Singapore

I should have written this post months ago, but I lost the will to blog. Anyway, here is the report on the final stage in our holiday, in Singapore.

We arrived at Woodlands Station and caught a cab to our hotel, the Millenia Ritz Carlton. We have stayed there before and it was excellent, but this time it just seemed a little... less excellent. Service was a bit poor, which I think was the main problem.  And they charged us a fortune for wifi, which is inexcusable.

This is the view from our lounge window at night:

During the day we had views of the Marina Bay Sands hotel which is the one with the crazy ship sailing across the three buildings:

And they have an excellent shopping centre with many nice shops at the bottom.

One day we decided to go to the Art Science Museum, which is the lotus-shaped building you can see in the photo above. We paid our $25 (each!) to get in, went up to the top floor to start looking at the exhibits, and found... nothing. Turns out the Art Science Museum (a misleading name if there ever was one) only has travelling exhibitions and all they had was a Titanic exhibition which had already been in Melbourne two years ago. Talk about disappointing. There was no art, no science. The boy was furious and argued with three different people to get our money back. He succeeded in the end, but it was a total waste of an hour.

We also met up with some friends from Melbourne who moved to Singapore a couple of years ago, and had lunch and a wander around Dempsey Hill, which is locally known as the Aussie Expat centre of activity.

It was a lovely day out and we ended up back at their place for dinner. So great to see Melissa and Dave again after so long!

On another day, we also went over to see the Merlion, which has been the symbol of Singapore for ages. It's a massive tourist attraction:

And then we had the most wonderful experience coming home. If you fly first class with Singapore Airlines, you get to go through customs at Changi Airport via a special separate entry where you sit in leather chairs while they stamp your passport and clear you through Immigration. Then you get escorted to the first class lounge, and if you are regular customers like we are you get to go into the Private Lounge where everything in the known universe is available to you. God it was good.

So all in all it was a wonderful holiday. I would definitely recommend the Eastern and Oriental Express train, it was a fantastic experience. Next time we go to Singapore we'll be staying at the Mandarin Oriental, as our experience there in Bangkok was top notch.

Next up

It appears that I have not yet told anyone about our next holiday, which starts one week from today.

We'll be flying to Singapore and then on to Bangkok, where we have a couple of days before getting on a train - the Eastern and Oriental Express - which will take us through Thailand and Malaysia and down into Singapore.  Then we have a few days in Singapore before heading home.

I'm really looking forward to it.  We have friends who moved to Singapore about 18 months ago and we haven't seen them since, so catching up is on our list of priorities.

It's going to be a great holiday.

Day twenty eight

This morning in Singapore we decided to go shopping again and get my lovely new handbag. She has been named Kate.
Isn't she lovely? We had a late checkout from our lovely hotel so we got to hang around our suite until 6pm. Then we got driven to the airport by another man with a nice shiny car (this one was a mercedes benz) and hung out at the airport for a couple of hours until our flight left.

We had intended to claim back our GST from our shopping in Singapore but we checked in our bags before finding out that we needed to show what we had bought in order to make the claim. Suffice to say, we did not claim back the GST. Oh well, lucky it wasn't a LOT of money.

The flight back to Melbourne is about 7 and a half hours which isn't too bad. As it's overnight we just slept most of the way.

Day twenty seven

After waking up at 4.30am (jetlag sucks) we got up early and went for breakfast. We decided to go shopping but after consultation with the concierge discovered that the shops didn't open until 10am. We had a couple of hours to kill so we went back to our suite and read for a bit.

After setting off to go shopping, we covered about 3km of underground shopping centres - thank god for the airconditioning because it was HOT! Anyway we made it to the train station and caught the train to Orchard Road. They were doing major construction on Orchard Road so there wasn't a lot to see... we did visit a few shops and I got some new sunglasses. The boy got some new boots and a winter coat from Hugo Boss (which is ironic considering it was about 32 deg C outside) and we caught a cab back to the hotel.

We had dinner at their fancy restaurant that night which was lovely. Then afterwards I decided that I needed a photo of the city skyline from our hotel room and this is what I got.

Day twenty six

We spent all day today flying, flying, flying and arrived in Singapore at almost midnight. Luckily a nice man with a big shiny car picked us up at the airport and took us to our cushy hotel, the Ritz Carlton. Even better, they upgraded us to a suite!

Day twenty five

Early afternoon flight from Vancouver to Singapore. 19 hours in the air!

Flying... flying... flying...

Itinerary Part 5

After we leave Churchill, we fly back to Winnipeg for the night before heading back to Vancouver the next day. We'll be staying in Vancouver (at the Listel Hotel again) for another 5 days before getting back on the plane and heading home. As we are flying Singapore Airlines we have to go via Singapore, so we're stopping there for 2 nights and staying at the very glamorous Ritz Carlton Hotel. Total pampering and luxury for 2 days. Then we come home.

4 weeks and 1 day of awesome fun. We are both so excited. I'm getting the new camera this weekend and we are both going to buy puffy jackets for the cold bits.

I'd better do some research about things to do in Vancouver.