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Published: October 27th 2005
Well, now that we have been living in Bangkok for almost 3 months, we decided to do our first weekend trip out of town.
Saturday afternoon we boarded Turkish Airlines, which has a stopover in BKK on its route from Istanbul to Singapore. Suffice it to say that the flight crew must have attended the Aeroflot School of Inflight Charm as we didn’t spot a single smile from the flight crew on the entire flight. We also discovered that there were a couple of pretty stinky people in our vicinity on the aircraft. Overall, we were pretty unimpressed with Turkish and we have ruled them out for any future long haul flights.
2 ½ hours later we landed in Singapore. The orderliness! The cleanliness! It is quite beautiful, very manicured, beautiful plantings everywhere. Everyone spoke English. However, as compared to Bangkok, it seemed very sterile and western….in fact, I felt much like I was in Orange County.
We immediately went to an Indian restaurant that Jim had eaten at in previous business trips to Singapore. Mmmmm. Wonderful! We had tandoori chicken, rice, garlic naan (a grilled flatbread), tandoori shrimp, and our favorite Indian dish ~ creamed spinach. Jeffrey
loves Indian spinach and wolfed it down. Gotta love having a kid who will turn up his nose at pizza, but will beg for spinach!
We splurged for the weekend, and decided to see if the Shangri La lived up to its reputation as one of the best hotels in the world.
Everything was quite clean, the bed was quite comfy, the room was a decent size…but I wouldn’t say it is that much better than many hotels that I’ve stayed in.
The pool was fantastic, it had a splash fountain at one end for the kids to play in and a huge play shelf (about a foot deep) so that the little ones had a good area to play in. It was a very large pool with a deep end too. The water temperature was perfect as well. The pool was definitely the highlight of the hotel.
We wandered around Little Arabia and Little India. Little Arabia was so pretty, shophouses painted in pastel colors leading down to Sultan Mosque. The smell of the restaurants along the roads was very tempting…..grilled meats, flatbreads grilling. Yum!
Little India was very lively and just what
one would expect ….. Bollywood music blaring, corner tandoori restaurants, stores selling just about everything one could imagine. It looked like there were some good deals on clothing in that area of town.
We enjoyed exploring the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple. The temple is devoted to Kali, a rather bloodthirsty Hindi goddess.
We took the opportunity to take in the skyline and water views at Clark Quay and Boat Quay. They are both basically a line of pubs on the water. I thought the name of this one was funny.
We ended the stay with taking a 10pm flight back to Bangkok. Honestly, we’ll try to never do that again. Carson didn’t really appreciate being woken up at midnight ….. And carrying a sobbing 45 lb child through customs wasn’t really that much fun for us.
Overall, Singapore was a pretty place to visit. It is very orderly, clean, and VERY expensive. We spent much more than we anticipated on eating out. However, I’m pretty glad that our home is here in Bangkok. Much more color, much more interest, and a whole lot less expensive.
Till next time!
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Wendy
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I'm loving this!
I love reading your entries! So cool that you guys are really over there seeing/doing all this once in a lifetime stuff! Great pictures! Poor Jeffrey - how could you not let him have the fishhead?! :o)