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The guidebooks all say that if you visit Singapore, you have to go to the Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling. The venerable colonial-era hotel copes with this onslaught by charging S$27 a pop ($18 US) for the famous cocktail. If this is supposed to keep out the riff-raff,  it doesn't seem to be working. When we visited the hotel's stately Long Bar last week, where the drink was invented, the place was packed with tourists, dressed in the casual blue jeans and short sleeves that Sir Stamford Raffles would have found inappropriate in such a stately Victorian setting.

One Singapore resident tipped us off to ask our bartender to mix our slings from scratch, rather than pour them pre-mixed. He did so, albeit without enthusiasm. We didn't note the exact list of ingredients, but the recipes I've seen elsewhere call for gin, Cherry Heering, Benedictine, Cointreau, pineapple juice, fresh lime, grenadine syrup and Angostura bitters, garnished with a marachino cherry and a chunk of pineapple. It's a lovely drink, but at that price, one was plenty.

Singapore does have its share of trendy upscale restaurants, wine bars and the like, but the best gastronomic reason to visit is for the abundance of street food. Actually, it is no longer really street food - except for the night market in Chinatown, almost all of the hawkers have been moved indoors, into giant hawker centers, where hundreds of stalls sell a variety of dishes (mostly under $3 US)  that is as diverse as Singapore itself - Hainan chicken and Cantonese noodle soups, Malaysian mee goreng and Indian rotis, satay beef, chili crab and char kway teow - noodles and clams stirfried in a rich brown gravy. Our favorite of the hawker centers was the Maxwell Road Center, where we had a farewell dinner of fried white carrot (actually turnip cake), char kway teow (noodles, bean sprouts, egg and clams in a rich soy gravy), and a mixed meat noodle soup brimming with fish cakes, wontons, meatballs and greens.