Unbelievalble difference from India to Singapore. We arrived early yesterday and got into our room at about 0930 hrs and we fell into bed and slept until around 1500hrs...Showered and left the hotel to explore our surrounds.. We are in a good location right next to Chinatown so there's plenty of shops and restaurants. Peter wanted Chilli crab for dinner so we were poking about all the food stalls in Chinatown or Peoples Park is the shopping area. We found a department store and Peter bought some socks ( again ) I found some perfume for the girls. We must have inspected about 12 Chilli crab restaurants and we finally found the Hawkers market where there is eateries all over the place nearly all specialising in Chilli crab. There is a yellow line about 2 mitres out from the restaurants and the Hawkers are not allowed to sell there wares past that line. We found a place with an outside table within the 2 mitres so our food was served on China plates..whereas the people on the next table who were eating at the same restaurant but were sitting over the yellow line, had their dinner served on Paper plates also they had to buy their drinks from a server who's stall was in the middle of the laneway whereas we got our drinks from the restaurant.. it's quite funny to watch.. Anyway I had some really good satay Sticks and Peter had his crab and totally enjoyed it and got in a real mess.. lucky for wet ones. Dawdling home we walked through the shopping market and picked up a few things, then we found an icecream shop, it had some really weird flavours but we were able to get some that we liked.. Next we found a Croc store...Now I don't normally like Crocs but this shop had so many styles I have never seen before we ended up both purchasing some... Lugging our shopping back to the hotel we were in bed by about 2030hrs..
 I had a crappy nights sleep so was pleased to get up and start a new one . We went off to breakfast and ran into Ray and Maggie from our tour.. we shared first day experiences over breakfast before setting off for a day of riding to Hop on hop off buses of Singapore. The stop was just across the road from our hotel but we must have just missed one because we waited about 45 minutes for the next one.. We got talking to an American couple from California so that killed the time. We started on the red route and went right around getting off eventually at the Marina Sands complex.
Singapore has changed so much since I was here probably over 30 years ago..There's almost nothing from the old days, everything is so modern and clean, I don't think I have ever seen such a spotless city and it's highlighted even more after coming from India where they have such a huge rubbish/pollution problem.. Here in Singapore you have to apply to buy a permit to buy a car, Permits costs $50,000 and there's not guarantee you will get one.. The permit lasts 10 Years Next cars have a 100% mark up on prices, so a car costs twice as much ..So only the very rich have cars and the government controls the number of cars on the road. High point of this is there is no pollution the air is squeaky clean which is really awesome after seeing India and China's pollution. Someone has got it right.
Anyway enough of that, our first stop was to the big Flower gardens which were pretty cool, we went around the sky walk and took some photos, next we went across to the Marina Bay hotel and went up onto the rooftop lookout..OMG what an amazing vista from the top., we got to see the city in all its glory. We also got to see the people swimming in the infinity pool but we only saw them from the cheap seats..lol. It was spectacular. Well worth a visit if your heading this way.
We then had to wait for nearly an hour before we could get on the Yellow route bus which we sat on for 3/4 of its trip before hoping off in Orchard road for a look at the shops.. We did that and had some lunch in one of the centres... I have been finding the shopping centres a bit odd, most of the room is taken up with escalators with the shops stuck around the edges.. Anyway that's just my thoughts... After a late lunch we got the bus back to the hotel.. Peter went for a swim and I went to look at the shops behind our hotel and found the same problem, I took an escalator up to the second floor only it bypassed the 2nd floor and went straight to the 3rd floor.. I ended up getting the elevator.. It was really confusing.
Back at the hotel we rested for an hour before going back out to Hawkers Street and more Chilli Crab..apparently he's having it again tomorrow for lunch before we check out.
Flying out tomorrow night & home on Saturday morning...Camera going back into retirement..