Singapore January 16

Sentosa Island Merlion

Hot, sticky, partly cloudy 31 degrees – real feel 39!!!

Finally we are sleeping a bit later…7:00 am, for some reason the monkeys thought we deserved a lie-in today, we didn’t hear them at all.

Seems like I forgot to write about what we did last night…I don’t know if it is the wine…the heat or the sleepiness, but I’m still figuring out what day it is half of the time. Anyway…we spent the evening (yesterday) in town at Vivo City…a  mall complex…a regular mall and tons of restaurants and one of Singapore's 2 cruise ship terminals. I’m not sure what I expected from the mall, but it is pretty much just like a North American mall with us being the visible minority. We wandered the mall a bit before sharing a bottle of wine and a couple of appetizers at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant – the same one we went to last year in Bristol. In general, what we’ve seen of Singapore isn’t cheap. I think it has a bunch to do with the crappy Canadian dollar, but also just the prices here. For example…a Starbuck’s latte that would cost about $5.00 at home was $7.20 here. One thing that makes us feel a bit better about the prices at the hotel, is that they are pretty much the same outside of the hotel.

We also checked out the mall grocery store. Vacation grocery stores are always on my ‘must-do’ list. This one was a bit of a disappointment. Things here are just too much the same as at home - no interesting chips to try.

The last thing we checked out before heading home was the boardwalk along the Singapore harbour. This is lined with restaurants, pubs and wine bars. We didn’t think it would be right to walk TO the wine bar without stopping AT the wine bar. We had a great spot right along the water.

nature walk

It seems that places here don’t have their own washrooms, but you are supposed to use public ones which seem to be everywhere. The thought of a public toilet doesn’t thrill me, but these washrooms are pristine – not fancy, but spotless and I feel totally safe.

Our hotel has a shuttle that drops off and picks up at the mall. We weren’t finished until after the last shuttle left, so we took the tram back – tickets for this are provided by the hotel, but no one seemed to want to look at ours.

TODAY…breakfast as usual was at the hotel followed by pool time, our daily 600 ml beer at the pool during a downpour, a bit of swimming, a visit from the peacocks and back to the room for a nap. We skipped lunch yesterday and today as we ate breakfast pretty late.

My horoscope for the coming year

Our evening activity was to checkout the Sentosa island (where we are staying) entertainment area and casino. We could have taken the tram, but decided to walk at least part of the way. Sentosa island has a nature walk through the jungle that we’ve been meaning to try. We thought this would be a good time and I suppose it was, but 10 minutes in and we were drenched. The humidity coupled with the heat and us hiking up a hill made us a bit ‘damp’ – damp is pretty much unavoidable here. Besides the heat and humidity it was a pretty awesome trail, and by trail I mean a paved path with info plaques.

The casino was exactly what we expected…you have to bring your passport, it was pretty busy, and the slots weren’t kind to us. It was fun to visit, but it would have been a bit more fun to have won!

Our cab driver who brought us from the airport told us Singapore is preparing for Chinese New Year. We saw evidence of this around the casino…my horoscope for the year suggests drinking less…I’ll try, but I’m on vacation after all!!