5 Days in Singapore

Hello!

Our visit to Singapore was a 5 day whirlwind of busyness. Here’s what we did in our five days:

Day One

We arrived in the early afternoon, dumped our bags in our hostel and went for a wander in Chinatown which was full of stalls selling Chinese tat, tailors and restaurants. We found a sprawling Chinese food hawker market nearby and got a huge bowl of cheap noodles to share for lunch. Afterwards we took the MRT to Bras Basah, where there is an abundance of art shops and I bought some long-awaited stationary supplies. The Singapore MRT is fantastic to get around on. Everything is signposted in English, it’s immaculately clean and there’s literally a train every couple of minutes. We loved it! We ate in a restaurant in Chinatown that evening but I wouldn’t recommend it for visitors. It was almost four times more expensive than food from the market and I imagine it was considerably less authentic too.

Day Two

We spent our second day seeing the Cloud Forest and Flower Dome in Gardens By The Bay. This huge garden is filled with themed areas to represent flora from a variety of countries. The most spectacular areas are those inhabited by Supertrees, which are these fantastic giant tree-like sculptures covered in lights and vegetation that produce their own solar energy to power everything in the gardens. The two paid-for attractions are the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest. Flower Dome is pretty much self explanatory. If you love flowers then it’s definitely worth a trip. If you aren’t that bothered then it really is just a dome filled with flowers! Cloud Forest on the other hand, is truly spectacular. It’s both incredibly humid and freezing cold inside to mimic the environment in the cloud forests of the wild. When you’re used to the fierce heat of Singapore, it’s actually pretty chilly! It basically looks like a miniature mountain inside a big glass dome, covered in all kinds of vegetation and flowers with a magnificent waterfall cascading out from the top. You can walk all the way up and and you get great views of the city from the walkways at the top. It was seriously cool!

Day Three

We took a trip to Little India, Singapore’s Indian quarter, for a wander around. It’s a bustling and vibrant area of the city filled with market stalls selling fruit, spices, fabrics and flower garlands. A lot of the old colonial buildings are painted in rainbow colours and look absolutely gorgeous even if they are a little weather-worn. We found a local hawker market and had the most amazing chickpea biriani meal in amongst the locals which was delicious. That evening we also returned to Gardens By The Bay to look at the Supertrees at night when they’re all lit up. We luckily arrived just in time for the 8pm light show to music which was pretty spectacular. We walked back towards the quay afterwards to find somewhere to rest our aching feet and ended up joining a huge crowd of tourists to watch something called the Wonder Full Light and Water Show. Basically they spray out water mist in the bay and project a weird film onto it which seemed to be mainly children’s faces laughing…we still aren’t sure if there was a story behind it but it was nice to look at!

Day Four

On our fourth day in Singapore we wandered in the huge malls for a bit. They frigging love malls here. To be honest, it’s so hot outside even Rich liked being in the malls! Singapore really does have a very western feel to it and everything is very big and impressive. We also had a stroll around the botanical gardens and orchid gardens, which were really pretty.

We embarked on the traveller’s rite of passage on our fourth day in the city by heading to the famous Raffles Hotel Long Bar, where we sipped on the original Singapore Sling cocktail. This cocktail is a mix of Cointreau, pineapple juice, lime juice, cherry liqueur, grenadine, gin, Benedictine and bitters, garnished with a wedge of pineapple and a brandy soaked cherry. I loved it (obviously!). The bar itself is gorgeous and old-fashioned with these huge bags of peanuts dotted around. It’s traditional to throw the shells on the floor after you’ve eaten the peanuts, which felt so wrong in a city where we’d yet to see a scrap of litter on the floor and chewing gum is actually banned! We both really enjoyed our experience in Raffles. Sure it was expensive but it would have felt wrong to have not partaken in this age old travellers’ tradition. That evening we treated ourselves to a cinema trip to see Finding Dory, which felt reassuringly normal. We almost forgot that we were on the other side of the world!

Day Five

On our last day in Singapore we ventured out to Sentosa island, which is basically an island full of entertainment! We spent the day at Universal Studios which was a cool experience. I loved the way that they really went to town on each themed area so that you felt like you’d actually stepped onto the set! As expected, we spent most of the day queuing, although thankfully it was undercover. The sun decided to finally break through the cloud for our fifth day in the city, which meant that you felt a little bit like you were in an oven when you stepped out of the shade! We had fun anyway : ). We met up with a friend for dinner in the evening (shoutout to Emma!) who recommend a fantastic falafel joint to us in the middle of the business district. We also nipped over to the Arab quarter for a drink that night and to take in the gorgeous gold dome of the Masjid Sultan Mosque.

So that basically sums up our whirlwind tour of Singapore! We both loved the city, and I especially liked how you could take a short ride on the train system and get off in what felt like a different country. It’s ridiculously easy and cheap to get everywhere and so immaculately clean it’s unbelievable! My favourite moment has to be when we were sipping our Singapore Slings in Raffles, although Rich thinks Gardens By The Bay was the definite high point. Either way, it was a fantastic five days!

Jess & Rich xxx