One thing I noticed about Singapore is they have toast shops. They are coffee shops, but they serve toast. I tried a couple out while I was there and had French toast and peanut butter toast. Not bad, but the peanut butter toast was literally just store bought bread toasted with peanut butter. At least it was only $1.
Anyway since all the Bayfront stuff was closed when I got there the previous night, I wanted to go again and see inside and go up on the skywalk in the supertree grove. Yanmei and I had lunch at a good restaurant in Chinatown, and as we were leaving the restaurant we saw a bus going to Harbourfront stopped right in front of us. Great, let’s hop on! After a little while I noticed the bus seemed to be going the wrong way, and then I realized Harbourfront isn’t Bayfront. It turns out the Harbourfront bus takes you to VivoCity, which is the biggest shopping mall in Singapore. We spent about half the day there, and I saw maybe 25% of it and Yanmei saw less because she found several shops she liked and spent a lot of time there. She bought five new clothes. We may have to buy another suitcase at this rate. To me it was just a shopping mall with the standard stores you find in most malls (Forever 21, Under Armor, Sunglass Hut, etc.), plus some asian brand stores. It was pretty busy, so retail isn’t dead in Singapore yet, although it being the last weekend before CNY probably contributed to that.
We finally headed back and rested a bit before dinner. After dinner I decided to rush over to Bayfront while Yanmei went back to rest. It was already starting to get late, but I got tickets to the two biodomes. The first was the flower dome. Not very impressive to me. I guess I’ve seen too many amazing gardens around the world.
The next dome was the cloud forest dome. Much more impressive, you get a big waterfall right at the entrance, then you can go up to the top and walk down, which also gives you nice views of the city through the dome.
As I finished the cloud forest dome I hurried towards the supertree grove because I knew they didn’t let people on the skywalk after 8:30. It was 7:40pm when I got there and they had a sign up that the skywalk tickets were sold out. Bummer, I should have gone there first and done the domes later. They had a light show at 7:45 though.
After that, I went to the Marina Bay Sands to go up to the observation deck. I have to say the inside is pretty impressive too. The towers are largely hollow which give a huge open feeling inside. If I come back to Singapore I wouldn’t mind staying here. I got up to the observation deck on the 56 floor, which is the bottom deck of the “boat”, the higher decks are reserved for the hotel guests. It is a great view of the city.
View of the domes and gardens, and towards the top you can see all the large ships anchored in the bay.
After that I headed home for the night. That’s it for Singapore. I feel like we could have stayed longer and seen more stuff, but tomorrow we are taking a bus to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
David