Singapore Day 2: Orchard Road

We got a late start to the day, having made up for lost sleep from the previous night. And, hey, we were on vacation. So lay off.

We grabbed lunch at this place called Freshly Baked. We had a perpetual debate between trying to find local stuff and going for more Western fare, which isn't so available in Bangladesh. We usually opted for the latter, which is a bit of a shame. We'll just have to visit again. Plus, I'm not sure "Live Frog in Clay Pot," as we saw advertised in Geylang, was exactly what we wanted.

Frustrated by my failed phone unlocking quest of the previous evening, I just decided to splurge on a new, unlocked phone. It seemed fitting, since Singapore life is, as far as I can tell, pretty much centered on working a lot and shopping a lot. A short while later, we left a Samsung store up one phone and down entirely too much money. There was an (open) Uniqlo in the same mall, so we checked that out. Unfortunately, they were mostly stocked for winter. Apparently down jackets are important for when it dips dangerously close to 70º F (seriously, I just looked up the lowest temperature ever recorded in Singapore: 66.9º F). But I guess it's all relative.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly spent wandering up and down Orchard Rd, probably the most famous of Singapore's many absurdly high-end and comprehensive shopping districts. I got to see all the stores that I've really only heard mentioned by Kanye or A$AP Rocky. Good times.

For the hell of it, we wandered into a couple fancy watch stores. Still being used to Taiwan currency, I started dividing everything by 30, and noted to Grace that, while expensive, they weren't that unreasonable. She gave me a weird look and I remembered that the Singapore dollar is at rough parity with the US dollar (about 1.3 SGD to USD). Yeah, those watches were expensive.

Wandering around outside we also ran into some interesting sculptures.

Eventually, the novelty wore off, and we headed back to the hotel to get ready for dinner.

Singapore Day 1: Things I forgot

So I forgot to mention a few things from our first day.

First, having drinkable tap water is something very easy to take for granted until you don't have it at home. Then it becomes really cool.

Second, we visited Sim Lim Square (on Wikipedia) on a quest to get my old AT&T phone from the US unlocked. We ran into: people that couldn't (or claimed they couldn't) unlock it, people who wanted more than the value of the phone to unlock it, and people who could unlock it at a reasonable price as long as I surrendered it to them for 1-2 days. All in all, a failed quest. Still the shopping center itself was nuts. Six floors of electronics stores ranging from boutique to pretty shady. Everything from camera lenses to TVs to phones to serious gaming peripherals. Like Best Buy times a million. We ended up going back for a couple random things, including an airplane headphone to regular headphone adapter (this actually makes me very, very happy to have - I love my headphones and the airplane ones are pretty terrible). If Grace wasn't with me I'm not sure I'd have left there at all.

Singapore Day 1: Botanical Gardens!

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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!

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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.