Advertisement
Published: August 14th 2010
The Malaysia/Singapore border crossing station is huge and beautiful! It was almost like walking through two brand new airports, their efficiency was incredible with tons of que’s- the wait was nothing. Comparatively- the China/Vietnam station where you cram into a tiny hot sweaty room, throw your passports into a stack of other passports and then crowd around a window for an hour uncomfortably with a bunch of other people waiting to hear your name so you can get your passport back and cross the border.
First impressions of Singapore were that it was the least Asian city of all of Asia. Everything is in English, everyone speaks English, and the only thing Asian about it is that the population is 75% Chinese. We hopped off the bus in the blistering heat and grabbed a cab to the hotel we had booked online the day before. We had gotten a good price due to the location (Geylang red light district) and as we grabbed our bags out of the cab, the line up of prostitutes on the corner across the street made us understand why. We stood and watched the activities for a couple minutes before heading into our hotel; there
were sooo many of them and just a crowd of guys standing around picking amongst them. Bleh! As we were checking in, one of the ladies from across the street and a gentleman came in to grab a room too. Yea - we were staying at the hooker hotel.
The room was actually pretty nice and we convinced ourselves that only the higher class hookers would be brought here as there were other hotels in the area offering hourly rates. Haha, whatever helps us sleep at night. That first night we stayed in our area of town to see if there was more beyond our street. We grabbed some dim sum despite walking past several of the tempting frog porridge restaurants that seemed to be everywhere. Most places we go the people on the street are selling jewellery, clothes, souvenirs, etc - not here in Geylang: Viagra, Cialis, vibrators, and cigarettes are the popular buys.
Singapore has crazy big malls located everywhere. In fact, you could probably spend a few weeks in the city and not be able to cover all of the malls. The heat is rather intense during the day so we grabbed some A/C in
one of the bigger malls on Orchard Rd to check things out. There is basically an underground network below the city streets that allows you to get almost anywhere without leaving the A/C for more than 2 minutes.
That day was also National Day in Singapore. So the city was busy in preparation for the big parade and show for that evening. Flags were hanging from every balcony and people were dressed in red and white with Singapore flags painted on their cheeks. You had to get tickets to actually go to the show and the parade, and tickets were for the people of Singapore only. We decided to try and get as close as possible anyway and managed to catch some of the army’s show, a few tanks, deafening fighter jets flying over head, war helicopters, etc. A quick location change later, we grabbed a spot beside a huge crowd gathering to catch the fireworks at the end of the night. The metro ride home reminded me of rush hour in Japan without the little white gloved guys pushing people on.
The next day we joined a hop-on hop-off city tour bus. Basically the bus has a
set route around the city to most of the touristy areas and you buy a standard ticket that allows you to get off and back on as you want. We checked out a bunch of areas before grabbing the bus from Little India to Sentosa Island. The Singaporean people love acronyms and a popular one for Sentosa is “So expensive, nothing to see actually”. Its a giant resort area with a newly opened Universal Studios and casino area. We checked out the beaches before checking out one of the new casinos that the tourist lady told us the Singapore people had to pay S$100 to get in while tourists get in free. A plot to deter the locals from gambling while swallowing the tourist’s money! We had found S$25 on the ground on the way and proceeded to lose S$10 in about 1 sec. After our 1 sec of fun, we decided casinos were not for the budget travellers and headed back to the beach.
We headed back to Orchard Road for dinner in the massive food center at Ngee Ann City Mall. There are a lot of Japanese influences in the city with tons of ramen restaurants, sushi
restaurants, and sweet bakeries. We came across a fav Japanese treat at one of the bakeries, Melon bread! But it just wasn’t the same... Oh well, we found many more delicious treats! We grabbed the metro home, the mass transit system is incredibly efficient and you can take it almost anywhere around the city for super cheap.
On our last day we were heading back to Malaysia around 9 pm, so we still had a full day ahead of us. We headed off to the supposedly world class zoo. That’s another thing about Singapore - they pride themselves on having everything - 1st in the world, biggest in the world, etc. About half way through our journey, a crazy tropical rainstorm came down, with thunder shaking the bus and giving the impression of driving through a car wash. The rain still hadn’t stopped an hour later so we hung out outside of the zoo trying to wait it out. The Singapore zoo is an open concept outdoor zoo with no cages... All the rain would surely have the animals taking shelter so we decided to not waste our money walking around in the rain to see nothing and headed
back. We grabbed dinner and headed back to the hotel to grab our bags. We caught a bus heading to the long distance station and crammed on with our huge packs on. I didn’t think mine would fit through the door but somehow I made it. Some nice ladies on the bus told us where to get off and where the company we were looking for was located and we were off to Penang!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.085s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 32; dbt: 0.0544s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Mom
non-member comment
Atta Girl
You always were a rebel!!!! LOL