Prices are written with an “S” in front, like S$5, so you don’t mix them up with US dollars.
One Singapore dollar is worth a little less than one US dollar, about $0.75 to $0.80 cents. So my lunch at the food court, which cost S$6.50, was only about US$5!
Singapore money has some cool surprises:
- Many of the bills are made of plastic, not paper. They’re harder to rip, and they survive going through the washing machine!
- There’s a S$1 coin instead of a dollar bill.
- The bills show Yusof bin Ishak (pronounced Yoo-soff bin Eesh-hawk), Singapore’s first president. It’s like how George Washington is on the US $1 bill.
How much does a bottle of water cost?: A bottle of water here costs about S$1, which is around $0.78 cents in US money. I bought mine at Octobox, an automated store right on my campus.
But here’s a secret: you can drink the tap water in Singapore! It’s clean and safe, so many people just refill their own bottles.
That’s pretty amazing, because Singapore is a tiny island without big rivers or lakes. So where does all the water come from? Singapore has what it calls the “Four National Taps”:
- Rain, collected in reservoirs (and it rains a LOT here!)
- Water bought from Malaysia, Singapore’s neighbor
- NEWater: used water that’s cleaned so well it can be used again
- Seawater with the salt removed
What was the best meal this week?: My best meal this week was a shawarma wrap with fries and a Coke! Shawarma is a yummy wrap filled with meat that cooks slowly on a big, spinning grill.
Pages
