Singapore

After an 8 hour bus ride which had involved two stops for passport control and a potentially expensive attempt at not declaring a bottle of vodka we arrived in a wet and humid Singapore. We had been organised enough to book ourselves some accommodation and were pleased to discover that the hostel we were staying at was excellent. We were also pleased to meet our Singapore tour guide, Daniel William Wallace, who was undertaking the second half of his elective having spent the first half in Northern India. The difference between India and Singapore is pretty extreme in that you head from chaotic dirt filled madness to a world of precise commercial calmness.

Thus we spent the next two days idly touring the limited sites of Singapore without having to once look at a guide book or read a map. Thus we could use all our mental capacity in preventing ourselves from becoming soaken from the constant Singapore rain. The best way to achieve dryness being to move stealthy from mall to mall; not a difficult feat in a city which would be more aptly named Singamall. Or indeed Singapour given the amount of rain we had to endure. However, after about 5 minutes we felt malled-out and so we turned to our tour guide for some more interesting activities. Luckily he had much experience in guiding and was able to dredge up some activities, other than shopping, for us to enjoy:

1) Lugeing:

We spent our final afternoon on Sentosa island which is a short monorail, or more expensive cable-car ride, from Singapore. It is mall free and acts as a Scarboroughesque amusements arcade, without the gambling of course; this is after all Singapore the cleanest of clean cut cities. You can spend your hours there playing crazy golf, heading up the Carlsberg tower to look back upon the malls of Singapore, laze upon a man made beach looking back at the huge cargo ships carrying various mall goods or luge. The luge involves climbing onto a piece of plastic on wheels, pulling the handles back to go and pulling them further back to stop. In Singapore you are given a helmet and a full safety talk before being allowed to trundle to the next safety check. After which you are free to whiz down the hillside track as quickly as possible with the winner taking all. At the end you get your picture taken and are then encouraged to slow down by large sponge safety barriers and a bored looking luge attendant. However, an alternative ending to your journey is to pretend you’ve lost control of your luge buggy and to crash into the safety barriers, thereby, sending them flying and an angry looking luge attendant scurrying. Full credit to Dan for not even attempting to be subtle and sending them flying with a head on collision. Great stuff!!

2) Chilli-Crab:

Thanks to some insider information we learned that as part of the Singapore food festival we could lay our impoverished student hands on some free chilli-crabs. And so we collected our free food vouchers from the tourist information and headed to Chinatown. Once there we found a respectable looking chilli crab merchant, ordered the bare minimum to accompany our crab (i.e. a drink and boiled rice) and sat back in anticipation. We were then presented with a huge plate of crabs submersed in chilli sauce and a pair of chop sticks. Now for those of you who have used chopsticks before we would like to point out that attempting to eat fully shelled crabs, even with a claw crusher, covered in thick red sauce is somewhat challenging. Unless of course you’re one of the two Chinese guys sitting opposite us; which enables you to gracefully eat a whole plate of crab whilst remaining spotless. It also enables you to sit and laugh at 3 hungry westerners struggling to eat chilli crabs and looking like a bunch of 3 year olds in a ketchup factory.

3) Museum & Outdoor Cinema:

The national museum of Singapore provided us with some interesting mall relief as we wandered through its many rooms of interesting exhibits. They provided us with insights into the food of Singapore (no mention of chilli crabs though), the lifestyles of the different ethnic groups, the history of Singapore cinema and most interestingly a stone banquet in which all the food had been carved from different rocks. The banquet was so realistic that our tour guide had admitted to almost trying to steal a sandwich until he realised at the last minute that it would have broken a tooth or two. Interestingly there was also a BBC party taking place but despite being licence fee payers we were refused entry. Maybe if I had pointed out that my father was the star of one of their most popular afternoon programmes, namely Diagnosis Murder, we may have been permitted to have supped champagne with the big wigs: maybe next time.

Outside the museum there was an outdoor cinema where we spent the evening watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We all agreed we enjoyed it but then proceeded to be demented by Moon River for the next week and a half. Having just recalled that I will now be singing it at random times for another two weeks. “My huckleberry friend….”

4) A Singapore Sling at Raffles Hotel:

An overpriced, funny pink coloured cocktail, drunk whilst surrounded by multitudes of people drinking the same drink and eating peanuts in a bar with a floor covered in peanut shells. And it didn’t even taste that nice (although Em says she really liked hers but that’s probably because I paid!) Still it just has to be done and no trip to Singapore can be said to be complete without parting with large amounts of money for a Singapore Ming, err sorry Sling. It was great fun, the hotel was pretty damn swish and our tour guide provided an excellent target for peanut shells.

And so we bid farewell to Singapore thankful that we’d had Dan as our guide so that we could avoid mall boredom at all costs. What we weren’t thankful for was the discovery of “The Maximator” a 12.8% Dutch beer that was very cheap and could be purchased from the 24 hour 7/11 opposite the hostel. But that’s another story….

More photos to follow soon. Love Em and Si xxx