What Colours You See In Singapore's Colourful Green Garden City

Flag of Singapore.

The flag of Singapore is red. the lucky colour is red. Another favourite colour is orange, orange lanterns for festivals, any time.

Singapore is a garden city, full of colourful flowers. Colours are all around you. The green palm trees have orange coconuts. There's even a lipstick palm with red.

Beautiful Bridges
As you drive from Changi airport into the city, you notice the beautiful bridges, draped with magenta boughainvillea. (The flowers are named after a French botanist and explorer).

Lee Kuan Yew, the early minister and later senior minister of Singapore, wanted the bridges to be adorned with colourful flowers. So they were, and still are.

Art on the underground in Singapore. Bras Basah MRT under the art school.

An army of invisible gardeners, like the clouds watering the plants, must pass unnoticed when you are not looking. So that later, when you do look, you see only the results of their diligence, the beautiful colourful flowers.

Beautiful Buildings
Beyond the bridges, or on either side, live the people who need the bridges. The buildings your car or bus or taxi passes are colourful. The government build HDB (housing development board) skyscrapers distinguished from each other by: tiled battlements and gables, curves of balconies around cylindrical buildings, co-ordinated stripes, random rainbows, patchwork balconies, polkadots of round windows up the stairwells, or mosaics or trees of colour.

Chinatown Colours
Divert from Downtown to Chinatown for a look at old Singapore. You will see that colour has always been here.

Tiles on seats and floors in Waterloo Centre, Waterloo Street.

Fun Food
Stop for food, and you will find colours in the delicacies and desserts.

The ubiquitous green pandan cake and green buns.

Green birthday cake.

Magenta orchids in the hotel lobbies and toilets.

No shortage of Western favourite foods. Macaroons in pink.

Gardens and parks are full of orange and pink and purple flowers.

But you don't miss out down underground on the MRT, mass rapid transit. If you come down the escalator and land in the middle of the platform, the trains seem to stretch in both directions forever.

However, glance up for a guide on the overhead screen as to where you will get a seat, and you instantly see that the MRT trains are three carriages long. The carriages fit the platforms.

The glass sliding doors' primary purpose is to hold in the air conditioning. A beautiful bonus is helping trains run on time because they control the human flow by helping to prevent accidents, falling, pushing, potential suicides and dropped keys and phones.

Red lines drawn diagonally from where the doors stop get you to the right place, and to the sides of the doors so you make way for alighting passengers.

Colours
The railway carriages are colourful. Seasonal colours. Eventful colours. Often I am like the other passengers, staring at a mobile phone. Jumping up suddenly on hearing my destination announced. But sometimes I look up and notice something new. Right and left of me are in the adjoining carriages are the latest colours. Pink. Green. Sometimes growing over the walls and ceiling like the quick-growing plants outside on the motorways far overhead, up two or three escalators. Sometimes simply on the railway carriage floor, radiating out, under the poles.

Useful Websites For Travellers
singaporeairlines.com

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Member of Toastmasters International speakers' clubs in the UK and Singapore and online.