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Wednesday 7th March
It's taken us 30 hours to get here and it's been a long tiring journey. We avoided being scammed for more money twice: first by the woman in Thailand who tried to convince us to pay her for Malaysian visa's (which are free to the British) and second by the bus driver when we got to Butterworth in Malaysia who also wanted money for customs to get into Singapore where our entry is also free! We did end up having to pay around $5 more for the last section of the bus journey from Malaka to Singapore though as apparently 'our ticket wasn't valid' but overall not too bad.
We arrive at The Inn Crowd hostel and it's a great place with a pool table, organised activities to get you meeting other people, a bar and free internet access for half an hour every day (if you can ever get on). So we settle into our dorm shared with 15 other people.
We venture out to the Botanic Gardens which are vast - it's so lovely here. We watch a man throw bread to the massive fish and turtles with odd shaped heads. The National Orchid Garden is also on site here and filled with the most stunning orchids you can imagine. Apparently you can have an orchid named after you for around $1000 Singapore Dollars. How fab would that be?
We catch a taxi to the Night Safari and I just had to take a picture of the sign on the taxi drivers seat saying 'Bags for Vomitting are below'. He then warns us that he's not a great driver. Actually he's kidding and he's incredibly helpful too. All in all a good start to our time in Singapore.
The Night Safari was good fun, very educational and I saw yet another giraffe so I was very happy.
Thursday 8th March
Kate flies out tomorrow so decides to go on the city tour bus to take in as much of the place as possible. I sit in the common room and plan my day. I get chatting to Anna from Holland who starts off by telling me that she heard Singapore was boring. 'Not at all', I exclaimed and off starts the beginning of a really great day.
We visit the Asian History Museum which is amazing - there's so much to learn about all the different cultures within the South East Asia region. Then we become 'ladies what lunch' and take a leisurely stop at a cheap and cheerful place in Clarke Quay, sitting amongst the locals.
We head back to the hostel later on as we signed up for a free walking tour around the Little India area of the city. We begin at a mosque and are permitted to walk around it with our two little muslim girl tour guides who run off in front of us, encouraging us on. What a beautiful building. We watch the men praying but can't see the women as they have to pray in a separate area.
Then we go into one of the small indian cafe's and drink Tea Ama which is basically english tea with condensed milk and sugar. They 'pull' the tea before they let you drink it which means they pour it from a great height from one jug into another, and it gets all frothy. Apparently it helps to cool it down so you can drink it straight away too. Mmm - tastes lovely. We sample various vegetarian snacks and then head off on our way.
Next stop is the hindu temple which is so vibrant in colour. They are playing their traditional music which they do at around 5pm every day and as I read some of the stories accompanying the art on the walls and listen to the music, you can see how they wrote the Karma Sutra - it's all very sexual.
Moving on only a few yards up the street is a buddhist temple. We rub the large laughing buddha statue that stands outside the temple on his head, shoulders, arms and belly, then put our hands inside our pockets as apparently it will bring you good luck, wealth and prosperity. They take this very seriously too, as we walk away a man goes up and rubs furiously on the buddha and walks off smiling to himself.
We then go inside and burn incense sticks to the goddess of mercy. Then we take a jar of fortune sticks and kneel on the mat and shake them until one falls out, all the while thinking about something we'd like to know the answer to. Then we throw the ying and yang pieces - you get 3 changes to throw them so they fall opposite to each other. Mine land yang side up all 3 times - apparently that means that now is not the time to be asking the question. But two of the other girls go and collect their fortune slip which corresponds to the relevant stick.
Further down the road is a Catholic church and also a Synagogue. I think it's fantastic that so many religions and so many races all live harmoniously together in this city.
Wandering through the markets there are shops that sell paper replicas of anything you can imagine, from paper umbrellas, to credit cards, to shoes, to paper TV's. During ghost month people choose things that their dead relatives loved in their life time and burn them so they have something to keep them happy in the afterlife.
Since we're in Little India, we go for indian food which is lovely. Then what would an evening in Singapore be without going to Raffles. Sir Stamford Raffles put Singapore on the map and we head over to his old hotel and have a Sinapore Sling cocktail to say good-bye to Kate before she flies to Australia in the morning.
Friday 9th March
Kate left in the wee hours this morning but I'll see her again in Sydney in a few weeks. It feels strange her not being here and I'm a little sad.
When Anna arrived her backpack unfortunately didn't - it went on travels of it's own! We wake up and find it still hasn't got here and so I lend her some clothes and we trot off shopping down Orchard Road to get her a couple of outfits just incase it doesn't show up for a few days. Oh dear - forced to go shopping - what a chore - tee hee. I take her in all the usual suspects, Top Shop, Zara, even Marks and Spencer!
We arrive back to the hostel at tea time, exhausted, and discover that her bag has turned up! So we trundle back to the shops and she gets an exchange on her new clothes for some perfume because they don't do refunds here at all.
We go for dinner in an egyptian cafe which is superb, fantastic mezze and shish kebabs. Mmmm.
Saturday 10th March
Anna's bus was booked for 8.30am so we said our good-bye's last night. However, I come down in the morning to find her still there. She'd set her alarm clock last night but somehow it had gone wrong and she ended up at the bus station at 9.30am and was totally shocked to find it was an hour later than she thought. Good job she's got a sense of humour. So she buys another bus ticket to leave at 12.30pm - we catch some late breakfast and I walk her to the bus stop just to make sure nothing else goes wrong. Hee hee.
So I find myself alone in Singapore and it's quite liberating. I don't have to consider anyone else, I can go where I want, do what I want, yes I think I like this. I head off to the Art Museum which is the most beautiful building and get chatting to a Swedish woman about the art.
Next I head off to the National Museum and eat my lunch while reading their copy of the Lonely Planet World Guide which Charina kindly bought for me for my 30th birthday. It's funny now I've travelled to some of the places it brings it all alive. I read it from a different perspective.
I walk around the living gallery which plays people's stories to help bring alive what life was like then, everything from prostitutes, to the outlawing of polygamy and inter-racial marriages.
I head back to the Botanic Gardens and sign up for the free guided tour of the Primary Rainforest which is wonderful. I wrote down loads of facts, so for those of you who aren't at all interested in plants, you'll need to skip down a bit.
- The fig tree is also called the banyan tree which translates as the merchant tree. It offers a lot of shade so merchants used to sit around it discussing trading.
- Buddha is seen meditating under the banyan tree with the 7 headed naga (snake) hovering over his head protecting him. The guide made us laugh by saying she thought the snake was there 'to stop him getting s*** on by the birds' - and those were her exact words!
- The strangling fig kills the host tree it grows up around by surrounding it and the tree inside eventually decomposes so you are left with a great big hollow middle inside.The calophyllum tree here is a relation of the one in Borneo. Scientists doing tests to try to find a cure for HIV discovered this tree had great healing properties but when they went back to Borneo to collect more samples, they had been wiped out due to deforestation. They searched all the botanic gardens in the world and can only find relatives of the original tree. So we may have lost one potential cure for HIV.
- Primary rainforest twice the size of Singapore's land area is cut down every day.
- They have a lot of lightning in Singapore and as some of the trees are so tall and very old, they pay tree surgeons from Australia to fix electricity conductors to them and run wires for over 200metres away from the trees at a cost of over $7000 Singapore dollars per tree.
- Primary rainforest trees are very slow growing and don't flower for the first 60 years.
- Palm trees and banana trees are not actually trees, they don't propogate by seeds germinating. Instead you have to take cuttings. The stem is actually just the old leaves that have built up to support the plant.
- In Brazil a fungus killed all the banana trees a few years ago so now all bananas there are cultivated from malaysian bananas.
- The cicadas are incredibly noisy here and only emerge every 2-3years. Apparently in India they only emerge every 17 years.
- The reason the Japanese invaded Singapore in World War 2 was because of the rubber trees, for tyres, etc for the war. And rubber is what made Singapore rich.
I take myself off to Zam Zam's and eat murtbarak which is like a square piece of thin naan bread with onion, meat and egg in the middle of it folded over and fried on a griddle. It comes with a dahl like sauce that you drizzle over the top of it. I sit there in companionable silence with a Chinese lady and two Indian men who don't speak a word of english. Well I say silence - the asian men do have a tendency to eat very noisily and usually with their mouths open.
Sunday 11th March
I go to visit Chinatown and walk around the Heritage Centre which is fascinating. Wandering down the street I stop to look at some beautiful photography and get chatting with the man running the stall. They are his fathers photo's and he has written poetry to accompany them. He explains about one image in particular which won a national prize as the reflections in the water could almost be dragons and fishes - both very important symbols for the Chinese.
He writes my name for me in Chinese and says I can check with anyone walking past that this is correct, so he stops a woman in the street who dutifully reads out my name. It is made up of two characters that mean, Beautiful and One who faces challenges.
Monday 12th March
I get up early and go to the airport to meet Simon. It's so exciting to see him. I can't believe he's here. We head straight out to take a tour of the city since he's only got 2 days here. He wants to see the Botanic Gardens so I'm delighted to show him around and spout off about all the great things I learnt on my guided tour!
It's fantastic to have him here. 4 months was a long time to be apart. It also makes me realise how much I miss everyone else at home too.
We go to Raffles in the evening for a drink and I tell him I've heard that the Swiss Hotel, which is just opposite, has a bar on the 70th floor. Apparently they do food too. So we go along to check it out and end up with a 5 course deluxe dinner with champagne, red wine and a view that is absolutely stunning. Dessert is a smorgasbord of chocolate delights. Mmm - I think I've gone to heaven or do I just feel that way because I'm on the 70th floor!
Tuesday 13th March
We spot our names written in chinese on key rings and laugh at the fact that Simon means Western and Prompt (yawn), but mine means Prosperity and Lucky (hooray).
We wander around Bugis area and I show Simon the temples in Little India. We go to the buddhist temple and shake the fortune sticks and this time my ying and yang pieces fall correctly so I collect my fortune ticket. Very interesting indeed - and that's all I'll say on the matter. Unfortunately for Simon his don't land ying and yang so no fortune telling for him today.
I get him to rub the laughing buddha statue and put his hands in his pockets to bring him wealth, then we find a display showing the 12 signs of the chinese zodiac. He rushes around to find ours - I'm a rabbit so we quickly read what that means for me this year, then we go just around the corner to look at the dragon and discover that his sign board is the only one that's missing.
By this point what with his rubbish name translation, not getting his fortune told and then the dragon board missing we fell about laughing.
So we head off on Tour-McNair! We go to St Andrews Cathedral which is right in the heart of Singapore. It's a huge majestic white building that has been struck by lightning not once but twice - there goes that myth.
The reason we're in the cathedral - before anyone starts jumping to the wrong conclusions - was because Simon's great grandfather helped oversee the detail work on the tower and there is a plaque with a special commemoration to him inside the church.
In addition, he had a street named after him so we hop in a taxi and find it hilarious as we drive up and down the street to discover McNair Estate, McNair Road Bus Stop, McNair Spring, and of course there's the token photo under the street sign.
Then it's off to the Night Safari. I had such a good time with Kate that it was definitely worth taking Simon there. At the educational animal show, I knew what to expect, so I sat us down right next to the box where they hide the snake under people's feet. Tee hee. Naughty me. Simon took it quite well when they opened the box next to his feet and there was a huge python inside. Her name was Maggie - somehow that doesn't make her seem quite so scary does it?
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