Singapore

Singapore was another one-day port. If you ask anyone what to do in Singapore for one day, the answer is eat. That’s why the first thing on our agenda that day was to get to the hawker center in Chinatown to try some of the famous food. We took the subway which was spotlessly clean. I think it was my first time on a subway and one of my friends called it “subway for dummies” because it was so clean and orderly. I didn’t mind. I don’t remember how many people started out in our group, maybe six, but we kept splitting up and by the end of the day I was with just one other person. When we got to the food place I searched until I found a vendor selling oyster omelets. It wasn’t as amazing as I’d built up my hopes for but it was still really good. After that we rode the subway again looking for the Raffles Hotel and got off at the wrong stop but walked around for a while because it was still a really cool looking place. We eventually made it to the hotel and found the part of our group we’d lost along the way but then I was getting impatient and Caitlin and I needed to go to the aquarium so we could do our class projects so we went on our own to Sentosa which is a man made resort island and where Underwater World is. We took the subway back to the waterfront and then took the sky tram or some other fancy kind of transportation to Sentosa and walked around there for a while and then we spent an hour or two in the aquarium. It was almost better in some ways than Two Oceans in Cape Town. I found my new favorite animal: sea angels. They’re so cool! Shell-less snails I think is the closest description they gave. After the aquarium we explored the island a little more then headed back to the waterfront and the ship. I would have loved to have more time in Singapore but it’s probably good that we didn’t because everything there was really expensive.

Surprisingly, no one from the ship got arrested for breaking any of Singapore’s many laws. You can’t spit, jaywalk, carry a durian on public transportation, eat or drink on public transportation, or a bunch of other things. The efficiency is very evident. They have four languages-English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil and the signs are all written in all four or at least two and the announcements on the busses and stuff are made in all of them too. The traffic was also a lot less scary than most of the other countries we’ve been to.