Signing off

 It’s been a few days since the blog. It seems there is less to talk about if Jane isn’t with me. Here’s some Singapore highlights before departure. 

After Jane moved in, I was on my own at my hotel on Orchard Road, a famous shopping district in Singapore. I’m not exactly sure what isn’t a shopping district in downtown Singapore, to be honest, but this was intense. 

Thought the hotel was just this far from the subway station (see the white high rise that says Hilton), navigating through multiple layers of dense shopping malls made it a surprising trek to arrive street side.  I started using the station on the other side of the hotel.  Though father, it navigated through a smaller shopping malls madras and was thus quicker.

There was a world of restaurants around the hotel. They reminded me how far from home I was. 

Desserts?

This is my new favorite fast food!  You pick the vegetables, starches and raw meats, place them in a mixing bowl and hand them to the cashier. She weighs them (separately for meats vs veggies), the cooks chop them, and they turn them into a soup or stir fry. I chose “spicy stir fry” and had the most memorable meal of the trip. 

There were multiple stalls like this. 

There were three types of eateries. One is a “Hawker Center”.  Singapore used to have many food hawkers on the street. They’d cook food and then sell it on a cart or out of a basket. Singapore cleaned that business model up by making Hawker Centers, where they all sell in a carnival like atmosphere. 

The second type of eatery is a food hall. These are famous in Singapore too. The hot pot restaurant was in a food hall. These are fast food but of all types of primarily Asian foods. One orders food from a stall and finds a communal table like a food court. Oddly enough, there are no plastic cutlery or disposable dishes.  Everything is returned to the communal dish washing center and redistributed clean back to the restaurants. Each food hall I saw had a token “Western Restaurant”, but it was not exactly something you’d associate with Europe or North America. Dishes like “salted egg French fries” were popular at those stalls. 

Finally, there were clusters of sit down restaurants. This Michelin rated Indonesian restaurant was in the basement restaurant cluster in a shopping mall. 

Jane and I tried this restaurant. Everything looked quite brown and foreign, but we were impressed with how it tasted!

Though I mostly worked during the day, I did go on a city walk one day. This is a famous building in Singapore, the Marina Bay Sands. Jane says it looks like a cruise ship crashed on top of 3 high rises. 

The public art consistently amused and impressed. 

Gardens by the Bay is a free park attraction. You can pay to go

to the top of these metal trees. 

From above, you can see the tree “trunks” are covered with air plants. 

Gardens by the bay advertises that is rated the #8 tourist attraction in the world. I bought in. Don’t know what 1 through 7 are, but those must be pretty dang impressive. 

The Gardens have an indoor flower dome, which is also a paid attraction. Their current special exhibit was “Lilytopia”, a fantasy of lilies and Venice. Wow, this was absolutely my favorite site of the trip. The perfume of the place defies words. They described the weather as “eternal spring”, a perfect human and flower habitat. 

The dome was divided by geographic zones. I enjoyed the desert landscape. 

The dome was dotted with little scenes of a Venice fantasy covered in flowers. My photography skills were not up to the challenge of capturing it. Many professional photographers were there trying their hand at it. Lots of engagement pictures and portraits were being taken as well. 

Jane and I caught a play called Murder in the Waiting Room, written and produced a Singapore youth acting group. We were impressed!

Last night I had dinner at Jane’s house. Her host mom made a beautiful meal, and we had a fun final evening together. 

After a final goodbye, I made the early trip to the Singapore airport, a famous site itself. It’s really just a giant shopping mall. One improvement included individual security at each gate. That made waiting no -existent and ensured everyone got through in a timely way.  As usual, exit immigration required only seconds. 

I’m taking a Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo and LAX. Japanese folks are stereotypically polite, and this flight was good demonstration of that concept. This is a zero “gate lice” situation. Nobody stands up at all until their group is called. Then they do so in an orderly way without rushing or jostling to the front. 

Here is Group 3 actively boarding. Look how relaxed everyone is. You can see the glass wall to the right, where we are in our own post-security boarding gate past the security specifically for our gate. Nobody was rushed. 

I had to move forward during Group 4 boarding to snap a shot of this single Group 5 American who couldn’t stand it. He had to stand up and hover. I understood the urge but resisted. 

Also, note that he and I had the same carry on burden luggage. Japanese folks did not. This is their typical carry on situation:

All over Asia, they are till using dot matrix printers. I saw this at every airport. 

The whole flight boarded in 15 minutes.  Wow. We are pulling away from the gate on time. Home again Friday, when it turns to Friday on the other side of the world. 

Signing off. 

Beth