After recovering from our midnight flight to Singapore with a nice long sleep, we headed out late morning to Marina Bay. This was my first time in Singapore, and needless to say, I was extremely impressed. I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie or in a piece of concept art for a futuristic city half the time. It's still hard to grasp that a place like this is real. In downtown Singapore, the buildings shine, the streets are clean, the hedges are manicured, the people are well put together, and everything is very efficient. Such a contrast from Bali, where the buildings are short and rustic, things are a little disorganized and chaotic, and everyone is relaxed. Pictured here in the foreground is the Marina Bay Sands resort complex. On the left are the three hotel towers, topped with the SkyPark that has its famous infinity pool. Next to it in the shorter buildings is the shopping mall, casino and theatre, and next to THAT is the lotus-shaped ArtScience Museum.
Singapore is truly an international city, and diverse like I've never experienced. There are four official national languages: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. It seems that everyone is multilingual, and people seem to be able to handle any language you throw at them. We've used both English and Cantonese with success, sometimes holding conversations using both at the same time.
This is the Helix Bridge over the Singapore River, with a design based on the structure of DNA (you can see part of it on the left in the top photo). At night, lights in the floor shine the letters G, T, A, and C representing the 4 DNA bases (definitely appealed to the biology nerd in me). My dad was much more impressed with the architecture, and wouldn't stop talking about the stainless steel and curved glass for the entire duration of our walk across the bridge.
We took a taxi to Little India at sunset. Quite different from the stark modernism of downtown.
For dinner we went to Lau Pa Sat, an indoor market that is famous for its huge variety of food stalls. The selection ranged from local Singaporean, to Indian, Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and everything in between.
At night, we went up to the SkyPark at the Marina Bay Sands to look around at the Singaporean skyline. The National Day of Singapore is coming up on August 9 to celebrate Singapore's independence from Malaysia 47 years ago, so they were rehearsing the light and water show.
Such a beautiful city.
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