It was approaching midnight by the time we landed, but we gained an appreciation of the scale of the place as we were coming into land. Singapore is only a small island but somehow has a population of over 5 million. We headed straight to our hotel which was a bit of a distance from the airport but the local underground network was easy enough to use as everything was in English. English seemed to be spoken as a 1st language by many of the people and that was reflected in the signage etc - perfect! Our first impressions of the city were good, looking back I suppose it was the calm before the storm as it's fair to say not all of Asia is as calm as Singapore.
We were due to fly out to Java in Indonesia a few days later so we only really had two full days to explore Singapore. We got up early the next day and made our way towards the business centre to take a look at some of the sky scrapers, including an amazing building which appeared to have a boat spanning across the roof of three large tower blocks (you can just make it out in the 1st photo) That was after a quick breakfast of some sort of pineapple pastry which tasted good and cost about 40p. We then walked to the Asian Civilisation Museum which was recommended by our travel book. The museum showed us a bit about Singapore's history and how the Indian, Chinese and Arabic populations make up the country. We then continued walking a bit further into the city through some nice areas called Boat Quay and Clarke Quay where there were lots of cafes, restaurants, bars etc.
We felt quite at ease in Singapore and the people seemed friendly. One monk (well someone dressed similar to a monk) was even good enough to come up to me and offer me a blessing and gave me a small piece of card with some religios text on it. It was then that he asked for a donation of something like 20 pounds for this service, needless to say I gave the monk his card back and I imagine he retracted my blessing!
We ate well in Singapore and cheaply too. We visited a large open air food market for lunch. There were plenty of Western looking office workers tucking into food there so we felt it was safe enough for our so far un-tested stomachs! I chose an Indian stall and ended up with a large platter of all sorts for about 2 pounds (by the way we write pounds as the keyboards here don't have the right symbol in case people hadn't figured!). That evening we went for dinner in Chinatown and found a street with loads of different food stalls. We picked the one with the biggest queue, probably the safest bet, and had a plate of vegetable noodles cooked up in front of us for next to nothing. The chef only had one wok on the go but seemed to work her way through the orders in no time - you wouldn't want to get in her way anyway!
The following day we caught a train out of the city to Changi Prison. The prison is used as a Woman's prison today I think. We wanted to visit the prison as we'd read that it was used as a prisoner of war camp during the 2nd world war, housing mainly British prisoners. It was interesting to learn how Japan invaded Singapore and how the country changed during the occupation. While we were there we met a retired couple from Kent who kindly bought us lunch in the museum restaurant. Their sons had done a bit of travelling a few years back so I think they were interested to hear what we'd been up to!
Once back in the centre, we visited the Arab Quarter and chilled out on a street corner with some Turkish tea and watched Singapore go by. We then walked to Little India to find somewhere to try some Indian food.
We took a photo of this sign on the outside of a government buidling near our hotel as it made us laugh. We then carried on walking a few meters and saw another sign which said 'Strictly no photos'. We didn't hang around after that in case the first sign came to life! The Singaporian police used to be well known for not messing about apparently!
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