Arrived in Bangkok

Finally arrived in Bangkok, but I'll keep that for a future update, for now I'll talk about Singapore.

I had this impression of Singapore from previous visitors of the country that it was a sterile, boring, overly-westernized, clean and oppressed city. In actuality, I was pleasantly surprised to find very much the contrary in a few regards.

First of all, I was tight on time when I had to book the hotel, so I didn't do much research on where the hotel was located. The name of the Hotel was Fragrance Hotel, and it was located in the Geyland district of Singapore. It was close to the MRT (Subway/train) and well centralized in the city. What I didn't count on was the fact that Geylang is probably the most active red-light district in all of Singapore. For some reason there was no prostitutes on our street, but on the next street, you could spot something like 50 of them lined up looking for customers. Furthermor, they could be spotted at most places where they serve food (hey most of them weren't too bad looking, and I can think of worst things to have to look at).

Aside from the prostitutes, we also found some great, extremely cheap (3-7 $CAD) local food by the means of the Hawker Centres. These centres are basically restaurants that have food already cooked and ready to eat and usually little to no tables in the restaurant. The tables would instead be lined up on the fairly large sidewalks leading all the way up to the street. Since the tables take up the whole sidewalk, you are forced to essentially make your way through narrow gaps between the restaurants and where the tables are (usually with lots of customers). This forces you to peruse and smell the various foods available, and because they're cheap, we never had to limit ourselves!

I was expecting some great multi-culturalism in Singapore and I was not dissapointed in the least. In our (very short visit), we managed to eat Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian (of course!), Korean, Malay and some other islamic-looking foods. And it was good! Generally, we frown upong eating at food-courts in Canada because they generally suck. We found in Singapore, on Orchard Road, what a Food court should be. No fast-food American crap here, just foods from countries all over Asia at super-cheap prices (but a bit more than Hawker Centres). They even had Dim Sum served on the carts! If I lived in Singapore, I'd want to live as close to this place as possible :)

While in Singapore, other than generally walking around the city, we checked out Singapore Botanical Garden which is simply awe-inspiring. It was so large that we gave up half-way through from exhaustion. To give you an idea, there's an orchid garden INSIDE the Botannical garden that itself alone took over 2 hours to go through, and it probably took up less than 10% of the whole park. This park puts all parks in Montreal to shame...

As for the public transportation system, we were expecting another example of how pathetic the one we have back home really was, and we weren't dissapointed even though it wasn't quite as advanced as the Hong Kong one. Finally, as in every other city I've visited so far in Asia, taxis here are dirt cheap!

On the last night, my friend's uncle invited us to an amazing seafood restaurant area in Singapore. The crabs were incredibly huge and were prepared in a Chili sauce and a black-pepper sauce. We wished we had found out about these restaurants earlier...

There's many things we didn't have to visit in Singapore, such as Sentosa island and the Jurong birdpark, but that's ok, they'll still be there for next time, and there will be, that's for sure!

My expectations for Singapore were low, and it turns out that even though I'm very happy to be back in Bangkok, Singapore may be have become my favorite city in Asia so far.

More to come from Bangkok very soon, as well as pictures from Singapore.