Almost home - Singapore

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Well the holiday is almost over. We left London 2-3 days ago (I've lost count) after a quiet day. We didin't do any tourist sightseeing or museum visiting but instead walked through some of the London streets taking in the streetscapes. We did a little bit of shopping on Oxford Street, had a coffee in Soho and eventually found our way to Bond Street to see how the top 0.1% live; some of the jewels in the jewelry stores along Bond Street give the Crown Jewels a bit of a run on size, ostentation etc. We eventually made our way back to the apartment, had a brief rest, showered, packed then joined the sardine tin that is the London Tube at peak hour.

Our trip to Singapore was just how we like it - uneventful. We flew on an A380 and were surprised at how quiet the plane was at take off and in the air - no shuddering as we accelerated along the runway on take-off. We arrived in Singapore at about 6:00 p.m. local time and made our way to our hotel via the MRT (Singapore's "underground") and shanks's pony. The Singapore locals were very keen to help us with directions to our hotel when they saw us stopped and consulting our map. I was a bit concerned at what our hotel would be like as it received mixed reviews on TripAdvisor with some reviews suggesting it was a bit of a dive. The only reason that we are staying here is because the Singapore F1 Grand Prix is on this weekend (we didn't find out until AFTER we had purchased our non-refundable air tickets) and so the normal Singapore stop-over hotel deals aren't operating at present. Well, we're very happy with it. The room's a reasonable size, it's clean, in an old Chinese mansion and very close to Chinatown and multiple MRT stations.

I'm a bit ambivalent about Singapore (and Hong Kong) as the main things to do are shop. We have done some sight-seeing with visits to Chinatown yesterday, Little India today and a couple of huge shopping centres both days - we've only been able to buy ice cream in the shopping centres.

Tomorrow is our last day in Singapore and we take off at midnight for our flight back to Brisbane. We should reach Mum's place around mid-afternoon we hope. Our plans for tomorrow are a visit to the Botanical Gardens. We visited the gardens last time that we stopped over in Singapore and enjoyed it very much so I'm looking forwards to tomorrow's visit.

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Photos

Mid-autumn festival
It's mid-autumn festival time and many of the streets are decorated with hanging lanterns.

Mid-autumn festival
Various locations are decorated with lanterns that have been decorated by kids and others.