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Got to Singapore! Flight was great, Singapore Airlines are fantastic and I met a couple of Australian monks who'd been on a pilgrimage to Sri Lanka! Quite a classy way to go on a pilgrimage.
 Singapore completely dissorientated me for the first day. I guess I got some sort of reverse culture shock from India. There was no dirt, rickshaws, no-one was beeping their horns, it was humid and everything here looks, well is, very futuristic. I got the underground to Chinatown, used a heat sensitive toilet, and got lost for the first time of many in what is really the easiest city to navigate in the World. I keep being distracted!!!
My hostel's pretty cool though it was a shock suddenly having to share a room with 5 other people and lock things up. I moved to my own room after four nights because I couldn't stand the snoring or the constantly needing something from the bottom of my locker!!! The hostel is really fantastic though, the staff answered about 100 questions I had and it's really clean and friendly and they did my laundry!!! I was so sick of doing it by hand!
On my first day I went with a German guy to little India (nothing like the real thing :)) and ate in a hawker centre. These are enormous food markets where you choose stuff from hundreds of little stalls, and I really like Chinese food so it was good. Then we went to a huge electronics mall (I was going to see if phones were cheaper here but it's not really the case), and then shot to the top of a 70 floor hotel and saw all of Singapore! It was pretty amazing. Thn we walked back and I was really amazed by how huge everything was :).
The next two days I spent looking round Orchard Road (which is a huge shopping district) and travelling around on the MRT (I love it, it's like being in a sci fi movie where everyone's Chinese and the trains all talk with a weird British accent.) I got lost in a shopping mallness, it was lots of malls joined together, which covered about 2 miles. Then I tried to find the zoo but got off at the wrong station and wondered lost in Singapore for a little while longer. I also went in to the city centre and made myself very dizzy looking up a lot - because that's the sort of silly thing I do when I'm in a big city I guess.
On Monday I went to the rainforest gardens with a girl called Rhoda from Northampton. We had an awesome day, the gardens were very beautiful and Rhoda was very funny. Then we got dressed smartly and went back to the top of the big hotel to see the sunset. After that we did the proper tourist thing and went to Raffles hotel to have a Singapore Sling. Raffles is a really famous, posh hotel with loads of atmosphere and even though the cocktail was a bit weird it was a pretty classy place to have it.
Yesterday I had to do boring things like go to the Thai embassy to get a visa extension (I'm thinking of staying in Thailand a long time now as Oz isn't really appealing anymore - expensive and crap weather when I'll be there). Then I posted some stuff home and went out for drinks with some friends from the hostel. I now have a hangover and have to go to the embassy in a moment to pick up my visa. I have a load of photos I'm about to put u;, a very silly amount so I don't expect you to look at all of them mum :). The pictures on the blog are actually of Tokyo but it looks a lot like Singapore.
 Tom
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