Singapore

We arrived in Singapore on the afternoon of New Year's Eve and Warren and his girlfriend Norshidah were waiting for us at the airport. It was nice to see the bro after a couple of years. We were staying the first 2 nights with Norsh, her mum and her brother in their 11th floor apartment. Below is the view from their apartment. It was really cool staying there and living how the locals lived for a couple of nights. It certainly gave me a new appreciation for the space we have and the size of houses back in NZ! 

We saw in the new year in a very chilled way. One of Norsh's friends has just opened a hostel in the last couple of weeks, and they were holding a small party on the roof-top terrace. All four of us were pretty tired so we left the party and got a cab back to the apartment at around 11:30pm. We saw in the new year there, and managed to see some of the fireworks live above and between some of the skyscrapers, as well as watching them on the telly.

It was very nice waking up on New Year's Day without a hangover! I still wasn't feeling great though as I'd been hit by jetlag pretty bad and didn't really get much sleep. We had some very good Chinese for lunch in one of Norsh's family's favourite restaurants, then went for a long walk taking in a few sights, including the famous Raffles Hotel. Coming from the UK the heat was quite difficult to deal with. Only about 32-33 degrees, but very high humidity so you constantly felt very hot and sticky.

Singapore is very design focused and we saw some awesome buildings. Although the strangest had to be the Marina Sands complex. I'm not sure who thought it would be a good idea to plonk a large boat on 3 tall towers...

We then caught a taxi out to the East Coast area. It was a novelty travelling by taxi so much, they really were cheap. We went for a long walk along the beach and were astounded by all of the big ships queueing to get into the port. I had no idea Singapore was such a busy port. You can see a whole lot lined up on the horizon in the pic below. They were hundreds of them!

We stopped for a bit to rest and watch some of the action in the wake-board cable-ski park. Some of the guys were pretty good and practising a few tricks.

After some more walking we reached our destination, the East Coast Lagoon Food Centre. There are hawker centres like it all over Singapore where you can get cheap and incredibly tasty meals. We ended up eating most of our meals at them. We met up with a couple of Norsh's friends there and had an amazing feast! There was chilli crab, incredibly fresh BBQ squid, Chinese greens, rice and beef, chicken and mutton satay. Warren also insisted on ordering some Roti John, so we ended up totally stuffed. It was all washed down with fresh refreshing sugarcane juice. They also ordered a couple of ice kachangs to share for desert. This was bit of an acquired taste... I liked the shaved ice with flavoured syrup bit, but wasn't so keen on the bean and corn 'goodies' you get to at the bottom...