It’s been a while since I was in the UK, so it has taken me some time here in Singapore to recall British norms such as: everyone drives on the left side of the road; the steering wheel is on the right; you get into taxis on the left, and – just to make sure – look both ways before crossing the streets. Singaporean traffic is thick and noisy. With some training and with enough sitting at outdoor caffes you learn to block the incessant traffic noise from your field of attention.

This morning I took in the National Museum of Singapore, to gain an overview of its history and get some sense of how it has become such a powerhouse. The Museum itself is a great white domed structure in the imperial sense, once housing great stores of collections on the flora and fauna and cultures of Southeast Asia. Now, inside, it is a thoroughly modern super-space seeming rather like Doctor Who’s TARDIS: larger on the inside than it appears on the outside.

Two things frustrated me about the museum: the central winding ramp that takes you into the bowels of the museum to began at the beginning of the region’s history – it seems endless; and the doggone blasted audio video unit that, though informative, was difficult to coordinate with the relics and photos and paintings curators had organized. So, I’d be looking at a giant 19th century Chinese bell and listening to how Lord Raffle’s wife had redeemed her husband’s reputation for posterity.

Nevertheless, the modern making of Singapore – much like Hong Kong – begins with British colonialists who outwit the local powers that be; in this case, Malaysia kings and princes. The most dramatic portion of the exhibit was the three years of Japanese occupation from 1942. It’s no coincidence the photos, film footage and montages are all mounted in a huge papier machet bat cave, lending a sense of disorienting, never-ending oppression.

The bit about how Lee Guan Yew, the architect of post-war Singapore was shorter than I thought it would be, and less weighty than his newly published autobiography, which I unsuccessfully tried to lift at the local Kinokuniya super-bookstore.

After gaining these past couple days a better sense of the people, the melange of cultures and the hyperventilated history of the city-state, Singapore rules make much more sense to me now. Some of it, I have to admit, isn’t a bad export at all.