Wednesday, July 19, 2006

 

Singapore: So Much Food... So Little Time

In the last few days before arriving in Singapore we have met a number of people from this island. Naturally we asked them from a locals point of view what we should not miss. All have said that there is basically nothing to do except shopping and eating. Wrong, Wrong, WRONG! Whilst this is definitely the place to come if you want some retail therapy and also suits the eating machines amongst us, it has so much more than that. Having said that, the only reason why Singapore doesn't appear at the top of the medals tables at major sporting events is because Shopping and Eating are not (yet) Olympic sports.

It probably didn't help that we arrived in the middle of the 'Singapore Sale', which basically seems to be a huge event coordinated by all the retailers, to encourage both the locals and the tourists to spend more money. Orchard Road is the local equivalent of Oxford Street and it probably would have taken us a couple of days just to make our way up and down each side of the street and visit all the shops. In addition to this there just seem to be shopping malls all over the place, and if you ever tire of the shopping then every single one of the malls has at least one area dedicated to the other competition sport that takes place here. Eating.

Prior to arriving here Kuala Lumpur was holding the prize for the best place to eat on this trip, but after a few hours in Singapore things were looking uncertain. Eating in Kuala Lumpur is definitely cheaper, and the choice is almost as varied, but somehow it just seems impossible to avoid food in Singapore. The locals certainly seem to dedicate an awful lot of time to eating, and even in the relatively quiet suburb where we stayed there was a 24 hour food court on the corner of the street.

Somehow, in amongst all this 'sport' we actually managed to get around and see some other bits of the city. First of all we joined the steady procession of tourists heading to the Long Bar at Raffles for their Singapore Sling. If you're lucky (and you aren't wearing shorts) then you can sneak inside the main hotel building and have a look at the lobby. We didn't get very far though, as even with the proper attire we only managed to get a few feet inside before meeting 'Residents Only' signs. For the sake of the proper fee paying guests the Long Bar is conveniently at the other end of the hotel buildings, in fact it's actually about as far from the main hotel as it's possible to be without being on the other side of the street! It's all very 'traditional' and there are peanuts and local birdlife but, more on the bar and 'The Sling' in the next post.... I will say however that it glides majestically to the top of the "Most Expensive Round Of Drinks All Year" league (although the previous chart topper, The Peninsula in Hong Kong, may still win since we only went in there for Mark to see the gent's toilets!).

I (Nikky) was pleasantly surprised that there weren't tower blocks and sky scrapers crammed onto every piece of vacant land. It was just fantastic, a perfect balance of old and new, open spaces, greenery and a great waterfront full of bars and eateries. You would clearly need several months to try them all out and a heafty budget to boot. One of the most noteworthy problems in Singapore is the humidity but we had arranged for it to rain for the 5 days before we arrived so we could have our 4 days in comfort! If you don't believe us then you can just say that we were rather jammy! (Apart from the photos above there are also night pictures here).

So in this city with nothing to do apart from eat and shop, we found ourselves pretty busy. We spent the whole day at the zoo, yup, a full 8 hours of wandering around saying "hello mate" to anything that would look at us ...... like a fully grown male lion is really going to be our mate! We tried it with the giraffes but they had other ideas. At one end of their pen is a raised platform so you can see what the world looks like from their perspective. The giraffes seemed to take pleasure is sauntering to the raised area so that everyone would race up the steps to get a better look and just at the moment you reach the top they decided to turn round and walk the other way. So you walk back down the steps and start walking towards them and looking up at them and just when you get near to them ... you guessed it , they head off to the raised platform! We swear at this point we could hear them laughing!

One of the shopping centres here has what is allegedly the largest fountain in the world, and having trekked through about 2 miles of shopping mall we eventually found it. We were expecting it to be shooting water hundreds of feet into the air but that doesn't seem to be it's thing. In fact the water only reached two or three feet when we were there, but the reason people visit is because it's supposed to bring luck. Apparently walking around it three times will bring financial fortune, hence it is named the Fountain of Wealth. We joined the queue to walk around, but at the time of writing we are still waiting for the floods of money to arrive.....

Our accommodation here was a great place which we only found out about by reading someone else's blog (friends of people we met in New Zealand, thanks for the info Adam and Michelle!). It was more like staying at a friends house than staying in a hostel, so if anyone is heading for Singapore we can highly recommend One Florence Close.

So after four days in Singapore we would have to disagree with those locals who claim there's nothing to do here. In fact we got so settled in that we still missed out on several places that we could have visited (did we mention that the food was great?!). But once again it was time to move on so we headed off to the airport. Oh yes the airport, part-shopping mall part-amusement park, don't worry about getting stuck in Singapore airport for a few hours there is plenty to do! We don't have too much time to spare though, we're heading back to the southern hemisphere again, time to go to Africa.....

# posted by Mark @ Wednesday, July 19, 2006
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