This took a bit too long to put together, but better late than never, I suppose. My camera ran out of batteries on the 3rd night and I never had a chance to recharge it, so my pictures from that day came from my phone (which is my official excuse for their obvious crappiness).
NAIA was as crowded and as disorganized as ever. With our flight just 90 minutes away, the line to the check-in counters reached all the way back to the airport’s main entrances. No pictures from the plane ride this time around, because I didn’t have a window seat, and the 777 we were on had a wing the size of a small apartment, which I simply couldn’t shoot around.
Singapore is a great little place. The main road, Orchard, takes only half-an-hour to traverse, but that’s assuming you don’t stop at any of the dozen or so malls on either side.
Conveyor belt sushi is fun-fun! I love raw salmon.
My mom and lizz at the Fullerton Harbor area. Note the Singaporean mascot Mer-lion in the background. The other photo is of some random school kids on a field trip. You can’t really see it in this picture, but it was the most cross-cultural bunch of students I’d ever seen, which I thought was very cool.
The chinese temple at Temple Road, which I figured was about as sacred as a 7-11. Anyone could just walk in, pose for a few polas and finger the incense pots, and nobody seemed to care.
The city, from Mt. Faber. The similar-looking buildings in the foreground are government-subsidized housing projects (which isn’t nearly as crappy as it sounds — those apartments are worth about S$450,000 or PhP14,000,000).
Singapore has the cleanest Chinatown I’ve ever seen … nary a smidgen of horse manure in sight. A great place to get kickass wanton, and cheap souvenirs.
Also spotted in Chinatown. Some designer must have spent all of five minutes creating the packaging for this Coca-cola drink.
The cable car station at the harbor. This was a fun way to travel the 2 or 3 kilometers to Sentosa, which was Singapore’s own little island resort. I don’t have any proper pictures of Sentosa’s beaches, but they looked suspiciously man-made to me.
Apart from resorts, Sentosa had a nice wax museum detailing their brief history. It’s interesting to note that a large number of their important historical figures are European. For example, Stamford Raffles, a British businessman, has everything from streets to hotels to airplane classes named after him to this day.
We also visited Sentosa’s Underwater World, which was moderately fun for the hour or so that we spent there. I took many really crappy photos, of which the four above are the most decent. The first one is of a water dragon, which had a body about a foot long (I couldn’t see where its tail ended though), and is supposed to be very good luck. Chinese are simply mad for water and dragons apparently. The second photo shows the glass tunnel to the main viewing area. You can ride the conveyor belt around the loop, where you are literally surrounded by marine life. The third and fourth photos are a lame attempt to capture said marine life without the proper equipment. My camera ran out of batteries soon after we left Underwater World, but nothing significant really happened in the evening that followed anyway.
The next morning I had breakfast sitting outside on a sidewalk bench, because I was sick of our hotel’s crappy morning buffet. I love how the coffee cups here have these little plastic handles, so you can carry it around without scalding yourself. I also love how their trashbins have all these unnecessarily cheerful comic drawings on them, which featured plastic bottles, paper cups and other assorted garbage asking you to "save their future." All in all, it was an ok trip. I would’ve appreciated a bit more pampering at the hotel (for example, a working flush would have been great) and a less complicated transportation system, but other than that, I had a good time. I actually have enough notes about the city to write a full-length travel guide, but I’m no Bill Bryson. I don’t really know if there’ll be any other trips for me within the next year, but hopefully the next one will have less shopping and more sights. Infinitely easier on the wallet that way, I think.