Day 41 - Skyscraping

Dear Singapore Airlines - when your flight takes off at 1am and lands at 8am only four hours later, please do not wake up your passengers halfway through for “dinner”, as that is only dinner time halfway around the World. Delicious as it was (for airplane food standards) this “dinner” was definitely not worth reducing the amount of sleep we got last night from an already meagre four hours to little more than a couple. Arriving in Singapore was a bit of a shock. The airport was spotless, we had to catch a “SkyTrain” to go from our gate to Baggage Reclaim, there were virtually no queues at immigration and when we got out and tried to buy a SIM card from a stand, the guy advised us to go to a convenience store nearby, as we told him we were only staying for six days and there was a much cheaper option there. Quite the change of setting from India and Sri Lanka…

Since we could only check in at 2pm, we dropped off our bags at a hostel in Little India and then walked to Orchard Rd, the main shopping precinct where I had planned to take my deceased MacBook to the Apple store so they could try and resuscitate it. Predictably, as soon as the Genius bar person plugged it in it switched on just fine, passed all tests and has worked fine ever since. I am one hundred per cent confident it will die again as soon as I get to Vietnam, where the nearest Apple Store is in Bangkok. Electronic glitches aside, the city is stunning for its architecture, from the cute houses of Little India to the enormous shopping malls in Orchard Rd or the skyscrapers in the distance. Despite the abundance of the latter, it all seems to have been planned carefully as, wherever you look, the landscape seems to make sense.

After leaving my camera at Sony to get its sensor cleaned (“I can’t see a speck of dust!” said the guy, before I pointed to the huge grain of sand right in the middle of it) we headed back and checked in at our four-bedroom flat. We were immediately amused by two notices on the lift asking people not to leave trash out of the bins, complete with screenshots of CCTV footage of the same woman committing two offences a week apart (somehow wearing the same clothes). As we were starving, we headed to a nearby Hawker (name given to the local street food markets) where I was reminded of my inability to eat noodles, producing a fifty-metre radius of splattering from a fairly small bowl of delicious braised beef noodles. Not quite satisfied with our mains, we decided to give Soya Beancurd, the local desert specialty, a go only to realise it basically tastes like a soy milk pudding - not exactly the most appetising proposition.

Photo credit to Ana, from whom I will steal pictures until I get my camera back...

The rest of the day was spent shopping, as we needed some laundry detergent to alleviate our clothes availability crisis, and waiting for Tom and Catarina to arrive. After eventually getting them to meet each other (for the first time) at the airport, initially forgetting there are a few terminals at Changi, they made it in one piece and we set off to the Marina Bay area shortly after for some dinner. We somehow found ourselves scoffing down dumplings and curries behind the stage of what looked like an F1-inspired fashion show set up by Heineken, where “models” holding assorted helmets paraded themselves in front of people who presumably consumed buckets of overpriced dutch beer in return. Our notion of overpriced beer was re-defined at Level 33, allegedly the “highest brewery in the World” as they craft their own beers on the thirty third floor of a skyscraper. Making London prices look budget, the beers were decent but clearly took the back seat when compared to the view of the high-rise buildings reflected on the marina waters, with glimpses of all three sectors of the race track and the Marina Bay Sands hotel looking over them. We were clearly paying for the view there, but if we looked at it as having paid to get on an observation deck and got a couple of complementary pints, it sounded like a much better deal. In any case, I was definitely far too tired to make any rational decisions, so at this point we called it a night and came back to the flat to wait for Amar and Alice, upon whose arrival I was very happy to pass out in my obscenely pink bed.

Cheers,

J-Wowww