Hello again, Singapore!

I’m back in Singapore. I kinda had itchy feet towards the end of last year, right around the time Scoot airlines announced starting flights to Perth, and they had an awesome sale… so here I am! 🙂

This time I’m here with L and K – K is meeting us tonight, and L flew over with me. We landed at some ungodly hour, and took a taxi straight to the hotel. The taxi driver was doing his best to make his car airborne – I quite appreciated his taxi computer which kept popping up “Please slow down”! We did reach the hotel in one piece though, and went straight to sleep, after marvelling at the french door-like windows out to nothingness on the 16th floor. Thank goodness the windows are locked, or my fear of heights might kick into overdrive!

Day 1 was a bit of a wandering around kinda day. We headed out to explore Clarke Quay, but it was pretty dead since it’s a night spot, so we walked up to Orchard Rd for shopping. Shopping, shopping, shopping! We’ve come across shops with some very interesting names. Heavenly Wangs, Wonder Buns, Skinny and the Crack Factory… all much fun.

Skinny and the Crack Factory. Hmm…

After trekking through a number of large, very airconditioned malls (and finding very interesting things like the mega-blingy shoe shop Anna Nucci which has lovely but pushy sales assistants… until you decide not to buy, when they get quite nasty! After doing some research online, it seems that each pair of shoes you might be interested in is the last pair in that size in the whole city, so you’d better buy them now…) we stopped for a mani-pedi (it’s a holiday after all!) which provided a bit of a rest for our tired feet.

Anna Nucci’s fabulous shoes. (I got told off for taking the photo…)

Then the malls continued, with Paragon, the very high-end one, filled with Gucci, Prada, and lots of other shops out of my price range. You can tell, because some shops only had about three items in each one!

Next we headed to Tangs, another big department store, again filled with *very*attentive* staff. All except one lass at the MAC counter, where I actually wanted to buy something, and she was more interested in her own makeup than helping others buy some! So I didn’t, and we headed up Scott’s Rd to Far East Plaza, home of jewellers and tailors. I was planning on just looking, but ended up ordering a set of necklaces for my bridesmaids, to pick up later in the week. I asked for a quote for the style of necklace I’m thinking about for the wedding, but since the price started at $850, I don’t think I’ll be going for that one in real pearls and stones!

Chinatown

A bit exhausted after the haggling session, we decided to head out to dinner. We’d heard Chinatown was pretty happening that night, so we stayed on the train and went straight there. It was pretty packed! There were hordes of people all through the markets lanes, and when we finally made it to the food hall, it was teeming. We picked up some of the awesome steamed rice dumplings (the bbq pork one is the best!), some roast duck, a strange glutinous rice dish, and some sugar cane juice to wash it down. We got talking to a couple of American guys who, in the course of the conversation, told me I really needed to visit Chicago, since two of the three places I’d visited in the US were the “most overrated cities in the US”! R will be happy – he’s wanting to go there when we head to the States later in the year…

You can tell this place has good food by the length of the “Q” – this is where we got the yummy rice dumplings

Roast Duck… still with heads.

Sugar cane being juiced

We left the Chinatown Centre and walked into huge crowds. Unbeknownst to us, there were huge Lunar New Year celebrations happening, even though there’s still a couple of weeks to go. Roads were blocked off, there were huge lit lantern displays and a concert.

Chinatown – party time!

After watching for a bit, we decided to head back to the hotel. Unfortunately I read the map upside down, and we headed directly away from the hotel for a while, but realised soon enough! Interesting sights on the way home included the well-named Ministry of Manpower and a huge fireworks display!

Very footsore after yesterday’s trek around the city, we thought we’d have a less strenuous day today. Hmm. We thought we’d check out some of the electronics offerings, and walked over to Funan Mall, only a few blocks from our hotel. Unfortunately we forgot that it was Sunday and things open later in the morning, so we had a lot of time looking in windows before the shops opened!

Seats at the sushi shop in Funan Mall

Interesting food at the food hall in Funan Mall

The offerings of electronics was varied and large, but the prices weren’t that different from home, so it wasn’t really worthwhile buying anything there. Since we’d heard Mustafa Centre in Little India was pretty good on electronics prices, we decided to head there next.

A section of the fabric section at Mustafa Centre

When we hopped off the train and into Little India, it felt like another country altogether. Crowds of people were walking in the streets instead of keeping to the footpaths like everywhere else in Singapore, and we felt like the only tourists there for a while! The Mustafa Centre is like a huge department store crossed with markets – not a lot of personal space, huge amounts of stuff with not a lot of organisation, and hundreds and hundreds of people thronging the place.

Instead of electronics, I found some awesome other stuff – an incredibly blingy abaya to use as as dancing cover-up (even blingier than the one I got in Morocco, if you can believe it!) and some fabulously blingy cheap shoes. We did check out the electronics section, since L was looking for some stuff, and it was even busier than the other levels! We found what we needed and got out as quickly as we could – we were both getting a bit claustrophobic in there!

We wended our way back to the hotel for a bit of a sit down before we head out for dinner, and then we will head out to the airport to collect K who is flying in tonight! Fabulous! 🙂