Sweet 'n sour chicken...Singapore style!

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G'day ye lil ripper....we finally left Aussie and have arrived in our first port of call in Asia - Singapore! The flight over was an interesting one in which we spent most of our time being insulted by a drunken Irish hooligan from Belfast! - as per usual, showing the country up! After insulting people at the front of the plane, he was unfortunately sent down to us at the back of the plane. The cabin crew hoped he pipe down with less people to insult at the back of the plane...however it got worse, long story cut short we moved jst to get away from him and 4 hours later touching down in Singapore the local police boarded the plane and escorted the nice young gentleman off the plane to no doubt spend 10 years in prison on solely bread and water...haha...Nevertheless it was quite scarey with al this happening, as we found out at 30,000ft its very difficult to escape an annoying or threatening random....

We had booked ahead a couple of dorm beds and on arrival we were duly shown our bed which was a matress on the floor in the corner of a room which also contained 26 other people....David was sure there were some random refugees in there!!The bathrooms were horrendous...there were four to serve about 80 people and im not sure they were ever cleaned, and strangely, they were out on the roof, outside. ha....As if this wasn't bad enough, we woke up on the thursday morning and the room and floor was trembling...David roared at me to stop jumping about in my bed, but I told him I wasnt. So we lay and thought if maybe the MRT train ran under us...nope...okay so actually it was the aftershock from the earthquake in Indonesia...reached 8.5, too close for comfort!!

We were staying in the Arabic district of Singapore which was a few lovely streets lined with great resturants serving up lots of delcious Middle Eastern cuisine, shops selling all types of scarves, dresses and crafts and the locals relaxing on cushions in front of the restaurants smoking their shisha pipes. We had a lovely meal in an Arabic restaurant whilst sitting around the table on cushions. It was all good apart from when we read the menu wrong and accidentally ordered snails for dinner! Oh dear! Those had to go back.

Having been in tropical Queensland, we thought we'd have no troubles with the heat, Singapore at the minute is around 33 C but it feels so much warmer with the humidity...we re running just to get to shopping malls and feel some much needed air conditioning!! We had three days in Singapore to spend sight seeing which was just a nice enough time. The city has a thriving Chinatown, and lucky for us we've arrived in the middle of a festival of lanterns..so we've travelled out to eat at the stalls and see the various shows within Chinatown...really impressive...The food stalls line the streets and everyone just grabs a table and has their fill...the nicest Chinese food we ve ever had, and may I say Chinese tea and a good introduction to our diet for the next few weeks!!!

Singapore is a such an easy city / country to get around mainly thanks to the MRT which is really efficient (puts British transport to shame), so much so we pretty much seen all the main sites in our first couple of days. We had been to China town, Little India which was really quite dirty, Clarke and Boat quay and of course the famous Raffles Hotel for Singapore slings which cost more than the days budget alone! One of David's friends is currently working there, so we managed to meet up and spend our last day watching some rugby and catching up over a few beers, before headin back to our bed on the floor to catch some zzzz's before our flight to Bangkok!! It's all dowhill from here!! haha

hope everyone is still doing well at home..

its really good to hear from you all

love Jenni & David x x

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Photos

Chinese Lanterns
Think local children painted these, but theyre were literally 100's of them!!

Arabic food
we actually stayed in an arabic region of the city and sampled some their spicey spicey foods!

Chinatown
Mmmmm the foodstalls..