Singapore in two days and a sling

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We arrived slightly late in singapore due to the extremely hot weather in melbourne causing our plane to overheat! I'm sure you all feel very sorry for us and our hot weather, not!

The first day we decided to walk into the city and catch one of the "hop-on, hop-off" tour buses but we ended up enjoying seeing the city on foot that we spent the whole day walking. We started off in chinatown, which was still steeped in decorations from the lunar new year celebrations, which we later found out go on for 15 days and so were still happening, which led us up to Fort Canning Park, a park that used to be a fort! After climbing the many many stairs up to the garden areas we had a stroll along the main path past lots of frangipani trees and some old cannons.
We popped our heads into the national museum, taking full advantage of any aircon we could come across, and continued on to singapore art gallery for some more culture. Our next stop was Raffles hotel, the home of the singapore sling, unfortunatly no thongs(flip flops) or singlets (vest tops) allowed and I was wearing both 😞
As part of our ongoing aircon theiving we popped into the very large shopping mall across the road and were surprised to see a lot of shops from home including marks and sparks (at more than double the price of home) and topshop, before heading to the esplanade to see the theatre on the bay architectural landmark and the relatively new singapore flyer, the largest observation wheel in the world. While there we stopped for some food at Madam Lins Asian Street Food for some noodles and questionable chicken, the chicken was left to the side and we spent half our time peering into the booth next to us at the strange concoction of ice, fruit sauce, peppers, jelly and sweetcorn! hmm?!
Our next stop was one recommended by lonely planet, the fountain of wealth. Apparantly if you put your hand in the water and walk round the fountain three times clockwise and make a wish it will come true! fingers crossed!! Here we stopped for a snack of kaya filled mini doughnut with green tea topping, sounds strange but was good, kaya is a coconut jam which is often served on toast for breakfast. After wishing for millions and millions of pounds we headed to a local street market to spend it. On the way we passed two very busy temples surrounded by hundreds of people with incense sticks not sure whether we were allowed in or not we continued up to the market stalls where we knew we definitely would be welcome!!
Here we saw many weird and wonderful things but resisted from splashing out too much, mainly as we know we can't carry much more!
That evening we went to the night safari, slightly out of the city next to the zoo, the evening began with a traditional cultural performance which was slightly wacky but very funny even though we had no idea what they were all saying. They were shooting blow darts at each other to pop balloons and then had an audience member up on stage for a shot, needless to say the target got hit in the leg! this was followed by some fire eating combined with the humiliation of another audience member and followed by all the performers holding kerosene in their mouths to blow flames! limited health and safety here i think!
During the show a male peacock wamdered through the crowd and jumped up on the roof to look threateningly at the people below as if he was going to jump on someone! the zookeeper had to come and chase him away.
Next up was the animals of the night show in the outdoor ampitheatre, this part was great they had trained civits, small leopard like carnivores, and otters who recycled and a bearcat which came in on a rope suspended above the audience amongst others. After all of this we eventually made it into the main enclosures where we saw loads of nocturnal animals going about their regular business, the best I think was the fishing cat, self explanatory.
All in all we walked about 23 miles and so were feeling pretty ready for bed, the next day we went out for some breakfast and had a wander up the main shopping street to have wee nosy before walking up to the botanic gardens and the national orchid garden where we met a couple from wales and spent ages talking about travelling as they had been where we are going and we had been where they are going. The gardens were lovely and they had orchids name after all sorts of famous people, poor margaret thatcher though, her orchid was a bit shrivalled up looking! That afternoon we had planned to get the cable car up mount faber for the views of the island, unforunately the weather had other ideas and clouded over before beginning to chuck it down! We took refuge at the hotel and then went out in the evening to Clarke Quay for some food and a singapore sling!
The next morning we got up at some ridiculously early time and took the short walk to the station to catch our train to Penang.

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