Singapore City

On my third day in Singapore I met with a friend early in the morning and he showed me around his home country. In Singapore everything is about food - Chinese, Malay, Indian! So we started the day in a typical Chinese food hawker or centre. This is a huge hall with lots of little food stands with tables and chairs between them. I just watched while Kevin ordered bits and pieces of everything. The first course was frog porridge! YES! Poor little frogs drown in hot rice porridge. But if you don’t think about it frog really tastes like chicken :-). Then we had something Indian which I can’t remember, essentially it was a crepe like thing which you dip into a spicy curry. For dessert we had bean something – a kind of sweet soy bean soup with solid soy bean bits ;-) And we drank cane juice. They crush bits of sugar cane and extract the juice – very yummy!!

Then we walked through Chinatown and started our little sightseeing tour in “Little India”, followed by the Raffles Hotel, the Esplanade, various temples and of course shopping malls :-) We had lunch near the “Fountain of Wealth” – apparently the world’s largest. The special dessert comprised of ice (water ice) with a sweet corn – durian flavoured sauce on top of beans and black jelly – DISGUSTING!! Durians are very smelly fruits with a very distinctive flavour! You either love them or hate them! Some hotels even forbid durians because of their smell :-)After about 7h or so of walking we were both pretty tired and finished the little sightseeing tour with a cocktail in the “New Asia Bar” which is located on the 71^st floor of the Stamford hotel. You probably get the best view over Singapore from there.

After a short afternoon nap I walked along Orchard Road and admired the amazing Christmas decorations. But the weather got slowly worse. On my first day it only drizzled a bit at night. On the second day it only poured down when I was sitting in the bus. The third day had long non-raining periods between short showers. Today it was raining pretty much the whole day – long drizzles alternated with short heavy showers. This is also the reason while I am writing this while still in Singapore. I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see and after visiting Sentosa Island this morning I am now enjoying WIFI in my hotel room :-) because sightseeing in the rain is not really fun. It is still raining outside and the forecast doesn’t say anything different. The positive side: the temperatures dropped from 30°C to 26°C but the humidity is now pretty much 100%.