre once before and been overwhelmed. I went back for chocolates to bring home, which is the Sri Lankan tradition when you return from overseas. My mistake. It was packed to a point where I couldn’t move.
I decided to walk to the hawker center a friend had introduced me to. It was packed too. McDonald’s five dollar meal, I asked myself? Then I thought, what would Anthony Bourdain do. And I walked into the place he had told me about. JAAN WEST COAST TEKKA NO. 01, all in uppercase on the board.
Mi goreng was five dollars, with a dollar extra for an egg. While I waited an old gentleman told me to grab a chair before someone else did.
I sat down and asked him what his favourite food was.
His name was Yusuf. He was a retired warden with two kids, a son and a daughter, with the daughter being a teacher and six grandchildren between them. He came all the way from MacPherson just to eat here, and the people at the stall knew him as a regular, which was confirmed when the waiter gave him a quick hi. He had gotten some food delivered over the last couple of days and it hadn’t been good so he had complained. He thought I was from Bangladesh. I smiled and said Sri Lanka. He asked if I was travelling alone. Yes, I said. He told me he hadn’t been able to travel alone because his doctor had said no. He had been to Australia, England, and Istanbul. When I mentioned Sri Lanka he said back then it was called Ceylon. I nodded and kept eating my mi goreng.
He checked his watch and said he had to head back. We said our goodbyes. Before he left he told me he was Malay, and also that he didn’t like Filipino people, that Philippine girls liked Punjabi boys, and if I hung around for a couple of hours I would be able to land one. He also said he didn’t like this place because it was packed with too many ethnicities. I sat with that quietly, watching this otherwise warm old man say this on his way out.
When Yusuf left a young guy took his seat for his own mi goreng. He started telling out loud to the table of foreigners nearby eating dosa that they were missing out. He had lived on the west side and came forty five minutes each way just for this food, and had been eating here since he was fifteen. I tried to jump into the conversation but it died out. When I finished I asked him if he had any recommendations. He pointed me to a tea shop down by the biryani stall and showed me a couple of spots in Chinatown on his phone map. “Thanks man,” I said, gave him a fist bump and walked to the tea shop and got my first ever Teh Tarik, which is a pulled milk tea, to ease the spice from the mi goreng.
I took fifteen milligrams of melatonin gummies one night, bought from a pharmacy at a mall, and the last thing I remember was lying in bed googling whether fifteen milligrams was too much. Between the meetings and walking close to twenty thousand steps a day on foot, my body had simply run out. I slept for twelve hours straight.
A clean shave from a three dollar razor pack I found at Mustafa on a deal took five years off my face. I thought about a founder I had met the day before who had assumed I was older than him, and then when I told him my actual age had said oh shit.
On the bus I passed the ByteDance TikTok office. Almost all of JustEnglish’s revenue came through TikTok organically in the first two years. Sketchy as they are, I thought, I am grateful for TikTok existing. A few stops later the Dyson office went by, white and brown brick, on the way to Google for an event.
The friend who had introduced me to Tekka was there again one morning, the one whose name I had never gotten around to asking in all the time I had been here. I had promised him we would grab mi goreng together before I left. I didn’t make it. I still feel a bit guilty about that.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t pay for touristy things in Singapore, but I made an exception for an immersive visual experience at the IMBA Theatre, with Botero and Hockney as two shows back to back. I fell asleep on a comfortable couch halfway through Botero when the narration got too soothing under the warm lighting. When I woke up the show was over. I rushed out to catch the Hockney show before it ended. There were four walls of moving illustrations and animation wrapping around you completely. I had never tried LSD but from what I had heard, I imagine it feels something like that. I spent almost two hours just watching, thinking of nothing in particular.
Ah shit, I told myself afterward over a hot pot bowl at Parklane, a spot I had travelled all the way to try for the second time. I had picked ingredients like I was hungry rather than like someone who knows the soup will fill you up on its own. Lesson learned, the expensive way.
The Singapore trip came to a conclusion with Shan and Uthpala over noodles, kebab, fried chicken, milo, and beer at a spot they took me to in MacPherson. The uncle at the stall told me it would be the best milo I would ever taste while his wife was making it. We had a quick chat with them, as they had visited Sri Lanka maybe twenty years back, and she remembered some kind of chaos that existed there at the time. When I had first met Shan I knew little about him and Uthpala, and by the end we had hung out till 2am, talking about life’s purpose, startups, direction, and conversations that kept going deeper the later it got.
My last meal in Singapore was fish and chips and a hot Milo at Changi with Shan before departure. He was still kind enough to come and drop me at the airport and wait until I went through the gates.
Bland, I told myself after the first couple of bites into the fish, regretting not getting one final mala hot pot. I’ll be back, I told Singapore quietly.
Anthony Bourdain once wrote something about being twenty two and hungry to learn, about sleeping on floors if you have to and finding out how other people live and eat and cook. I thought about that on the way home.
On the plane home I thought about the mi goreng friend at Tekka whose name I never asked, and the promise I broke. I thought about Yusuf and his kids. The Sri Lankan girl trailing off about living costs. The uncle in the pink shirt saying “enna enna,” what do you want, without looking up. Shan and Uthpala at 2am. Everyone else I had met through meetings, events, and random encounters that I didn’t write about here, maybe one day I will. The food, the drinks, every single meaningful thing about Singapore had been a person I sat down with over good food and good company, long enough to hear their story.
I closed my eyes as the plane took off. I wished I could stay longer, but at the same time I knew things would be different when I landed in Sri Lanka. I felt open, I felt less heavy, and I was excited for whatever was next.