We woke up to another 3H day in Singapore - hot, humid and hazy! (PSI today 162 - 200.)

When we first arrived in Singapore 4 days ago we walked from the MRT subway station to the hotel about 10 blocks away, but since then we smartened up! The hotel provides a shuttle service to and from the MRT every half hour - MUCH easier than walking in this climate! We had about 20 minutes to kill this morning before the shuttle's next departure so we had a quick look through the Teng Ern Jee Temple, right next door .  

From what we can tell, the Tneg Ern Jee Temple is now a collaborative effort by 2 temples and a German Franciscan church - good karma in helping each other. Currently, it provides a traditional Chinese medical clinic to provide free medical services to the poor. Its main deity is Buddha. Compared to the temples we saw in Japan, this one was quite small. In all of our travels so far in Singapore, we have noticed many small temples and shrines weaved into more of the everyday buildings and neighbourhoods - more so than the more stand-alone structures in Japan. No temple book entries here for Eve!

The shuttle arrived and off we went to the Novena Square Mall, which is where we get dropped off and picked up - it connects with the MRT in the lower level, two floors down. Today was breakfast at the Coffee Bean and the Tea Leaf at the mall. It was chosen as I noticed that they served drip coffee yesterday. Almost everywhere else serves instant coffee that is made in several ways . The coffee here in Asia is all very strong, but this drip coffee was just what I was looking for. Of course, I had to pay dearly for a "large" coffee, $4.70. I also had a "US Style cranberry muffin", which was like the ones at home except this one was loaded with about 4 times the cranberries! Eve had a ridiculously expensive Jasmine tea (about $5.50 for about 250 ml) but the justification was they "only use whole leaf tea - hand plucking only the top two leaves and bud" - she did say it was really delicious, and also ordered a solid sausage roll. Enough relaxing ........on with seeing more of Singapore.

Our first destination today was "Little India", a very colourful part of Singapore originally settled by Indian and Tamil residents. We walked through many, many small shops on the streets and in the malls - some selling food, some creating and selling flower garlands and lots and lots of clothing! We saw some beautiful Indian gowns and sarees as well as some casual regular clothing . By far, the majority was women's clothing. In many of the clothing shops, merchants had their sewing machines up front and were sewing their wares. Most of the shops selling the flower garlands were interesting as there were people weaving the fresh flowers into short and long garlands - some quite intricate - they were also selling the small flowers for people to take home to weave their own. The flower garlands are a symbol of spirituality & respect, commonly used to welcome guests, in marriage ceremonies and to honour deities.

Our next destination was the Promenade/Marina area (the Gardens by the Bay are on one side of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, and the Promenade and Marina area are on the other side of the hotel.) This is the sight of many of the other ultra expensive hotels - like the Conrad Hilton, Pan Pacific, Ritz Carlton and Mandarin Oriental. We saw two colonial style hotels, icons in Singapore, Raffles Hotel, established in 1887 (managed by Fairmont Hotels) and Fullerton Hotel, now a 5 star luxury hotel, but was originally the General Post office building opened in 1928. We also walked by the "Esplanade Theatres on the Bay", consisting of a concert hall which seats 1800 people and a theatre for the performing arts which seats 2,000. They are very unique looking buildings.

We walked along many of the roads in the Marina area used for the Formula One Singapore Grand Prix, which happened the weekend before our arrival :-( It was the first Formula One street course in Asia and the first race held at night - with the temperatures and humidity here, it still makes for some pretty high temperatures for the drivers and the cars . While we were on Orchard Road the first day here there was a Formula One Souvenir store we had to check out - nope, even though it was the last day for the store and they was "clearance" pricing in effect, we couldn't afford anything in that store!

We visited the "Merlion", which sits at the mouth of the Singapore River - it is called the personification of Singapore. It is a lion's head on the body of a fish. (Singapore is known as the "Lion City". It was originally a marketing icon and mascot for Singapore. It stands 8.6 m (28 ft) tall. There is also a "cub" Merlion just behind it standing 2 m (6.5 ft) tall which a lot of people overlook. The Merlion is a very popular tourist destination with many photographers on site today, many trying to capture pictures so it looks like their subjects are catching the water coming from the Merlion's mouth!

After walking through the many, many shops in the area, we headed to Chinatown to do a little business.....to ride the MRT and public transport systems (buses, trains, etc) we got a 3 day pass on arrival then yesterday got a 2 day one to cover our last two days here. Today we had to turn in the first card, since they were expired - each for a $10 refund. The refund cannot be received at every station, but we were going to be closest to Chinatown today and decided to cash these in before we lost them or got them mixed up with our current card!

We went on to Clarke's Quay (pronounced "key"), further down along the Singapore River . We saw another station for Singapore River Cruises as well as the very colourful Singapore Ministry of Communications Building and some people taking the Gmax reverse bungee ride and the G5 Extreme Swing ride. Eve said no to both! Clarke's Quay is known as a trendy neighbourhood of shops, nightclubs and restaurants. Greg spied an Irish Pub here in the brochure and of course we had to check it out. We arrived during happy hour - it was a lot "glitzier" and bigger than other Irish Pubs we've been to. We need to bring some of our Irish friends to know if the pictures of green on the wall were actually from Ireland! Greg had a Kilkenny draft for the bargain Happy Hour price of $10 and Eve had a cocktail, which at home would be about $6, for a mere $17 here.....she only had one. We ordered supper here with Greg ordering Fish and Chips - the chips were mutantly large potato wedges, so big he only got 6, and mashed peas. Eve went with a half rack of ribs which came with "skinny" fries, which turned out to be just regular sized straight fries. Desserts started at $14, so we passed!

After taking some night pictures of Clarke's Quay, we caught the MRT back to our home station, Novena, caught the shuttle and got back to the hotel about 8 this evening. Eve wanted to pick up a few things at the grocery store next door - we walked across the courtyard between our hotel and its sister Ramada Hotel - all the trees in the courtyard were beautifully lit with multi-coloured lights.

While Eve was getting what she needed I noticed something very interesting.....I was checking out what kind of cooking oil they used here, lots of palm oil and sunflower oil, but it seems canola oil is starting to make a dent in the market. I even found one manufactured in Saskatoon!

Back to the hotel to get packed to depart Wednesday evening for the airport for the next red eye flight back to Osaka (Singapore Airlines departure at 0125, Thursday morning). We will be checking out in the morning and leaving our luggage at the hotel until we head for the airport.