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How to meet people in Singapore when you're on your own
Singapore is the only city in this series where sharing a table with strangers is not a tip but the default. At a hawker centre you take whatever seat is free, and if the table has five other people at it, that is the table. The city solved the mechanics of sitting with strangers decades ago.
What it did not solve is the next step. Everyone here is busy, and a shared table is not a conversation. Here is where the conversations are.
Hawker centres, and the tissue packet
The custom you need on day one: a packet of tissues on a table means the seat is taken. That is chope, and it is how you hold a place while you queue. Do it and you look local; ignore it and you will take someone's seat.
Which centres depends on the hour. Maxwell and Chinatown Complex for lunch; Tiong Bahru Market for breakfast, then the cafés of the estate around it; Old Airport Road for the largest spread. Lau Pa Sat is the evening one: from seven, the street beside it closes to traffic and becomes a line of satay grills with tables in the road. "Satay at Lau Pa Sat, 7:30, four seats" is a plan that fills, because the satay comes by the dozen and a dozen is not for one.
The city runs early and late
It is thirty-one degrees and humid all year. The hours that work are before nine and after six, and the plans that fill are the ones that know it.
Mornings: the Botanic Gardens, free, from seven. MacRitchie Reservoir is the ten-kilometre loop through actual jungle, monkeys included, with the TreeTop Walk suspension bridge in the middle; it is the plan to propose to someone who hikes. East Coast Park is fifteen kilometres of seafront with bikes for rent, and on a Sunday morning everybody is on it. Evenings: the Marina Bay loop for the skyline, the Southern Ridges for Henderson Waves at dusk.
Rain comes without warning and leaves within the hour. Nobody cancels.
Neighbourhoods with a living room
Tiong Bahru is the low-rise estate with the cafés that became everyone's living room first. Haji Lane and Kampong Glam are the small bars and the shophouse cafés. Joo Chiat and Katong are the pastel Peranakan shophouses in the east, quieter, with the best laksa argument in the city. Holland Village is where the expats have always gone, which makes it the easiest place to find someone else who arrived last month.
Chinese is spoken by most of the city and Mandarin gets you anywhere, but the working language is English, and the social one is Singlish, which you will understand by day three.
Practical
The MRT runs until around midnight; use Grab after that. Do not eat or drink on the train, do not drink alcohol in public places between half past ten at night and seven in the morning, and do not bring in chewing gum: the fines are real and the city is proud of them. Otherwise Singapore is about as safe as a city can be. The usual rules still hold: first meeting in public, tell someone where you are going, keep your own way home. The safety page has the rest.
Where MeetMap fits
MeetMap is a map of small plans happening soon near you. Each pin has a time, a place and a number of seats; take one and you are in the group chat. Singapore's plans write themselves once you know the hours: "MacRitchie loop, 7am", "Satay at Lau Pa Sat, 7:30, four seats", "East Coast bikes Sunday, 8".
If the map is quiet, post the first one. This city already knows how to share a table. Somebody has to say what time. Two weeks of that is the whole method.
