Friday, May 3, 2013

Seeing Singapore

Friday May 3 2013



We wanted to just get a taste of daily life in Singapore so K took us to:
- Park View Square which is an enormous old hotel that has now been turned into office space.  It was raining on and off all day, so we had umbrellas with us.  the rain is actually very pleasant in the heat but we didn't want the camera and stuff to get so wet.  When we came into any public building from outside they have these skinny little umbrella bags for everyone to use so that they don't drip water everywhere.  Outside they have all these bronze statues of random famous men throughout history. So in one section we saw Plato, Dante, Dali (as in the artist Salvador), and Lincoln or Newton, Churchill and a Chinese politician I didn't know.  It just looked super arbitrary who they had together.  It was pretty entertaining to say the least.
 It has a restaurant inside that serves wine and cheese in the evening.  We didn't get to see this in action (because we were there in the afternoon) but we saw the evidence...they have this huge tower of very expensive wine and they have a harness for a woman dressed as ferry zooms up the tower and gets your bottle and then flies down with it for you!

- We checked out the fancy, fancy Raffles.  You can pay $10 000 per night!
The gift shop was selling $1300 wallet! So needless to say we bought all our souvenirs there, not.

- Next we went to see St. Andrews Cathedral aka the sugar church.  The white plaster on the outside of the building is made from sugar, egg white, lime (not the fruit).  It creates a very beautiful white effect.  N reported after a lick though that the resulting plaster was not sweet tasting, as we had hoped.

- Fort Canning Park was a lovely gardens that we Moises through.  Unfortunately the Mosquitos and ants were rather unwelcoming hosts so we didn't stay as long as we might have liked.  Kind of random but I thought interesting, there
Also used to face ocean now cannon shoots into city

- Lunch at Boomerang an Australian restaurant N and I had kangaroo pizza.  It was delish!

- We went to the Fullerton Hotel that used to be a post office. mot was beautiful inside!  It had a very funny elephant-unicorn sculpture inside.

- There are Starbucks all over the city, which made me very happy.  So we got frappe chinos before heading to Merlion Park.  On the the way to the park we passed a number of bizarre sculptures including a bird with giant feet and a tribute to Isaac Newton by Salvador Dali that was kind of disturbing.
The Merlion is a national symbol of Singapore.  It is half lion, half mermaid.

- To finish off the day we headed to Orchard Road which is a large series of shopping malls.  They have every store imaginable.  There are tons of designer brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci) but then they also have lots of familiar stores from home (H&M, Levi's, Mango).  Sadly we have no space in our luggage for me to get to shop.  Very cool to see.  In the middle of it all we saw a couple getting wedding photos, outside.

- Went to Cafe Rouge, for dinner.  It was delicious French food.  Although seeing a meal for $6 N ordered something more local that was very interesting looking and tasting.  I had to laugh at him.  My meal came with coffee and not wanting to stay I asked for it to go.  They gave me a styrofoam cup in this interesting bag-carrier.

 Over all an awesome day!


 Randomly bridal photos in the middle of a shopping centre

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