Nerd Mecca: Sim Lim Square

There is an immiment trip to the place local tech-geeks love and know very well. It’s called Sim Lim Square. This is a “mall” that has been stuffed to near capacity with high tech shops selling everything from cameras to PC components (Though far more of the latter than the former) and looks like a big mess of shiny objects with price tags designed to make you faint.

It’s an interesting sort of place that acts kind of like a barometer for Singapore’s consumer climate. When I first came up on it years ago, it was THE place to go if you were into video games because so many of the stores there weren’t really stores; they were just barely decorated rooms with a few shelves here and there and a cash register. The rest of the room was stuff with pirate software and pornography. For the price of a legal game, you could walk away with four or five games, or four or five new porn videos. Of course, since heavies like Microsoft have weighed into Singapore and set up corporate regional HQs here, this practice has been heavily swatted at with a multionational corporation sized fly swatter, and such shops (Though they still do exist) are found mostly in the fringes of less common areas on the edges of the island, and maintain a nomadic existing, opening for a few days before closing to move on, like digital gypsies moving their circus from place to place.

These days all the stores in Sim Lim are legit, but then it was always the more legit stuff that brought in the crowds. If you were the type that scoffed at package deals from Dell or IBM and preferred to assemble your PC from choice components all by yourself, Sim Lim was–and is–still paradise that way. Custom cases, cooling units, RAM chips, graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards, hard drives, optical drives, keyboards and a million buzillion other peripherals are all there for the taking if you’re just willing to suck it up and accept the fact that there is no map, and, in a Bladerunner-esque sort of way, navigate through the sometimes grungy shops, and negotiate with the owners in broken accents who will tell you things like “Aiyah, is already best price I give you, cannot go lower, ah?”

Oh well, off I go…