Sunday: On Sunday I went down to the reception and booked my room for another night. And then got an email about 10 minutes later telling me I had a place to stay! YES! I had written to Francois (a friend of Etienne, a couch-surfer from Hannover, who momentarily lives in Singapore) a couple of days before, hoping to be possibly be able to stay with him, but he had been gone and had just then read my email. So I cancelled my bed at the hostel, packed up my stuff and brought it down to the reception and happily went to the Singapore Botanic Garden. They are a huge park with different themes in different areas. There's is The National Orchid Garden, the Heritage Trees, and a lot of walks that have certain plant types as a theme. It's a huge garden, beautiful and very well designed. Especially the Orchid Garden is wonderful, they have SO many different kinds there, and even a cool-house for those that wouldn't survive in the heat. I spend several hours there, just wondering around and getting lost in this green hell that made me think I was in a different world. Listening to Nils Frahm, soaking up the sun and just enjoying the moments... In the end it started to rain, so I went back to Chinatown and to the food courts and just was really courageous and bought a bunch of things of which I didn't know what they were - because most of signs were in Chinese, and those symbols looked, well, rather Chinese to me. So I sat up on a road-crossing and watched the cars go by under the lampions while eating delicious and not so delicious food.
Then I went to get my backpack and took the metro to a bus-station where I met up with Francois, who came by car to pick me up to go to his apartment.

Francois and his wife HoJin life in an apartment that the company Francois works for provides for them. In Singapore you can't just rent an apartment unless it's for at least two years or more, so you have to get something different. In their case: a suite in an apartment complex that actually is more like a hotel suite. You have a breakfast buffet in the morning, a large pool, a gym, everyday somebody comes and cleans and changes your towels and even gives you shampoo in the shower. All in all, it's a very nice place to stay at. They even had two bedrooms, so I had one for myself. Good thing the company pays it though,
otherwise these suites would just be unaffordable... It's kind of the same with the car, the company provides it, because cars in Singapore are expensive. For a lot of businessmen it's actually cheaper to just take a taxi every day (and those are not cheap!) instead of just getting a car themselves. In Singapore, a good Golf GTI is kind of seen as a good status symbol. Yes, a Golf. But only because with taxes and import costs it's about 3-4 times as much as in Germany. No need to talk about a Porsche...
We ate a delicious salad and some brownies from Korea for dinner and then I crashed, partially because the night before at the hostel, I didn't sleep a single minute...


Monday: The next morning I went for a nice breakfast downstairs with HoJin. They have a wide variety of fresh fruits, salty thins like omelets and tater tots, and little biscuits and fresh juice. There were quite a lot of families with little kids (or rather just the mums in track suits trying to keep their three kids seated at the table, with rather little success...) as well as some lonely guys in business suits.
I took the free shuttle-bus that is part of the apartment-deal to a stop close to the MBS and walked the rest of the way there, getting a good view from the other side of the Bay. Lots of the streets where either closed down or had construction sites at the side, because they were setting up bleachers everywhere for the Formel 1 (?). They even built a little soccer field on a platform on the bay that I first though was a helicopter-landing-space. Whether you really need such a thing or not is debatable I guess...
I bought a ticket to go up to the 'Skypark', the visitor platform of the Marina Bay Sands, and then took the elevator. Nothing special, one could say, but in this case, because you cover such a great height in such short time, it's more than just a normal elevator-lift. The pressure change is so drastic that it can pretty hard on your ears, same as loosing great height in an airplane very quickly. The guy next to me made a really funny face when he noticed it, and then tried to take a discrete look around to see how everybody else was doing. Since I was the only other person around and the pressure-change didn't bother me much, he must have felt kind of weird... :)

Afterwards I gave Little India another try, but in my eyes it didn't seem much nicer than during the night when it was raining. Lot's of people who try to talk you into buying things in a quite aggressive manner, something I absolutely despise, and not that much else to do other than buy things. I much preferred Chinatown!
In the evening I got tired and went home and watched a very old and just as pointless movie witch Richard Gere together with Francois and HoJin, in which he plays a sneaky bad cop. One of the only times I fell asleep during a movie...!


Tuesday started out like the day before, with a great buffet. Afterwards I went to a Supermarket with HoJin and ate some Chinese Noodles at a little restaurant (very different from the ones they sell in Germany though, not the box-type, but on a plate with tomato on them and a soup kind of liquid). Helped out some Germans who were trying to figure out what to eat and were kind of scared of the food. They ended up having the same thing as me, kind of in the way: If she is German and she likes it, we must like it! Way to be open for new things...
When we got back I didn't have much time left, so I packed up my things, said goodbye to HoJin and Francois, who had luckily just arrived, and the had nothing else to do then to take the comfy shuttle-bus that took me straight to a metro station in a mall (where it seemed like the shoppers had never seen a backpacker before...) which took me straight to the airport. There I met Desiree, another girl from Freiburg in Germany, who'll do work&travel in New Zealand as well. I managed to get her sign up on couchsurfing, which before she had thought would be a crazy thing to do. We spent some time on the airplane together as well, which was quite nice. Maybe I'll see her again in NZ or here in Melbourne, I don't know yet.

Things I saw/ learned/ experienced/ ... :

•  Most couples I saw in Singapore are what I'm just gonna call "pure". Both western, mostly tourists, or both Asian. Whenever I saw a "mixed" couple, it was the man who was western looking, never the women. It's not a big deal, but it did kind of strike me as remarkable...
• Before I came to Singapore I was told that people would take pictures of me, or even ask me to take pictures with me. That has never happened to me. Not a single time. (Though I am in a lot of shots of other tourists I suppose...)
• Singapore is a nice city. I like it, and I liked it's diversity. But there was nothing that drew me to it and made me want to stay, like some other cities like Barcelona or Paris do, even Dubai a little. Visiting was nice, but I don't think I would ever want to live there...

After over a week without any updates from my side I'll try to make a little resume of what happened during my time in Singapore (at least of the things I still remember, which is not that much really. I sometimes take pictures of things that should never be photographed just so I know what to write about later...not sure if I'm supposed to be embarrassed of that.

FRIDAY: On my first morning in Singapore I had breakfast at the hostel, because it was included and therefore free. That's really all the good I can say about it, because it was really just very lame. Toast with either peanut butter or apricot jam, and plain cereal. But there was a coffe-latte-chocolate-cappuccino-milk-...-machine and that made up for it a little bit.
I stayed in the hostel for a while sending couchrequests to lots of people (in vain, as I should find out later) and sleeping a little (or rather a lot) because I hadn't slept the night before on the airplane and because there were people in the hostel who came home at 4 in the morning and decided it was time for all others to get up when going to bed themselves...
When it was almost dark, around 6.00pm, I decided to not completely waste an entire day and went to visit Chinatown, which conveniently started right in front of the hostel-door (and to it's right, left, and at the back of it.) I guess Chinatown in general is always quite colorful, but for the next month there is a special 'festival' going on, so they hung a lot of colored lamps above the streets and I imagine some other things that I didn't notice because I've just never seen it any different. I visited a little Hindu-temple at the end of Pagoda-Street, the main street in Chinatown (main street meaning: only for pedestrians, with what seemed like thousands of restaurants, souvenir shops and even a duty-free shop for perfumes (yes, duty-free... ! ! !). I had to take my shoes off (they kind of stood out next to all those tiny other pairs...) and even paid the 3$-tourist-fee (voluntarily payable, because they let us take pictures. For videos it was double.). There was not much to see though, because it was rather empty and in all the religious areas tourists were "kindly asked to stay out". (On almost every sign around here, in the hostel as well as on the streets, the "kindly" ask you to do stuff. "Kindly" wash your dishes, "kindly" label your food before putting it in the fridge. I labeled my banana kindly, very kindly even, but only so I wouldn't squish it...)
Afterwards I went to 'Little India', which is only 2 stops away from Chinatown. When I stepped out of the station it was raining, or rather pouring. I decided not to care and wondered around anyway, but all the shops were closing and it was rather dark and unpleasant, so I left. Having gone back to Chinatown it had stopped raining (just my sort of luck...) and I walked around some more and accidentally got to a spot where I wanted to go anyway. "Clark Quay", THE party location in that area and also quite famous all over Singapore as it seems.

"Clark Quay" seems to be a little world by itself. It's part of the river that runs through Singapore, but seems a lot like it's a little bay, especially at night. On the one side there is a big mall and some fancy restaurants, on the other one a huge bar/restaurant/club/party-scene, kind of located in a circle, and since it was a Friday night the place was packed. I got some Singaporean ice-cream and licked my my way through the crowd, taking pictures and soaking in the atmosphere. Further down the river there were more restaurants, only for seafood, one next to the other. They had aquariums outside so you could pick your crab or whatever you wanted and then eat it later on. I wonder if the guests get to name their food too before it has to crawl from the death-row to the kitchen...
Back at the hostel I had gotten a new room for the next night, a different one because the other bed was booked. It was female only, up in the attic, with a lot more space and single beds instead of bunk-beds. Nothing to complain about! The hostel btw had the welcoming name of "5FootwayInn". I don't know what it stands for, but it sure felt like the beds could have something to do with it, because my feet were sticking out...! It thus took me quite a while to fall asleep...



Saturday: Same breakfast story, but smart as I am I had bought some fruits the day before, so I had at least some banana and apple to top the cereal with (plus banana & peanut butter should be a compulsory break-fast dish anyway...!). I found out that there were so many Germans at the hostel because they were actually a group: The "Sinfonisches Jugendblasorchester Baden-Wuerttemberg" (a symphonic youth-band). They are on an Asia-Tour and are giving concerts in lots of different cities, one of them Singapore. I'm pretty sure they also went to the orchestra-competition I went to with my school orchestra a few months back. The world is so small...

Later that day I went to the 'Gardens by the Bay', a lovely big garden with lots of different kinds of plants, right next to the Marina Bay Sands. They have some 'fake-trees' there as well, which are connected with a bridge, the 'Skywalk'. I wanted to buy a ticket as it was getting dark and everything was beautifully lit, but apparently lots of other people had the same idea as me and they stopped selling tickets so the walk wouldn't be overcrowded. It was beautiful to see from the ground as well though, the 'trees' have little light-bulbs in them and look like a star-covered sky. Guess I'm in a lot of pictures now...
The gardens are directly connected the Marina Bay Sands (MBS) Mall, which, just like the MBS, is huge, and where only high-end stores are located: Gucci, Chanel, Dior, Ferrari,... Solely Louis Vuitton apparently though it wasn't good enough, so they got a separate little building outside on the water. Just walking around in the mall is quite impressive, but it also gets boring quite easily if a single bag at a certain store costs more than all the money you have saved up to spend on your trip. I must say, I much prefer my trip...!
One thing about the mall was really astoundingly though: The toilets. Usually not a topic I would want to discuss on here, but they really have some of those 'standing'-toilets in the womens bathroom, just like in France at the auto-stops. Imagining a women in +10.000$ outfit using one of those made up for the long line I had to wait in before!
The Light and Water Show 'Wonder Full' in front of the mall started slightly afterwards, and even though being reasonably late, I got a very good spot right in the middle. The show was ok, but for me, the constantly analyzing human-being that I am, a little weird. Basically what they do is to project short movies on water that is sprayed into the air by a fountain under very high pressure, so that a "screen" is produced. So far, so good, I like the idea very much and to see many pretty colours reflected on and in water easily pleases my dear brain (or frontal lobe, or thalamus). But was was shown on the water to the audience was nothing more than what seemed to be a pretty, but quit  random collection of movies of children. Little, cute, pretty children (and some adults), but without a theme or any logic behind it. It doesn't say anything about it on the website either, only that I "won't want to miss out on this exciting, free showcase of stunning visual effects with interweaving lasers, video projectors and giant streaming water screens". But it was free and colorful and a nice ending of my day at, in and around the MBS.

I went back to Chinatown, was grateful for the opening-hours of the local food court, got fruit and some unknown but tasty bread and had dinner on the terrace at the hostel. I was still couch-less, but figured that I'd  just have to stay at the hostel for my time in Singapore. The guys at the reception must have thought I was a freak, since I went down there every morning before 12.00 to prolong my stay for just one more night...


Sooo here are some pictures to give you an impression. Sorry about the ones that are not upright, they were on the computer but the website changed it...