Sim Lim

People will tell you that Singapore is a fine city because any violation there is slapped with fines.
But to me, Singapore is the Mecca of electronic gadgets because the prices of electronic items in Singapore are scandalously cheap.
And when you are in Singapore, the center of electronic shops are Sim Lim. There are two "Sim Lims" in Singapore, lest you be confused, like I was.
There is the Sim Lim Square and Sim Lim Towers. These are two electronic havens situated near each other. Take the Bugis MRT station, ask around, and Sim Lim Square is nearby.
The difference in prices of electronic shops between Singapore and your own place is dramatic.
For a digital camera, you will get one in Singapore that is around P10,000 (around S$300) cheaper than in Manila.
I came over to Sim Lim to buy a memory card for my digital camera. I ended up buying a fresh, new model.
It was near-hypnosis.
I wanted to buy just an upgrade for the memory card for my digital Olympus which I had bought in Manila more than two years ago.
I had a 128 mb and I wanted to upgrade it to 1 gig. Upgrading the memory card would allow my camera to shoot more pictures.
Unfortunately, the Olympus dealer at Sim Lim told me that the new crop memory card no longer supports my old, outdated digital camera. (Yet my camera was only two years old!)
There are no more memory cards that would allow an upgrade to my Olympus.
Eventually, I was convinced into buying the upgraded digital camera, rather than an upgraded memory card.
I bought the new camera because the price was obscenely low. It didn't provide a chance for me to say no.
It was only S$560 or roughly P17,000. While the older one I bought in Manila two years before was priced at almost P30,000. Who could say "no" to that?
I was thinking that the same Olympus model that I had just bought at Sim Lim would cost P10,000 more in the Philippines.
True enough, I went to a camera shop in Manila upon my return and the same model cost P28,000.
In Singapore, Sim Lim is a must-visit for electronic gadgets.