Hai from Singapore! I noticed that I still hadn’t posted pics from my LAST Singapore visit, so now is an appropriate time 🙂
We stayed at Clarke Quay, at the lovely Swissotel Merchant Court which was just moments away from the water.
The hotel room itself was lovely and very bright, with a great view of the quay.
I loved the Kopitiam food court in the nearby mall, Liang Court. We ate there 3 times in our short stay! Sometimes for brekkie/brunch, or as here, for a refreshing Ais Kachang. More on food here in a separate post.
For our evening meals, we couldn’t go past Jumbo Seafood. Both times we went to the one further away from the bridge, because the tables at the bridge establishment were already reserved til way late! We elected to have Pepper Crab instead of the usual Chili Crab, and it was delish (more on Jumbo later too, in a Singapore food post to come).
After a short rest and freshen up, we glanced out the hotel window to see a load of people gathered on the bridge, seemingly drinking and chatting en masse. But wasn’t this squeaky clean and orderly Singapore? Do they allow drinking on the streets? In Sydney there’s an open container law which prohibits you from public drinking except in designated areas (like, in pubs or right next to them). Dom popped out to investigate. And our eyes did not deceive us!
I scurried to get ready, then we raced out to mingle with the locals. We hadn’t arranged to meet anyone, though we’d met a few goths back in 2010 when we went to Heart of Darkness. Spotting a few black-clad suspects, we decided to loiter nearby, while beginning to enjoy our cold Tiger beers purchased from the nearby convenience store.
Erm yes, blurry – but then, that’s how we felt after a few beers! Before long we got chatting to the people next to us…and behold, they were goths and punks! One lovely girl called Prethi leaned over to say how nice my hair was, and that was it. Soon after I discovered that the Indian guy with the death hawk (see pic above) was none other than Philip Von Grave, who had been a facebook friend since we met back in 2010! Small world! (And poor memory).
Basically, we got to meet all their friends (a couple of whom I’d met at HOD before), and one of them got out his laptop to play some alternative tunes: Rancid, Clash, Bauhaus, the Cure etc. And we all got drunk and silly together and talked about gigs and albums we liked until the wee hours. I tell you, it really made the night for us!
On our second day, with cranky brainboxes we dragged ourselves back to Kopitiam for morning nosh and I had a delightful dish of silken rice noodle wrapped around small tasty prawns, before being smothered in a soya sauce. YUM! OK, so I also had some dim sum sides, while dom had some wontons with noodles:
After brunch, Dom went to Chinatown, while I headed to Geylang (see my Geylang/Joo Chiat post here). We reconvened for a meal @Central, before hightailing it to the Marina Bay Sands. OK, so we got off at the wrong stop and had to get back on the metro, meaning that by the time we got to the top, the sunset was all but over. It took a long time to walk through the complex, find the lift, wait to board the lift, disembark, join the queue, find a spot to take photos… Despite the rush I couldn’t help but marvel at the architecture once again, both inside the complex and outside at the city views.
The view, once we made it to the top, was stunning:
However, the delay meant we were late heading out to the Singapore Night Zoo, and eventually we had to admit defeat on that score. Not to worry though, let’s just head to Jumbo Seafood again!
I’ll soon be posting some of my CURRENT Singapore and Malaysian shenanigans…more soon!