We spent two nights in Singapore. The city is as spotless as every geography text book says, the inside of every building and metro train gleamed and the streets were generally spotless. The city is multicultural, with Arabic, Indian, Chinese and Colonial sectors- all of these plus Malays are present on the incredibly efficient metro (MRT). Our day walking around took us through the Arab district with its rug sellers and Turkish cafes, before removing our shoes and seeing a Hindu temple in Little India and eating a tasty curry(as nice as we’ve had sine being away) for just £3.
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| The Main Mosque in the Arab Disrict |
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| Hindu Temple in Little India |
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| Curry |
We saw the CBD with its skyscrapers, not as modern and ‘glassy’ as Australia’s, with the odd spectacular building such as these flats with communal sky gardens linking them and three skyscrapers upon which is a giant sky deck. The colonial district contained the white stoned St Andrews Cathedral among other buildings, though British influence didn’t seem as strong as I thought(the biggest example was actually the fact that everything was written in English and everybody spoke it).
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| Skyscrapers with a giant roof garden on the top |
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| Flats in the South of the city with communal roof gardens linking each block |
The place was very modern (the excellent quality of cars on the road, heaps of glass shopping centers and number of flashy smart phones on the MRT indicative of this), people didn’t try and haggle you for cash and being a westerner didn’t mean you stared at like an alien. The only minor gripes were that it was really humid, you sweated buckets walking about and there was only one tourist information point in the city which was far to the west, even though the city maps said there were others. We turned up to the central station where a bloke said the computers didn’t work so we couldn’t book the train out for the next day- in the end after a bit of a hunt we managed to sort our coach out to Malaka.
In the evening, we went to Chinatown, eating noodles on the street under Chinese lanterns with Alex Paull(an old friend of mine from Uni who has been traveling South East Asia) before having some tiger beers in the colourful expat area, located next to a canal containing a collection of bars under a canopy of lights(with a weirdly shaped air ventilation system which nobody seemed to notice).
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The odd ventilation system
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| Chinatown |
There were some interesting and weird places including a bar where drinks are given in syringes and drip bags and another where patrons sit in wheelchairs to drink (don’t think that would be allowed in England). 
People sat with their own beers along the canal, while street performers and ice cream sellers plyed their trade. A colourful evening. The next day we said goodbye to Alex(who was at our hostel) and jumped on a coach for Malaka.
