Trip Report: Singapore ..

We left Mumbai late 26th night / early 27th morning en route to Singapore. I'd forgotten how short this flight is (4.5 hours). Kinda makes it a bit hard, since the kids do not get a decent night rest. Gaurav, a friend of my brother Stephen, offered to host us in his apartment in SG. We decided to take him up on his offer.

In retrospect, it was quite an excellent decision to stay with Gaurav. We saw life outside of Orchard Road and Marina and got to explore the non-tourist side of Singapore. The kids were thrilled since there was a small play structure within the apartment complex. Gaurav rents a fairly spacious 3 bedroom apartment in Buket Purmei. The apartment complex was built by the housing board of singapore and has probably 20 buildings or so along with a lower school etc. There is a fair amount of green space for the kids and a few play structures in the complex. We also visited my friend PMT and his family, who also live in another apartment complex on east coast parkway. This apartment complex is private and has a few more facilities, specifically a swimming pool and a gymnasium. Its also much smaller in total number of apartments compared to the HBD complex.

Spending time with another family who has kids with the same age range makes things so much easier. PMT's daughter, Sheba, is also 5 years old and goes to a Montessori school in Singapore. it was quite entertaining to see how sheba and maya would play with each other. They were very polite and shared things nicely. They seemed to agree on when it is ok to break their self made rules. Mari has taught maya the dot game (you lay down a bunch of dots and then fill them up with squares and your initial). Its quite a easy game to teach and play but does provide endless hours of amusement and fun for the kids. We had an excellent lunch at a seafood place on East Coast Parkway (Red ???). PMT thinks that all the places there are similar. We ordered a chilli crab, a black pepper and garlic crab, fried rice, chinese brocolli with ginger and some fried bread. The bread with the chilli crab sauce was most excellent (one of the top 10 dishes of our trip!). The pepper and garlic crab was interesting but lacked the sauce (which IMO is quite important).

We then played at ECP for a few hours, watched some surf boarding at the man made lake there and saw lots of planes land at Changhi (amazing as to how busy that airport is!). We then went for a quick swim in the complex before heading to Chinatown night market. The kids were quite exhausted (not a lot of sleep the previous nite on the plane), and we had to carry them and give them a couple of good sugar drinks (coconut water and watermelon juice). The food at the chinatown night market (on smith street) was quite excellent. We got peanut/sesame ball soup, chicken porridge and fried noodles (char kway theo?). You need a big group to eat at such places, too many choices for a small group.

The next day we went and visited our good friends at the NZ immigration office. Compared to LA consulate, this office was very busy and quite slow. We waiting for 30 minutes before seeing the person. Unforunately our files had not yet been transferred. The person was nice enough to call our case officer (JD) in Christchurch, who immediately fixed the situation.Good thing that SG and NZ are relatively close from a timezone perspecitve (+5.5 hours). We were asked to wait for 30 mins and so we decided to head down to Food Republicj in Wasim Atria for a quick singaporean breakfast. We had a great breakfast at Toastbox (toast with eggs in a sweet soy sauce and white pepper). The other places at Food Republic seemed quite good also. We did want to have lunch there, but unforunately, we could not hang out in that area forever since shopping is the main and only attraction on Orchard Road. The much advertised and signed aquarium in Wasim Atria / Ngee Anh City is basically a large fish tank at the basement of the building. We then picked up the visas and headed to the zoo. We wanted the kids to experience the SG subway system, so we took them to the zoo on the subway. Maya has a slight aversion to subway's after seeing kurund miss the subway in NY. We finally convinced her it was ok, and off we went.

SG zoo is a must visit. Its quite amazing to see how kids change as they grow older. We've taken the kids to the zoo multiple times in the past. This time it seemed a bit different. Maya was really curious about some of the animals. It helped that the male lion got into a fight with the female lions and scratched one of them pretty badly and prevented the lioness from getting any feed. PJ was quite upset with the male lion. One of the trainers explained that the male lion gets teased a lot by the lionesses and hence reacts that way when his patience runs out. PJ seemed to relate to the situation (she likes to tease maya a lot, and maya gets mad at her periodically), but insisted that in her case it is very different. After playing in the park they wanted to go back and visit the lions again. They also liked seeing the other cats. The orangutans and chimpanzees also put on a good show for us. We convinced the kids to pose for a picture with the orangutans. The camera uses a wireless card to store the image on a computer at the picture desk (a few meters away). So you get the picture pretty much immediately after its clicked. Pretty cool use of technology. A new kids park / animal rides is being constructed at SG Zoo and this is scheduled to open in June 2008. Kinda cool to see them making things even better. The kids were having so much fun at the zoo, that we had a mediocre lunch at the zoo and played there till a bit past 5:00 pm. We arranged to meet our friends PMT and family at their house and then head to the hawker / food court at Vivocity, a new mall in SG. The Vivocity foodcourt was very mediocre. We had some decent dim sum and a collection of different noodle dishes. We over ordered a bit for the kids, and then ended up eating that food. In retrospect, we should have headed to a more historic / renowned hawker area like Maxwell, Newton or the more recent Glutton Bay (near esplanade).

We had an early flight the next day morning. We got to the airport well in advance and hoped to find a good breakfast spot at the airport. I was not aware that the better eating spots are in the public areas, while the transit area has the more mediocre places. We ended up eating an awful masala dosa and chai from Kaveri. The kids had inari and tamago from a sushi boat place. there were quite amused by the sushi going in a circle. There was a pretty cool block art area for kids and adults at the airport. We spent some time there before we boarded the plane to Manila, for our final leg of the journey.