Crown casino in Singapore?
After hearing my last assignment of the semester fall with a satisfactory thump into the assignments chute at Law school, I headed over to Crown Casino for some dinner and to watch my friends play.
I don't know why is it I cannot seem to gamble. I can't even play pokies without sweating and feeling stressed so I eventually gave up gambling as one of many vices I am just temperamentally unsuited for.
It was a good evening though ; my friend eventually won an a fairly large amount of money( around $1000) and decided to spend some of it on a treat for us.
We headed straight for Margo's, this restaurant on the casino floor that has half priced oysters every Monday and Tuesday and had ourselves a lovely dinner:steak, calamari and lovely fresh oysters.
But while they were playing, I looked around the casino floor and felt this odd sensation. It was just difficult to believe that in a few short years, this glittery hedonism would make some kind of appearance in Singapore.
I didn't bother getting much into the whole debate of casinos; mainly because I just knew deep down that no matter what people said, the government would go ahead and do as they thought fit anyway.
Here in Melbourne, I'm a regular patron of Crown Casino. I go there to watch movies, eat and shop. In the time I've been here, I've spent less than $10 on the actual gambling and more of my time watching friends blow their pocket money at the tables.
The thing about a casino is that most of the time, people get drawn there by other things first. Very few casinos focus only on the gambling. Crown has a cinema, shops and lots of really good restaurants within its walls, but its when you're there watching other people play that you really feel the itch.
My friend won but she's been here for three years. In that three years she's been a regular at both the gaming tables and the pokies. Last night she won a large amount of money but her boyfriend lost easily $100 at the baccarat table before she even started playing.
I've been with this bunch awhile now, and I know that $1000 is a small reward for the kind of money they've thrown at Crown over the years. Sometimes, they're lucky and sometimes they only just manage to get their seed money back. But more often than not, the casino won.
I've read Down Under, a travel book by Bill Bryson. And in it he commented that he was shocked that Crown Casino tends to draw such a predominantly chinese crowd.
He was right. Despite the fact that asians are a minority in Australia, they're the majority at Crown.Around me crowded Hongkongers, PRCs, Singaporeans, wealthy Malaysians and Indonesian chinese...all with a fevered look in their eye.
I thought of Singapore, where people already spend thousands going on cruises just to gamble and who think nothing of blowing a few hundred dollars on mahjong and 4-D and I had to suppress a shudder.
Much more than the Malays and Indians, the chinese tend to be terribly susceptible to gambling. It forms a major part of chinese new year festivities and local films even show scenes where people (usually chinese) take down numbers from car accidents and suicides just to try their luck at 4-D.
I don't really know if the whole casino idea is a good one. I'd be the first to agree that a casino really can generate tons of revenue and jobs. But the social cost may be one that we cannot pay;addicts frequently turn to crime and drugs after all. And there are other reasons.
Melbourne is a large place. It's the capital city of a state that is easily a hundred times larger than Singapore. If you want to get away from all the glittering, flashy neon strobe lights and congested crowds of people, you can. You'll only be a couple hours away from gentler, quieter towns like Bendigo. The same goes for thrumming cities like New York or even London. But this just isn't the case for Singapore.
We forget, when we want to compare ourselves to them, how much more room they have to fit in things. Here, if something isn't absolutely essential, it tends to get discarded. Which is where all of our green spaces and clean water has gone,of course.
Which is why we're going to have the room for a casino but not really the room for more green spaces where people can just relax and wind down.
I don't know why is it I cannot seem to gamble. I can't even play pokies without sweating and feeling stressed so I eventually gave up gambling as one of many vices I am just temperamentally unsuited for.
It was a good evening though ; my friend eventually won an a fairly large amount of money( around $1000) and decided to spend some of it on a treat for us.
We headed straight for Margo's, this restaurant on the casino floor that has half priced oysters every Monday and Tuesday and had ourselves a lovely dinner:steak, calamari and lovely fresh oysters.
But while they were playing, I looked around the casino floor and felt this odd sensation. It was just difficult to believe that in a few short years, this glittery hedonism would make some kind of appearance in Singapore.
I didn't bother getting much into the whole debate of casinos; mainly because I just knew deep down that no matter what people said, the government would go ahead and do as they thought fit anyway.
Here in Melbourne, I'm a regular patron of Crown Casino. I go there to watch movies, eat and shop. In the time I've been here, I've spent less than $10 on the actual gambling and more of my time watching friends blow their pocket money at the tables.
The thing about a casino is that most of the time, people get drawn there by other things first. Very few casinos focus only on the gambling. Crown has a cinema, shops and lots of really good restaurants within its walls, but its when you're there watching other people play that you really feel the itch.
My friend won but she's been here for three years. In that three years she's been a regular at both the gaming tables and the pokies. Last night she won a large amount of money but her boyfriend lost easily $100 at the baccarat table before she even started playing.
I've been with this bunch awhile now, and I know that $1000 is a small reward for the kind of money they've thrown at Crown over the years. Sometimes, they're lucky and sometimes they only just manage to get their seed money back. But more often than not, the casino won.
I've read Down Under, a travel book by Bill Bryson. And in it he commented that he was shocked that Crown Casino tends to draw such a predominantly chinese crowd.
He was right. Despite the fact that asians are a minority in Australia, they're the majority at Crown.Around me crowded Hongkongers, PRCs, Singaporeans, wealthy Malaysians and Indonesian chinese...all with a fevered look in their eye.
I thought of Singapore, where people already spend thousands going on cruises just to gamble and who think nothing of blowing a few hundred dollars on mahjong and 4-D and I had to suppress a shudder.
Much more than the Malays and Indians, the chinese tend to be terribly susceptible to gambling. It forms a major part of chinese new year festivities and local films even show scenes where people (usually chinese) take down numbers from car accidents and suicides just to try their luck at 4-D.
I don't really know if the whole casino idea is a good one. I'd be the first to agree that a casino really can generate tons of revenue and jobs. But the social cost may be one that we cannot pay;addicts frequently turn to crime and drugs after all. And there are other reasons.
Melbourne is a large place. It's the capital city of a state that is easily a hundred times larger than Singapore. If you want to get away from all the glittering, flashy neon strobe lights and congested crowds of people, you can. You'll only be a couple hours away from gentler, quieter towns like Bendigo. The same goes for thrumming cities like New York or even London. But this just isn't the case for Singapore.
We forget, when we want to compare ourselves to them, how much more room they have to fit in things. Here, if something isn't absolutely essential, it tends to get discarded. Which is where all of our green spaces and clean water has gone,of course.
Which is why we're going to have the room for a casino but not really the room for more green spaces where people can just relax and wind down.
posted by adinahaes at 1:08 AM
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