The last week of July marked my first vacation as well as my first venture out into Asia aside my travel around Korea. Julia and I booked a tour package after a long and hard fought search for cheap flights or flight and hotel packages, etc. She was under time constraints because of a midterm the following Friday, so out package deal extended between Monday and Friday morning.
This package tour I should mention was totally in Korean. I was hesitant because I see many tours around here in Jeju and they are just full of old men and Woman, and given this cultures history being a foreigner in hat group would surely make me feel well out of place.
Luckily that was not the case at all. We had a small group of 12 people, 3 families and another couple.
Meeting in Singapore, after a stop and duty free to pick up some ridiculously cheap spirits, I hauled around my 2 liters of gin and vodka to our little group where we met our tour guide. A Korean woman in her young 40's had been living in Singapore for about 10 years.
The first things that hits you about Singapore is the shear amount of flora just decorating the city. The highway from the airport to downtown was overflowing with brights colors from the trees to the potter flowers.
They took us to the hotel and gave us room keys, instructed us to meet down here in the early morning to eat the buffet breakfast and get set to travel into Malaysia.
That night we took a walk around the river to a semi-famous colored bridge. Painted an array of colors, it floored me with the amount of detail in the design. It was then that I knew this city had lots to offer. As we continued our walk along the river, searching for an open local flavored restaurant we (or at least I) began constantly taking pictures of interesting buildings. Some were modern with oddly shaped windows and the perfect amount of ivy overtaking its cement structure. Others were rustic and looked as if they were a model from a Disneyworld theme park. Reminded me of French Polynesia style or Cuban or something. Gently worn, mint green window shudders against a textured egg shell surface with high beams and red tiled roofs. Simply beautiful. The architecture alone made me fall in love with this place and yet I still had not tired a single bite of food and my stomach was rumbling.
Barely having left out hotel I must have taken 20 pictures, it seemed like every moment was worth capturing. We would turn a corner into what seemed like an alley and there would be this gorgeous clock tower in what you would think would be the middle of nowhere. Another picture or 5 just to make sure I would actually get the lighting right for once.
Our stroll in the very last hour of the night took us to expensive foreign restaurants that seemed as if they were only showcasing drinks and maybe some appetizers. Not what we wanted to eat. Julia wanted to look inside the 7/11 store just to see what it was like. A bit different that the Korean ones and certainly more so than the American ones. This store actually had curry to go in these places you would see hot dogs to go in America. Having little Singapore dollars with us at the time, we went with these dollar fifty curries. We took them to the river and ate them, enjoying the mild spiceness and the suprising tenderness of the chicken.
After watching a bit of TV (because it was in English!) we went to sleep.
The next morning we awoke, showered, packed and headed downstairs to our breakfast buffet. They had everything I could have wanted and I ate like a king.
It was at about this time that our guide decided to mention that I could not take and liquids back in Singapore, so my feeling was that I either had to sell everything or drink it. Having 2 days to do that, I knew that was not possible unless I just shared with all the adults on our bus.
We left for Malaysia, driving through Singapore my finger on the shutter the entire time as we had great weather, my first time seeing Singapore in the daylight. The flora here is incredible I kept thinking to myself. Every corner and as far as my eyes could see there were exceptional landscaping, apparently this is the largest major students take in Singapore and it certainly shows.
Getting through the border guards and accidentally taking a picture in the place I was not supposed to take a picture (nobody bothered me about it but my guide) we drove into Malaysia looking out into the South China sea. There was certainly a different feel to Malaysia, especially being only an hour drive from downtown Singapore. Prices seemed cheaper, people were mostly the same race and the architecture wasn't as nice.
Our stops for our tour included a couple of Mosque's, a Muslim cemetery, a traditional Malaysian dance and musical performance. We didn't plan to, but we stopped briefly at this Muslim school where the cutest kids were doing some song out of the patio. I of course took pictures.
The Mosques both places were beautiful of course, but we never went inside (Muslims only). So we took a few pictures and continued on. The dance and instrument session were great until they singled me out and pulled Julia and I up on the stage to dance with them. It was not my most favorite moment of our trip.
Malaysia was brief, tours being what they are, as many things as possible crammed together. Our total stay was maybe 3 or 4 hours.
Getting back into Singapore, my visa section of my passport was beginning to fill up even more.
Our next stop was the World's Largest Bird Park where we would attend a bird show.
The show took place on the other side of the park, so we took on Monorail across seeing all the different environments that were created for these creatures. Very cool stuff, this place was indeed enormous.
The bird show was amazing, some incredible things from a large variety or birds. A parrot that would answer simple questions, huge vultures flying right above my head and pelicans who could catch a fruit tossed 20 feet in the air.
We had some free time here also so we went to go see he penguins where we were charmed by 3 babies playing in the corner, doing dives for us. We must have watched them for 20 minutes just acting like penguin children splashing all about.
After the park we ate Mongolian buffet that was delicious. Nothing too special, but fancy style buffet.
Our next stop was Sentosa island a resort area right off the coast of Sinpaore. There, we travelled up into a 60 story tall viewing ride that did a 360 degree turn of the area, which was great to get a feel of what Singapore looked like from a distance and what the island had to offer. There were beautiful coves and beaches that were tucked into the area, which I desperately wanted to get to in our free time.
Julia thought we would not have enough time and we would be getting that exposure tomorrow when we would go to Indonesia.
We opted to check out the Singapore history museum which was one of the best history museums I have ever seen. There were lifesize models of events and old traditions. So for instance, instead of just displaying an old tools or artifact, it was presented collectively in amongst others of the same general kind. So there were these model displays of what life was like if these models of people were actually real. They were all to scale, just made out of wax.
After the museuem we met back up with the group and took the cable car from sentosa island to the mainland Singapore.
We would then head out to the ferry terminal and get tickets for the ferry over to Indonesia. We would see one more day of Singapore, but first it was time for some white sand beaches and bath temperature water, not to mention giant lizards in the swimming pool and birds stealing my breakfast.....
More soon ~
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