Second day in Singapore

Although there are Malay signs everywhere in Singapore, I haven’t heard anybody speaking the language. At least I can translate signs for Mike though! Signs are usually in English, Malay and Chinese.

We’ve been staying across the road from the Raffles Hotel so this morning we went and had breakfast there. Unfortunately I only saw this Kueh Ubi Kayu

after I’d already ordered a strawberry danish. So my breakfast looked like this:

The kueh was perfect: not sweet, it tasted like it had only two ingredients: coconut and ubi. 🙂

The Raffles Hotel is quite a testament to the colonial era, it is huge and quite spectacular:

Full of the charm and elegance of a bygone era.

This is the back of the hotel:

For the record: I love the tropics. Even the stifling heat, or perhaps especially the stifling heat! It feels like home to me. It reached 32 degrees today, so we ducked into the occasional shop to appreciate the air-conditioning a little. I enjoyed this little shop where the store keeper told me about his teas:

Mike, who for the record does NOT appreciate tropical heat 😉 wanted to go to a couple of electronic shops. The first one was a mall of 4 floors, of just electronic bits and pieces:

Then we went to another that was even bigger!!! I didn’t count the floors but there were at least 7:

On our walk to these malls, I enjoyed, again, the combination of the old and the new, and the east and the west. Here’s some of what we saw:

Here’s a stall selling ye olde nonya dumplings wrapped in banana leaves:

Beautiful lotus flowers:

Now here’s something I’ve never seen before: using SNAIL shells, huge snail shells, as planters!!!

We walked past a Hindhu temple, Buddhist temple, and Christian temples. Here’s one:

Singapore is such a melting pot of religion and race. Truly where east meets west, and probably where north meets south too!!!

On our wandering back towards our hotel we made this delightful discovery when we walked through a building:

It was an exhibition of Chinese fashion for Chinese culture week.

Works of art in themselves, I thought of how Cathy and Christy would love seeing these!

At this point we were getting hungry, time to find some good local food, which we did.

Nasi Lemak x2 please! 🙂 It even had ikan teri kacang with it! Wow, I must have been 18 when I last had that! It was very nice, the rice itself was delicious; I wish they exported decent rice to the west.

After lunch we probably should have done what the locals do:

But instead we walked around the malls for a while. And yes, that is a becak with the rider at the side instead of the back!

The malls are the biggest, cleanest, most spectacular I’ve seen anywhere! They just never seem to end. Mike’s worst nightmare. Ha! 😉 We weren’t there for shopping though, just looking thanks!

We made the rookie mistake of not realising that most of them are joined underground, they’re just one huge network of malls. To start with we were walking outside to get to them which I didn’t mind, but Mike did. Too hot.

In one of the malls we saw a huge queue of people going into a huge room and wondered what they were all there for. When we returned the same way an hour later we saw the sign on the door and realised why:

It was a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 exchange point! Not that easy to make out, but all down the right there, a LONG way down, are desks with people at them getting their phones changed. There was a line exactly the same opposite that on the left. Quite incredible!

At this point we headed back to the hotel for a while before heading to the airport. One thing in our hotel room that I thought was a great idea:

Universal plugs and voltages! Excellent! The view from our hotel room wasn’t too bad either, were on the 7th floor of a 17 floor hotel:

Then it was time to get a taxi to the airport.

Our impressions of Singapore: so organised, so clean, so impressive! We loved it!