Singapore Day 4: Singapore Flyer

We started out our last day in Singapore by going to the Singapore Flyer (on Wikipedia), until recently the world's tallest Ferris wheel (the record is now held by the High Roller in Las Vegas). The motto is truly groan-worthy: "A moving experience at every turn." Still, we thought the views would be worth it. We were mostly right, though it was quite hazy, so our pictures didn't turn out very well. Apparently the haze is caused by forest fires in Indonesia?

I guess this is pretty standard for giant Ferris wheels, but the capsules don't actually stop for people to get on. Instead, the wheel turns slowly enough that you just sort of hop on while it's in motion. Like something out of an action movie, just at 1/10 the speed and with a net below in case you fall.

The capsules you ride in. Thankfully not very crowded.

Cables.

Flyer selfie!

A corner on the Singapore F1 track, with the Gardens by the Bay in the background.

The Gardens by the Bay from above. Cloud Forest dome on the left, Flower Dome in the middle, and the Supertree Grove towards the back right.

The Junior Olympics park from above.

After the Flyer we wandered around the esplanade area, mostly feeling hot and overexposed to the sun. We headed to the Asian Civilizations Museum, but once we got there didn't really feel like going in for more than just a break from the heat. After sitting in the lobby for a few minutes, we moved on, finding a 7/11 (yay Slurpees!) and encountering some interesting statues.

The Flyer from below, while standing on the F1 track.

This guy zoomed past at a speed just below that which the track is designed for.

We stopped under this neat bridge for some shade.
 

The ArtScience museum from underneath the Helix Bridge.

I can't remember if I was yawning or trying to yell for help.

The Marina Bay Sands Hotel with the ArtScience Museum in the foreground.

The famous Merlion from far away.

The Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay.

Said to resemble durians.

The Cavenagh Bridge (pretty sure that's not a local name). Also another glamor shoot going on to the left.

No cattle.

Orfeur Cavenagh.

This statue is already hilariously colonial.

And it only gets better.

A chubby bird.

Dali's Homage to Newton. Didn't even realize he did sculpture. Reminds me a bit of Gargallo.

Slurpees in hand, we spent an hour or so reading up on Singapore via Wikipedia (we had realized we didn't know much about the city besides what we had experienced ourselves). Lots of interesting facts, including that 1 in 6 Singaporeans is a millionaire, excluding real estate. Nuts.

We left early for the airport, as we wanted time to redeem our VAT (making my phone splurge just slightly less absurd). We were also both feeling pretty crappy after spending the hottest part of the day wandering around in the sun. Luckily, the Singapore airport can be a pretty relaxing and comfortable place. There's even a spa, which I was tempted by, and a movie theater.

I had a pretty bad headache that still hadn't gone away by the time we boarded. Of course, the flight attendant was only too happy to grab me some pain killers. And then check up on me like three times during the flight to make sure I was feeling better (I was). Definitely service one could get used to.

Singapore Day 3: Gardens by the Bay

Just on the other side of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel are the Gardens by the Bay (on Wikipedia). Like many other things in Singapore, the gardens were very impressive. We were initially greeted by the Supertree Grove:

The Supertrees are really neat. In additional to being trellises for vertical gardens, they also mimic real trees by collecting solar energy (via photovoltaic cells), collecting rainwater (for use in irrigation and fountains), and as air intake and exhaust towers. The yellow walkway you can see is the OCBC Skyway. Unsurprisingly (but unfamiliarly), tons of things in Singapore have corporate sponsorship. Including walkways in gardens.

To put the Supertree Grove in context, I grabbed a panorama.

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From left to right: the Singapore Flyer (giant Ferris wheel), the Flower Dome, the Cloud Forest Dome, and the Supertree Grove.

Minor fear or heights aside, I decided we had to go up on the skyway. It just looked way too cool.

The skyway from underneath and a supertree up close.

Maximum capacity expressed in kilo-Newtons per meter squared. Not something you usually see.

This is Singapore, and we have rules here.

Just after exiting the elevator up to the skyway.

A view of the Singapore Flyer from the skyway, with a few supertrees in the foreground.

More supertrees!

Grace about one second after she got annoyed with me taking pictures of her.

Skyway selfie!

After the skyway we headed over to the Cloud Forest Dome, seeing some interesting things on the way.

A calabash tree (not to be confused with the vine, which produces the fruit one might be familiar with). The way the fruit grows off the trunk and branches reminded me of cacao, but it's not very closely related at all.

We actually saw a decent number of women getting glamor photos taken. Not sure if it's particularly common in Singapore, or just common in touristy, scenic areas the world over.

Some spiky trees.

More spikiness!

The Cloud Forest Dome was really interesting (and pleasantly cool!). Inside is a 138 ft "mountain" that's covered with all sorts of plant life, has walkways jutting out of it into the air, and even has a waterfall coming down off the top. We were there just as the sun started setting, and the walkways looked really neat when lit up.

The Cloud Mountain and waterfall.

A shot of the walkways, plus all the misters working overtime.

Apparently from East Timor. I'm going to take a wild guess that this guy has something to do with fertility.

More sculptures. I think they're all from East Timor, but I'm not sure.

Moss-covered truck.

Canoes with some fierce passengers (and orchids).

Walkways from above. Pretty serious supports.

The waterfall is lit from below at night.

The walkways are also lit on their undersides at night.

Next was the Flower Dome. Maybe something that we should have done earlier in the day, but still really beautiful at night. In some ways maybe even better. Not the best conditions for handheld photography, though, so we only took a few pictures.

The lighting was really dramatic at night.

One of the tress in the baobab section.

Pretty statue. Not sure where it's from, though there were many from Zimbabwe.

They had some stuff set up for a festival. Seemed like a good place for a picture.

After the Flower Dome we headed back to the Marina Bay Sands. On the way there we stopped at an overlook of the Gardens by the Bay, since they do a light show in the Supertree Grove twice nightly. Pictures (and video) of that below. Afterwards we wanted to go to the top of the hotel and were confronted with the choice of the observation deck or the rooftop bar. We opted for the bar, as it meant free admission (but insanely expensive drinks). Not sure it was the right choice, though drinking on top of the city was pretty cool, and the drinks themselves were very good. Our last night in Singapore ended well.

The Supertee Grove at night.

The Marina Bay Sands Hotel at night, from the gardens.

A view of the Singapore Flyer at night, from the Ku Dé Ta bar atop the hotel.

The bar itself. Pretty crowded.

The hotel from below is pretty imposing. We were on the part jutting out at the top of the picture.

The ArtScience museum at night.

Singapore Day 3: Marina Bay Sands

Alright, let's just start here. At a cool $4.7 billion (that's a "b"), the Marina Bay Sands is the world's most expensive building. It's absolutely insane. We took a bunch of our own pictures, but to start things off with a bang (as seems appropriate for such a place), I'll include this gorgeous one from Wikipedia:

I'm really not sure anything needs to be said.

We took the subway there. On the way to the stop nearest our hotel, I grabbed a picture of a neat building entrance.

Not sure those guys are all about the shopping, but what do I know?

The subway there was one of the newer lines. So clean and well designed. Even had little displays with looping, cutely animated safety and courtesy PSAs. One thing I noticed about Singapore was the common usage of the verb "alight." As in, "Take care when alighting and mind the gap." Definitely not used much in the US, and I don't think used much in the UK, either. Anyway, I had to take a picture of one of the signs in the subway car.

Okay, first I took this picture because "No durians." Only afterwards did I notice that, while durians are not permitted, their possession apparently carries no fine, unlike the other items. Also you can see the clearly denoted reserved seat for the elderly, pregnant, injured, or parent of small children. Or, presumably, any combination thereof.

Our ride was only a couple stops. Once we arrived, we realized that, in order to get outside from the subway, you travel through a shopping center that may be so ritzy as to put Orchard Road to shame.

Does your local mall have gondolas?

A single story Gucci is obviously insufficient to keep up with demand. Check back soon!

We grabbed lunch at a pizza restaurant that was painfully expensive but pretty delicious, and then started wandering around, gawking at everything and taking lots of pictures. I also discovered my camera's panorama function and started taking advantage of that, with mixed results. Also, turns out they mess up the size scaling on galleries, so I'll have to include any I take as separate images.

The Singapore ArtScience museum on the right, and a Louis Vuitton store (building?) on the left.

The Louis Vuitton building from another angle, and a portion of the Singapore skyline. I really love the blue color on the cluster of leftmost towers.

More of the Singapore skyline, including the Fullerton Hotel on the right by the water. Also some strange, air control tower-looking buildings on the left.

Yet more of the Singapore skyline, including the Theaters on the Bay in the foreground, whose design was inspired by durian fruit.

A view of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. It's completely surreal.

The ArtScience museum from a bit closer up. A bunch of shots of this follow, as I think it's a really neat building.

The (maybe just a) Singapore Junior Olympics field. More or less floating on the bay. Really neat.

Selfie time! We really should take more pictures that feature at least one of us...

Another view of the Singapore skyline.

Flowering lily pads just outside the ArtScience museum.

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The Singapore skyline from the Marina Bay Sands shopping center. Also apparently a boat cutting through my panorama.

I'm actually a little unclear how directly the shopping area is tied into the Marina Bay Sands proper (the giant three towers with what looks like a cruise ship bridging their tops), which is a hotel. Either way, we left the shopping area and crossed through the hotel on our way to the Gardens by the Bay (on Wikipedia).

Looking up at one of the three towers of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel.

View of the port and some interesting building. No idea what it is.

An interior view of the hotel.

Flowers on balconies.

There was a really interesting metal screen art installation built into the hotel, that reacts to the wind, shimmering and rippling. Pictures don't really do it justice, so here's a video, hopefully with better quality than before.

I was going to include our adventures in Gardens by the Bay in this post, but I think I'll split that off into the next one. Stay tuned!

Singapore Day 2: Dinner and a Night Safari!

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?