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Published: February 4th 2010
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So after leaving Australia dosed up on all sorts for my ‘woman flu’, I managed to develop an infected wisdom tooth on the flight over. But despite the odds, I managed to hold out until we landed in Singapore where we immediately met Ashleigh, my friend from university, who had been waiting at the airport for us for about 5 hours. After eventually finding the bus that would take us to our pre-booked hostel, we had the chance to catch up on what had been going on at home during the last two months. Meanwhile, Tom was showing us the sights that he recognised from his last visit to Singapore when he first went travelling around South East Asia.
We arrived at our hostel at about 11pm, I think our windowless room reminded Ash of a prison cell but Tom and I thought it was quite nice compared to some of the hostels we had stayed in during Oz, plus it had air con! The next day we awoke late due to the absence of any light in our room and made our way downstairs to our free breakfast which consisted of hardboiled egg - nice! Ashleigh has sworn of
boiled eggs ever since. When we finally got ourselves moving, we headed down to the harbor where we had a drink and tried to plan how to get over to Indonesia. After trying to find information on how to get the ferry over, we decided to book flights as the ferries were fairly irregular and the flights weren’t too expensive. With the flights sorted, we milled about around Orchard Street (the main shopping district) in the heat of the day, eating a nice lunch at a bakery whilst Tom and I were still mulling over whether we wanted to buy a net book.
In the late afternoon Ash decided that she wanted to head back to the hostel as she was still fairly jet lagged and Tom and I decided, well we might as well go and look at net books, it’s not as if we have to buy one?! both knowing we would. So off we headed to Sim Lin Square a massive building full of electronics with the guidebook quoting ‘if you know a lot about computers you will get a bargain, if not you will be ripped off’ How hard can it be? After spending 3
hours visiting every shop in the building asking questions we didn’t understand the responses to like ‘how much ram does it have, what kind of operating system does it use’ we walked away with a lovely little Acer net book with a 250GB hard drive, Windows 7, and were each 100 pounds lighter, although we did get 50 pounds off, bargain!
The next day I awoke very early in agony with my tooth and forced Tom and Ash to trail around Singapore searching for a dentist. When we eventually found one that would treat me, both the dentist and the receptionist had a great time looking in my mouth and oohing and ahhing at the huge lump before the dentist offered to remove it for me. Ever the skin flint I thought ooh... ‘How much?’ the answer was 250 GBP, I decided to wait for the NHS and settled for Amoxicillin.
With the tooth solved, Ash and I decided to head down to Raffles hotel whilst Tom stayed at the hostel playing with the shiny new computer, christened Alfie the Acer . Raffles is the famous hotel in Singapore where they invented the Singapore Sling and has had lots
of famous/infamous (Conrad) writers to stay, and is absolutely gorgeous. After wondering around here for a while and relaxing in the courtyard we took ourselves off for a bit of shopping before heading back to meet Tom. We went to dinner in Little India and had a gorgeous and cheap curry and spent most of the meal laughing at a sign on the restaurant opposite which was supposed to be ‘a genuine customer comment’ see the photo to experience the hilarity. After dinner we went off to the Singapore Night Safari, which is at an open plan zoo where you catch a train around all of the different sections to see the animals in a more natural environment. It was really good, but unfortunately we were a bit rushed as we were due to fly to Medan at 6am and we hadn’t packed yet, so we didn’t get to see as much as we would have liked.
At 3.30 am we were off in a taxi to the airport, where we reclaimed the tax we had paid on the net book (see, bargain!), had a really strange breakfast, before jumping on the plane with about 3 other foreign tourists heading
towards what, in hindsight, I would call the unknown.
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Gill Carr
non-member comment
Singapore
Rachel - your blogs are great, think you have a new career as a travel writer. looking forward to hearing about Indonesia x