Singapore’s 47th National Day marks Singapore’s independence from Malaysia and consists of a “Parade” with lots of marching, music and singing, salutes, performances, and fireworks. Unfortunately, you need an invite or ticket to attend, so we watched the stream from our apartment by downtown Singapore (oh yeah– hello from Singapore!). Interestingly, many of the local people do not recognize National Day as a holiday — rather, it is mostly wealthier people, civil servants, and foreigners who partake. The locals told us that it’s essentially a government function. What we saw affirms this too; aside from the flags and banners everywhere, life and traffic seemed to continue as usual. Our morning started with a huge procession of red-wearing Singaporeans next to our apartment walking off to somewhere, and we got very excited for the big day, but the places we went did not seem to be affected by the holiday at all. We learned that educators and officials are invited to the parade, and I wonder who else. I originally associated National Day with US’s Fourth of July, but after some research, I deemed it to be more like a festive version of the State of the Union address. Except it seems that this year, they aired the National Day message a day early (transcript here). So there goes that theory.
Either way, it was very interesting to see Singapore show off its various groups of armed forces and performers of the various southeast Asian cultures, to listen to the singing in Singapore’s 4 national languages, and to see the sea of some 27,000 people in the world’s largest floating stadium. So many colors, so many styles! I guess the mix of cultures is their culture. Despite the utter lack of Caucasians, there is a touch of British influence to much of what we see in Singapore, and it is even apparent in the show, when performers wearing traditional southeast Asian drag dance to rap. And since Singapore’s such a tiny place, we could hear the fighter jets and fireworks from our apartment as we caught them on the TV.
Anyway, happy National Day!