Singapore: Day 1

Jesus, my last post was September of 2012!

Anyways, Singapore. (I'll make up for the lack of posts sooner or later. I still have a Hong Kong post and a Batangas post pending.)

So just last week, my mom, Toni, Karina, Gabriel, and I went to Singapore! Amazing thing too since we had just recently gone to Hong Kong last Christmas. However, unlike the previous vacation, I did not lose my shit in anticipation and excitement. I guess all the thesis work that came before it as well as the Theo Orals made it impossible to see anything beyond those things. God, remind me to make a dedicated Theo Orals blogpost. One of the darkest hours of my life...

Where was I?

Singapore. So on the eve of March 24, I packed my stuff and got ready to leave for another country. This was totally not as exciting as the Hong Kong trip packing. I just picked up a few things from closet and stuck them in my bag.

We left for NAIA terminal 2 at 3 in the morning and proceeded with our checking-in and waiting. I wish I could have gotten some sleep but sleep was impossible since there were no comfy places to sleep and I was already pretty excited to get on board. So I busied myself by enjoying the free internet and munching on a rather buttery coffee bun.

When we did get on the plane, managed to score a seat next to the aisle and two other empty seats. This meant that I had a lot of room for my legs since I didn't need to stuff my laptop and other carry-ons under the seat in front of me.

The flight there was pretty pleasant. Managed to get some delicious chicken (or fish?) curry for lunch and watched an episode of the first season of Dr Who c/o Andy Go.

Being a former flight attendant, my mom always has former co-workers chatting her up for extended periods.

Activity books for the little boy

We then made it to Changi Airport. Woohoo! I had mixed feelings about this because of the way the last travel agency meetup went. I'll have a dedicated blogpost for that but in the meantime suffice to say that we could have ended up taking down a few travel agents and getting thrown into Hong Kong jail if the situation had escalated any further. So for this occassion, we were wiser and I was on alert to keep things cool. I was the Sheriff of Abacantown.

Keepin' it cool

We made our way down to immigration and all the while I was documenting the first few minutes of Singapore. As I was very touristly filming everything, an immigration security guy comes to me and tells me to keep my camera. He points to a sign saying no picture-taking and he asks to see what I've been filming. Like it's some big fucking secret. Like I'm gonna use it to smuggle in drugs. It wasn't bad though, I have to admit. The guy was real nice about it. Just told me not to do it again. God. MAJOR difference from the goddamn Hong Kongers!

Okay not all of them... Just this one guy...

Anyways, we found our driver who would be taking us to our hotel and then we were off. One the road we made some nice conversation with the guy. We talked about durian and about what language people spoke. He said that people mostly spoke Mandarin but he was part of the minority who spoke Malay. Real nice guy. Not bad.

The surroundings were really clean and pristine just as everyone made it out to be. It looked like I was still in one big country club and for a while I was wondering when we would be leaving whatever compound we were in and entering the public highway. Turns out we were there already.

I have to say though, people should stop hyping up places like they're fucking paradise! I mean Singapore IS really clean but I was still able to catch cigarette butts and empty wine bottles in their reservoir! I also caught a man spitting some chewing tobacco on the street. And, yeah, he was a local. Moral of the story: no place is perfect. That isn't to say that Singapore is not a big deal. Far from it as I will elaborate on further in this blogpost.

So we made it to the hotel. Parc Sovereign. It wasn't very far because Singapore is so very small. They identify places by street which still amazes me. As me made our way down the van, the bellboy (I should say bellman or doorman), whose name I forgot, helped us with our stuff and he was a really upbeat and happy to help. My mom asked him how he was doing today and he just beamed and said that he was doing great.

We got to the hotel room and set our stuff down. While we waited for our scheduled city tour, we made our way to some local shops down the road to get some food. On the way we saw this really amazingly designed college campus. It was Lasalle College of Arts and the whole place looked like a designers dream. The students were sitting around doing some yoga on artificial grass and the building was so full of angles that defied traditional non-angular buildings. I couldn't help but think about how boring the Ateneo Campus was in comparison.

Click for a better view of the campus!

Here's another panorama pic. Notice Toni and the rest of my family to the left of the pic.

After a heavy dose of admiring, we came upon this foodcourt with lots of different kinds of food. and Each stall was labeled according to the type of food. There was "Chicken Rice", "Indian Food" and even the aptly named "Pig's Organs" stall. We all got different dishes and I settled with some Indian food. And oh man. Let me tell you. This shit was something else. I got the lamb biryani with two pieces of naan bread. The owners told me that the biryani was only "medium spicy"... God. Never in all my years have I had food that was so amazingly sweat-inducing, face reddening, throat swellingly hot. It was so hot that I was crying and my jaw muscles were literally swollen. You could see it on my face and feel it because they were hard to the touch. I sweat so much that I looked like I had run a marathon. I mean. It was delicious food but GOOD GOD!!! WHEW!!! I'd definitely go for a second round the next time I go there. Great first meal!

Even just looking at it makes my mouth go all watery and mucus-lined. Also there was a non-spicy version available but it was a boring brown color.

After I recovered, we made our way back to the hotel to get picked up for the city tour. The city tour itself was pretty okay. We went over to the Merlion, a Taoist temple, and then a jewellery shop. It is interesting to note that the singaporeans do not have the marketing powers of the Hong Kongers or the Chinese. On our trip to HK and Shenzhen, China, we visited some jade factories and the people were so aggressive in their attempts to take your money. They would talk about fortune and mystical energy and whatever. They had whole spiels prepared. The efforts of these Singaporean jewel sellers were lackluster and really easily defeated. There was this one display full of badly carved jade animals and a woman approached me. She said that the animals ward off evil spirits and they're good for your office and stuff. That was the end of her spiel. In China, the saleslady went on about how the thing she was selling, a baby dragon known as a Pichou, symbolizes good fortune and yadda yadda. She even went on about how it has no asshole (or if you prefer, anus) because good fortune goes in and never leaves your home. She had a good 1:30 minute speech. This Singaporean lady was like "Okay..." when she finished. This was a good thing because after that trip I was so fed up with people trying to sell me bullshit fortune products!

Here's a pic of her pathetic product

This one looks like something from the Nightosphere!

There were some nice things though. Like this pagoda which was part of a giant mural  made from semi-precious stones.

Here are some Merlion and Temple pics.

The next stop for the tour was the National Orchid Garden. Not a big deal actually. Just lots of orchids. The best thing about it was that I saw real life squirrels! They were so cute and so inquisitive looking and adept at climbing! I was so close to them and they looked right at me. I was afraid that one of them would jump me but they just hung out on their branch, hugging themselves. D'awwww.

The last stop was Little India, a place that I wish I could have explored more thoroughly. We couldn't find any nice shops to buy from (probably because we didn't actually see the Little India marketplace but we did manage to find some nice buildings and a lot of pigeons.

Trippy

And that concludes the City Tour.

Since my writing gas has been depleted, I'm gonna go continue the rest of the Singapore trip in the next blogposts to come!

Like whatever, y'know?