Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Singapore is wonderful. We are really going to like this place. After checking in we headed to the famous Botanical Gardens; amazing. We spent a few hours wandering around, just soaking up the park. Hugely impressed with how well maintained the gardens are.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Up late after enjoying too many glasses of wine the night before. Today we walked into the Colonial district, mainly to revisit the Merlion and Raffles Hotel. We were both in Singapore a little over 20 years ago, and the skyline has certainly changed. Nothing like when we were here last. Some of the buildings here are just down-right insane. Someone had a good idea of building a ship on-top of three sky-scappers. Why not I guess.
Thursday, November 28, 2013 (Thanksgiving Day)
This is me, Caroline, continuing this post.
Yesterday Stephen discovered that the Thai Consulate is literally just across the (Orchard) road from our hotel. So this morning we were in line at 8:50 for a 9:15 opening time to apply for visas. The whole process took about 45 mins (incl waiting in line). Yes you can get visas at the border, but only for 15 days. Doing it this way we were promised visas for 60 days. We’ll find out tomorrow when we pick them up.
After that little exercise we took public transport to the Marina Bay area, and that ‘stranded skyship’. Our destination: ‘Gardens by the Bay’. Totally loved the whole concept and felt like I’d stepped into one of the worlds of MYST 🙂 (Yes, I’ve played all of them). We spent quite some time there walking and enjoying.
Afterwards we snaked our way towards the city center and took public transport back towards our hotel. It doesn’t sound like much but we had a good day. And not all day have to be long and jam-packed.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Spent the morning walking around Little India. It was good to see another side of Singapore. In afternoon we picked up our Thai visa and did a little window shopping in the Orchard Road malls. We spent a wonderful evening in the executive Lounge where we discovered some new friends from Detroit. Over a few drinks we committed to dinner at the Slanted Door once back in San Francisco.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Time to leave Singapore. We had a great time here. We decided to take the fixed price taxi back to JB. But apparently in Saturday everyone goes to JB for shopping, so the taxi line was probably an hour (or more) long. A very kind Malaysian man offered to jump the line for only $15. Ok, it is not the right thing to do to jump the line, but we did anyway. The traffic on the causeway was terrible, so it took 90 minutes to cross back into Malaysia.
We stayed there lol