Visiting Singapore is akin to spending an extended amount of time in a steam bath, and our guide told us that the day we were there was not all that bad — mid-high 80’s with about a thousand percent humidity.
Our guide was a feisty Chinese woman — for some reason the local agents thought we were two women traveling together because our names are so similar — so the hotel gave us a room with single beds — our guide was apoplectic. The poor skinny Korean desk clerk who was just learning English trembled and called his boss who announced there were no king or queens available. The only people who didn’t care were Ira and me —we only wanted to park ourselves in a bed somewhere, but inserting ourselves into this mayhem would have only made it worse. We proceeded to our room which was actually gorgeous despite the single beds (which were quite large), switched to a king the following night, and both rooms had gorgeous views of the marina.
We had a whirlwind tour on Sunday. Singapore is truly multi-cultural —Malaysians, Indonesians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese. According to our guide, each nationality had special talents to offer — the Indians, for example, were good at IT, Malays good cooks, and on and on. She shared a few of the tenets of her Chinese heritage with us — no one could eat until her father sat at the table and began dinner, people with thin lips are talkative, matchmakers are reluctant to take on female clients born in the year of the tiger because it is feared they will dominate their husbands and thus no one will want to marry them. The multiple ethnicities in Singapore made us more conscious of our American, and Caucasian, character.
We visited a mosque (and both of us needed to cover up to enter), a Buddhist temple; we strolled indoor markets where we were treated to a cup of sugar cane juice. The proprietor of the sugar cane juice stand presses stalks of sugar cane through a hand operated roller and collects the juice, then pours it into a cup, fills it with ice and voila — a very refreshing drink. We had a delicious lunch in Chinatown of dim sum and noodles. Although the restaurant was 100 years old it modernized with robots rolling around delivering dim sum and transporting dirty dishes back to the kitchen. Watching the robots negotiate a bottleneck was quite interesting but they had trouble with head-on confrontations and generally needed human intervention.
Singapore has “reclaimed” land for a huge garden with both outdoor and indoor displays. They have 18 “super trees”, wire constructions with vines and other greens slowly growing upward and eventually covering the supports. We spent the afternoon roaming both indoors and outdoors— there were clever animal sculptures done from driftwood throughout the grounds, a few in the photos included below. A 10000+ steps day.
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