Singapore Day 1-ish: Exhaustion is a motherfucker

11:58 pm Singapore local time, 1:58 am Sydney time: Exhaustion is a mother fucker

So you've probably worked out from that title that all is well. Leigh has landed in Singapore and if you know why I was here, so has the rest of Australia's best chances of winning in the Asian Championships, a different leg of the World Cyber Games currently running a national final in Sydney's Luna Park.

In the few hours I've been here, I can already see what people mean by way of that whole comment thing you find out when you ask someone what they think of Singapore. Try it some time: quite often you'll get a up-turned frown, a slight glare with a twitch in their left cheek, and a comment like “oh yeah, it's ok”.

Unless they're honest in which case they'll flat out tell you that it's shit.

It is. It's one giant mall. Aside from looking at the incredible amount of architectural monstrosities that plague the roads – it looks like Frank Lloyd Wright threw up and then someone found the carrots & peas, ate the regurgitated acidic contents, and then threw them up all over again for added measure – and obvious amount of work the Singapore government is putting into making the place look pretty with plants and shrubberies and such, this city is just one giant shopping center.

And yet while it has a mall feel, the prices are all over the place. Bottled drinks like Coke, Pepsi, or even green tea are all cheap as chips (or chups, for my Kiwi neighbours in this crappy “resort”). Food from a convenience store or supermarket like Coles is around the same price excluding the currency conversion while alcohol just hits the roof. Sixty to eighty bucks for what would cost twenty at home.

But what's more disturbing is the feeling you get from people working in Singapore. Short of having what has to be one of the world's worst Subway restaurants (though I do like how much space it has to eat inside), workers here seem intent on ripping you off at every turn. One moment there's a special for you and the next moment it's gone. There's no explanation as to what's going on other than that you're getting the feeling that someone is taking a prodding to your ass and you won't find out who till later.

Disturbingly, the people running the event I'm reporting from have seen fit to allow the gamers some many with which to buy food for (albeit from a place that's not exactly close) but those of us set as Team Captains – an honour I've begrudgingly taken when work kind of forced it on me – don't quite get the pleasure. Instead, we get to pay for ourselves.

Not that I can't pay for myself but surely there should be some level of, I don't know… fairness? It's bad enough that the hotel we're staying in is barely able to be called a hotel. It's a “resort” and truth be told, I think it got that name only because it sits next to the water and has a mall next to it. And having a mall next to it isn't exactly an honour but rather something commonplace.

Every fucking thing in this city seems to have a mall next to it. Oh, you need to go to the post office, well why not pick up something from the mall right next to it. And there's a portable loo, I bet you there's a mall next to it too. What about that mall there? It must have another mall next to it!

Granted, I've only been in Costa Sands and I'm dealing with the ugliest cockroach infested, flying ant ready, sheetless, classless, tasteless fucking hotel on the planet.

But from what I've seen so far… hole.