Singapore, where I’ve been living for the past year, has a reputation for being a safe and law-abiding place. That’s a reputation I can attest to. At no point, anywhere in the city-state, have I sensed any physical threat to myself or my property. Admittedly, the local newspapers contain a lot of stories about scams and scammers, and I usually receive two or three scam calls – very obvious scam calls – a week. Mind you, when I check the numbers, some of these calls seem to originate in Thailand or Malaysia, so they’re not all the fault of Singaporeans.
But the impression of Singapore being law-abiding was truly brought home to me the other week when, one morning, I toddled along to my local bus-stop to catch a bus into work and saw what had been attached to the bus-stop sign. Evidently, someone had dropped their wallet while waiting there, and someone else had found it. Not only had that someone else not succumbed to temptation and pocketed the wallet, but he or she hadn’t taken it to the nearest police station and handed it in. No, someone else had simply popped the wallet into a plastic bag and stuck it to the sign, along with a sheet of paper announcing the wallet-owner’s name, and left it there with the presumption that sooner or later the owner would return and find it. And in the meantime, nobody else going past the bus-stop would be tempted to sneak off with it.
The wallet hung there for the next three days. On the fourth morning, I arrived at the bus-stop and saw that it was gone. Had the wallet finally found its way back to its owner? This being Singapore, I strongly suspect it had.