Heavy Sightseeing Day

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I am sitting in Singapore Airport lounge, at 06:30 trying to catch up on my blogs and dawn is breaking. So here goes



14/1/18

It has stopped raining!! It looks like it may start again - very soon, but doesn't.

We like to take river trips when we can as it puts things in place for us. Accordingly, we boarded a small pleasure craft endearingly called a bum boat and sailed along the Singapore river. There was a crew member who was quite entertaining. Singapore has 700 square kilometres of space for 5 1/2 million people who live on top of each other, literally, in high rise tower blocks. You can see a number of them from the river as well as a lot of office buildings. The residential tower blocks are those with washing hanging out of Windows on long bamboo poles. We returned to our embarkation point round the corner from our hotel and got ready for a city tour we had previously booked. We got ourselves stickered again and were ferried to a "hub" next to Chinatown for our tour proper. The "hub" was absolute chaos but good natured Chaos. It was here that the stickers came into their own. After some time we got allocated to a coach ready for our tour which took in the marina, the botanical gardens and little India. The gem in this lot was the orchid garden which was stunning. I only really grow stuff that you can eat so this was a bit of a departure but we now know what the fuss is about. The C.O. was very impressed as well and went a bit quiet which was much appreciated. The tour guide was amusing and a well informed local who gave us a lot of info on life in Singapore (including her childhood growing up in one room shared by 22 family members) that I won't bore you with now.

We had dinner by the river but we were still tired so I readily obeyed the C.O.'s order to go to bed at 9.00 p.m. Party animals or what!!

Had some bad news during the day as Raffles hotel and bars (including the long bar) was closed for refurb so have to find somewhere else to get my "sling"

I am having all sorts of trouble trying to load photos onto my blog so I have to apologise for not including any and I will try to sort it for subsequent blogs.

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