Singapore Day 2: Dinner and a Night Safari!

in

So we made good on our reservation at artichoke, and were even able to get some friends of ours from Dhaka to join us (a lot of people take advantage of the long weekends to travel, and Singapore is a popular destination). The whole experience was a trip. First, let's quote artichoke's Facebook page About section:

MIDDLE EASTERN x DUDE FOOD x RECKLESS COOKING
Rule-breaking dishes - really loud music - chummy service - no pretentious bullshit

Of course, that description is pretty hilariously pretentious, just in a new, hip way. Then again, they weren't lying. The service was pretty chummy. We were greeted upon our arrival by the the manager, who treated us like long lost friends. Awesome. We placed our orders for starters (it was mostly a mezze or tapas kind of place), including the baba ghanoush. The manager came by and let us know that if it wasn't the best we'd ever had, the dinner was free. Unfortunately for our wallets, but fortunately for our palates, we got no free meal.

The rest of dinner was equally great. Good food, good people, no complaints. At least until we were getting ready to go. The manager came by again and started talking to us. And talking to us. And talking to us. We only managed to escape when he was called over to another part of the restaurant. Even then, he still flagged us down and sent us off with little packages of special gummy treats, apparently Czech in origin. Wherever they were from, they were amazing, and we quickly polished them off despite just having shared an awesome baklava sampler for dessert.

Basically, if you're in Singapore and want some Middle Eastern cuisine, you could do far worse.

Part of the reason we were a bit eager to leave dinner was our plan to go to the Singapore Night Safari. Apparently one of Singapore's more famous attractions, it's basically a tram ride through a zoo at night. But it's so much more than that. Because it's at night, many animals are much more active than they would be during the day. Even cooler, most of the enclosures are designed in a way that relies on more "natural" barriers to keep the animals contained: moats, trenches, and similar. So there's no fence or wall in between you and (most of) the animals. There was really no hope for pictures, but we had an awesome time.

The night safari was actually quite a distance from where we were staying and, since we stayed until midnight (when it closed), there was an absolutely massive line of people waiting for cabs. Probably an hour's wait or more. For whatever reason, though, a cabby grabbed us just as we were getting in line and told us the guy who called him never showed so he was available. This sounded super sketchy, but we were in a group of four people and it's Singapore. We decided to risk it, which worked out just fine and probably saved us a whole lot of time. Still not sure why we were singled out. Maybe by looking particularly foreign and therefore likelier to tip? Who knows?

Singapore Day 1: Botanical Gardens!

in

We left the hotel pretty early - around 7:00 AM - and went off in search of a coffee shop or somewhere similar where we could just hang out and kill time until we could check in to the hotel. We started out looking for something local, but ended up at Starbucks. Hey, they had free Wi-Fi. And muffins. So not particularly exotic. Grace passed out in the cushy seat after our snack while I scoured the internet for ideas on what to do during our visit. I also studied the map we picked up at the airport. I was really surprised (and pleased) that is was not your regular tourist map where it just highlights the establishments that pay to advertise. It was actually very good.

Anyway, after Starbucks we wandered around various malls containing stores that weren't open yet (we were in the Bugis neighborhood). We spotted a Uniqlo, which Grace found very exciting. Turns out it was the first of perhaps a dozen, but we didn't know that yet.

Closed malls got boring rather quickly, so we went back to the hotel to see if our room was ready. It wasn't, so we decided to head to the botanical gardens (actually referred to as botanic in Singapore). This was the decisions we should have made from the very beginning. They were absolutely gorgeous and very peaceful. Definitely would have been a good idea to just go there and nap for a couple hours.

We explored a decent portion of the gardens, including the National Orchid Garden (the only part of the gardens for which you have to pay), but definitely didn't get to see all of them. I took a bunch of pictures, but either I'm bad at floral photography or flowers just don't tend to make the most compelling subjects. Still, I'll share a few shots.

Okay, that was more than a few. I misremembered how pretty some of the flowers were. We also saw a neat fountain, which is going to give me the opportunity to try embedding some video. We're getting fancy here, folks.

I know what you are all thinking. Flowers are pretty and all, and so are fountains, but boooooring. I hear you. You know what's not boring? A frickin' DRAGON! How about that!? On our way out of the park we saw a Komodo Dragon. Not in a cage or enclosure or anything, just wandering around to the side of the path. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you ask Grace), he was pretty wary of us which made it hard to get a good picture. I was also hesitant to leave the path in case severe fines and a public caning would immediately follow. I got a maybe one that wasn't completely terrible, though, along with a video of him cruising around.

He's right at the bottom edge of the ferns. Darn camouflage.

He's right at the bottom edge of the ferns. Darn camouflage.

Okay that video quality came out pretty bad. I promise improvements in future.

After spending entirely too little time (read way, way too much time) watching the Komodo Dragon, we continued the rest of the way out of the gardens and searched for a cab back to the hotel. Unfortunately, this guy didn't offer us a ride:

The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable. We were wiped out from our time in the gardens (and barely sleeping on the plane the night before) so just crashed at the hotel for the afternoon.

Dinner was awesome. We tried to go to artichoke, but they were completely booked, so we made a reservation for the next day and ended up eating at Herbivore, which was ostensibly a Japanese vegetarian restaurant but had a lot of meat on the menu. Not sure what was going on there, but any time Unagi is in play I don't ask questions.

Vacationing in Singapore!

in

So we had spent just a couple weeks in Dhaka before departing on our first vacation. Several reasons for this. First, people say to get out pretty frequently, as Dhaka can be a little overwhelming. Second, it was a four day weekend, and those don't come around all the time (but three day weekends more or less do - US Embassy employees get all US holidays as well as all local holidays, up to a cap of 20 - so averaging more than 1.5 long weekends per month). Third, and most important, the cause of the four day weekend was Eid al-Adha. Celebration involves ritual slaughter of animals. The richer you are, the bigger an animal you slaughter. So in our relatively swanky neighborhood this means lots of cows being slaughtered and butchered in the streets. Not something Grace (a vegetarian) really wanted to hang around for.

Anyway, we took off on a Thursday evening. To give an idea of how bad traffic can get here, the 6km drive to the airport took right around an hour. Not so much fun, but at least we weren't the ones driving.

We had a red eye to Singapore, which was made a lot more pleasant by the fact that we were flying Singapore Airlines. Really enjoyable, and I the Dhaka-Singapore flight definitely doesn't use their fanciest plane. No $20,000 suite class here. But I did get to binge watch Fargo, which was almost as cool.

We arrived in Singapore around 6:00 AM local time. Not the most convenient for checking in to our hotel room, but it meant the airport was not very crowded. Singapore is a pretty absurd place (in a way that, subjectively, is really pleasant). To start with, both the immigration lines and the restrooms had little touch screens upon exiting where you could rate your experience on a scale of 1 to 5, represented by little smiley faces wearing appropriate expressions.

We felt a little too dimwitted after barely sleeping on the flight over to figure out the train system (turns out it's remarkably easy, no surprise there), so got a cab from the airport to our hotel. The cabbie was quite the character. We told him we arrived from Dhaka and he asked if Singapore was home. No? Then Beijing? Seoul? No, actually we live in Dhaka. He was pretty surprised, but slipped into tour guide mode quickly, giving us a little recent history of Singapore and extolling its virtues (often in particular comparison to Hong Kong - I imagine the two have a bit of a Asian city-state rivalry going on).

I don't think we could have picked more different place from Dhaka. Even the highway we took into town was well designed and obviously the product of a lot of thought and planning. The lanes were numbered (for clarity?) and the street itself was gorgeous - lined by trees for miles on end.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, we were unable to check in when we arrived at the hotel around 6:30 AM. They put us first on the list, though. We didn't feel like sitting in the lobby for four or more hours, so decided to adventure into the city.