We spent Tuesday through Thursday, May 25-27, in Singapore. What an amazing city!
We were most impressed with how clean and well organized everything was. In a lot of ways, Singapore is run like a corporation, with the president (who basically has no political opposition) making over $2 million a year! The subway system was really incredible, especially compared to NYC's. There was no possible way to fall onto the tracks, because there are doors on the platform that don't open until the train arrives. And the subway stations were beautiful and unique.
We thought it was funny how many public service announcements we found throughout Singapore. But they must be working--everyone seems to be pretty happy and well behaved.
But I guess the behavior could also have a lot to do with the stiff penalties on everything. It's a good thing we didn't try to bring illegal drugs into the country--that would merit the death penalty in Singapore! In any case, we never saw anything do anything suspect in Singapore, and we never even saw a policeman. We realized how safe the city was when we saw two little girls (no older than six) in dance outfits leaving a subway station and hopping into the car of their mother who had been waiting for them at the curb.
On Tuesday, we spent the day on Sentosa Island, a resort area of Singapore that is a mix between Disneyland and Las Vegas, with several man-made beaches thrown in. The beaches are pretty, but we didn't want to swim. With all the barges that pass by Singapore (apparently nearly half of the international shipping routes pass by Singapore), the water isn't very clean. It turned out that there was even a small oil spill on one of the passing tankers on the day we were there, so we're especially glad we didn't get in the water.
On Tuesday night, we went to the Cliff restaurant on Sentosa Island. We had always planned on going to a fancy New York restaurant together (a restaurant named Daniel) when I finished school, but that never happened since we had to leave NYC sooner than we'd planned. So we celebrated in Singapore (and, unfortunately, probably ended up spending more money than we would have in New York). It was a beautiful restaurant and a fantastic meal of foie gras, scallops, roast duck, red snapper, sorbet, various desserts and virgin drinks.
Our food tourism didn't end on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, we had lunch at a "hawker center" in Little India. At this open air food court, we ate food from each of three primary cultures in Singapore--Chinese, Indian, and Malaysian. With drinks and several different dishes, the total came to less than US$15. Amazing.
Our favorite activity in Singapore (other than eating) was the Night Safari on Wednesday night. It was basically a narrated tram ride through a zoo. But because you go at night, you can't see the cages/barriers between you and the animals. It really seems as if the lions and tigers could just walk right up to you and eat you!
Speaking of being eaten by animals. . .we had fun putting our feet into a pool of skin-eating fish for five minutes at the end of the night. It felt really funny, but apparently it is one of the best ways to get rid of dead skin. After this experience, Andrea has decided to stick with normal pedicures. And I'll just stick with having dead skin on my heels.
On Thursday, we visited the local offices of my law firm, Latham & Watkins, and met with one of the attorneys there. After meeting with him, we decided that from a career perspective, Singapore would be a great place for me to come work for a while. But after our walks around the city, we concluded that Singapore would be a hard place to have a family, since it is always so hot--the high temperature is in the 80s or 90s year round, with 100% humidity. We were nearly always dripping with sweat. On Thursday afternoon, we searched for nearly an hour to find a celebrated Singaporean dessert--ice kacang (pronounced kuh-CHAWN). Ice kacang is a mixture of shaved ice, evaporated milk, flavored syrups, mixed fruit, jelly cubes, cooked red beans, and creamed corn. It turned out not to be as good as we'd anticipated, so we ended up getting slurpees at Seven Eleven to cool off.
Among the highlights of the trip was our amazing hotel--the Conrad Hotel. We took full advantage of several of the hotel's luxuries, including the pillow menu. Our favorite was the "ploh" pillow--a down-filled body pillow.
In Singapore, we hit the half-way point in our trip, which meant that we had to do some laundry, which we did by hand in our bathroom. While doing laundry isn't the most pleasant way to spend several hours in a beautiful city halfway around the world, it did mean that we didn't have to check any bags on our flights.
2 comments:
Love the post and the pictures! Sounds like a whole lot of fun!
I just spent some time catching up on your blogs. Wonderful pictures. Skin eating fish? I don't remember hearing about that in your recap. I know that little fact would have stayed with me! Thanks for taking the time to share a few insights of your trip with us.
Post a Comment