Day 256 - The 'Singapore Sling', the 'Ding-a-Ling'

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We had seen a leaflet advertising an exhibition of ‘technology of the future’ at Singapore’s Science Museum. Since Asia is generally far ahead of the UK in all things technology we thought this would give us a glimpse a long way into the future, but unfortunately we were bitterly disappointed. The exhibition was nominally in its final week but they’d obviously decided it had been going long enough, because only a fraction of it was actually working. We lost count of the number of signs saying ‘out of order’ and basically it was rubbish. They had a Segway that you could take for a ride but that was being recharged and they didn’t know how long it would take to finish. The best bit was a virtual golf game that Ed tried, where you swing a 2ft-long club in mid-air to simulate a ‘real’ golf swing. An image is projected onto a wall showing where the club is relative to the ball and then it shows you where you hit it. It was quite unforgiving and Ed scored 14 on a par 4. Although the exhibition wasn’t much good, they did have an IMAX cinema in the museum so we went and watched all about the human body which was pretty good.

After this we caught a train to the other end of town, which being a city state is broadly the other end of the country. Here we were following a walking tour of an historic area. Our first stop was lunch and we marched in scorching heat and whilst starving hungry to a place we’d read about. We were not happy when we saw that it was closed for refurbishments. We found a café next door and just about managed to eat whatever it was that we’d ordered. This language barrier is going to present something of a challenge, particularly when it comes to eating.

After a recovery session in the air-conditioned hostel we headed to the famous Raffles Hotel, synonymous with ex-pats, foreign correspondents and colonial rule. This is an excellent hotel that probably costs 100 times as much as our hostel, and seems to be a more or less obligatory stopping point for passing tourists. The cocktail the ‘Singapore Sling’ was invented here and that’s what half the bar was drinking so we joined in. And very nice they were too. Then we went to a place called Clarke’s Quay for dinner, which is a collection of fancy restaurants from around the world and the hangout for the current day ex-pat community. There’s even a magazine for sale called something like ‘Ex-Pat Living’.

Lastly, as we were walking home we saw some funny UFO-like lights whizzing about in the sky so we bravely went to check it out. There were some kids with remote control kites with bright LEDs all over them (all over the kites that is). They are incredibly fast and quiet and seem much better than remote-controlled aeroplanes. We toyed with the idea of buying one but it’s not really practical right now so we took their website address and added it to our list of things we’ll need when we get back to England.

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