On The Sea Again, I Just Can't Wait To Get On The Sea Again: Singapore Day One

We're wrapping up our three days in Singapore after leaving the ship. It's been a busy three days, so I'll break it up into three blog postings (plus a special edition). I'll just say here that we had great time in Singapore after a rough start.

Okay, let's get the rough start out of the way. We had registered to leave the ship at 8:30. Apparently there were big delays getting people through Passport Control so we were not able to leave until 9:30. Not a big deal until we got into the terminal and joined the still long queue for Passport Control. After finally making it through, the real chaos began. Normally, the luggage is placed nice and orderly by color and number code. And, normally it's in a big room. Not that day. The luggage was scattered in a small space and the port ground crew brought the luggage out in the wrong order.

As a result, we did not get out of the terminal until 10:30. The good news was that we did not have a flight to catch and our room with a good view was ready when we got to the Hilton Garden Inn.

We had three ideas of what we wanted to do in Singapore. First, visit the Botanical Gardens and National Orchid Garden. We visited it 10 years ago. Second, we wanted to go to the Sky Park atop the Mairina Bay Sands. The Marina Bay Sands is an incredible structure - three 57-story hotel towers topped by a platform shaped like a ship - see the photo at the top. And third, visit with our friends Gina and Jim who we had met on a cruise 10 years ago. Unfortunately, Linda came down with a cold on the last day of the cruise so, the first order of business at the hotel was a bit of a rest. That was okay since it rained while we rested! And then it was time for lunch. Our hotel is in the Little India area of Singapore. Yes, we had to eat Indian food. We walked through the interesting streets to a small restaurant that served biryani. Their biryani has mutton in it so they made us a vegetarian dish with rice. Really tasty and all for the whopping price of 7 Singapore Dollars (or about $5.30).

After lunch it was time for another nap. We tried to book tickets to the observation platform on top of the Marina Bay Sands. Let's just say they had difficulty processing our U.S. credit cards. We then decided we would go to the hotel to have dinner and watch the Light and Water Show. It was time to navigate the Singapore Metro System. The first challenge was to figure out how to pay the fare, A security person helped us and it turned out to be so easy. Just tap a credit card to enter and tap it again to exit. No tickets to deal with. We negotiated the passages to find the correct train and took the 4 stop ride.