Hello all!
Jaclyn and I left Korea early morning (c. 2 am) on our first day of vacation, and got back this Monday morning at 7:30 so as to start work at 8:30. I am only telling you this to impress the fact that we took full advantage of our alloted time (and then some, but that's a story for another day). With so much packed in in such a brief time, I thought it best to chop up the telling of our trip a bit.
From Incheon, we headed straight to Singapore. We only had one evening and one day, so we really crammed it in. Singapore is probably best known for this:
Really strict laws. It's illegal to spit, to chew gum, to smoke non-Singaporean cigarettes. I wouldn't be surprised if dirty looks were illegal here. But in exchange for a few civil liberties, Singapore has become synonymous with safety and cleanliness. We got to our hostel fairly late, and when they found out we only had one day they said, "At least Singapore is safe so you can stay out all night!"
We were staying in the Muslim district and, being Ramadan, things got lively after sundown. The streets were lined with stalls selling all sorts of food I couldn't identify, and tables packed with people spilled into the roadways to jam up traffic. The food all looked (and smelled) amazing, but we were hoping to find something less imported and more "Singaporean." It took us a while to comprehend that the thing that makes Singapore's "native" cuisine so outstanding is that there is no real "native" cuisine. Singapore's history is heavily colored by colonialism and immigration from all around Asia, and this melting-pot past has yielded a cuisine unrivaled by any country I've ever visited.
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Perhaps Singapore's most famous export is the eponymous cocktail, the Singapore Sling. It was created in the "Long Bar" of the Raffles Hotel, as the signs, posters, and souvenir glasses will all tell you. I'd read somewhere that a room goes for something like 700 dollars a night, so I was surprised when we got to the bar (after literal hours of searching... getting lost is a great way to get familiar with a city) that we had to wade our way in through a morass of peanut shells. |
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| Crunch crunch. |
Well, we got our 26 dollar cocktails from the very bar of their origin. I found it rather cloying, but it was a fun time nevertheless. It was a very cool bar, dripping with that austerity particular to the colonial British empire. I felt like Rudyard Kipling and those stuffy guys from The Jungle Book movie could have been sipping tea the next table over (I have a very narrow view of British-Asian colonialism, obviously). Instead, it was some middle aged british women with their fruity pink cocktails, asking us how to send pictures on their iPhones.
Perhaps the saccharine flavor of the Singapore Sling was for the best, because we rose early the next morning to do as much as we could with our brief time.
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| View from the hostel. |
A subway ride and a brief walk brought us to the a large market known as the best spot for stall-food. Jaclyn made friends and got some recommendations, then we loaded up and chowed down.
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| Busted. |
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| Some kind of ricey dumpling with some kind of pickled something all over it. |
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| Some kind of omelette-esque thing. |
After breakfast and a cup of thick coffee with condensed milk, we wandered around for a while and took in the scene.
After breakfast we headed back to the city center where we looked at some buildings, including one that looks like a giant cruise ship balanced on three towers. I've heard a lot about it lately because it was constructed by a Korean company, and it's supposed to be the largest of it's kind, though, I don't know how much competition there is for cruise ship-balancing buildings.
We rode this giant ferris wheel to get a better view of the city. I'd heard the best view is to be had at night, but by the time we'd found it the night before it was already shut down. We made do with the daytime scene.
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| Not too shabby. |
After that we got a some more delicious food at some more food stalls. We adpoted the strategy of ordering a lot and eating a little, repeating that process every hour and a half or so in order to sample as many dishes as possible. Between meals, we wandered over to the track used for the F1 Grand Prix. I was surprised to see it's open to the public, and was being utilized by several bikers and joggers. But I guess in a city-state, there's no wasted space, and in a country where crime is practicaly nonexistent, why bother locking anything up?
Singapore definitely has a lot going for it. It's safe, organized, and hospital clean. You can see evidence of it's powerhouse economy at every turn. Case in point: Louis Vuitton island.
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| When we went in, they literally said, "Welcome to Louis Vuitton island." You can see the security measures in evidence everywhere you go. How many security cameras can you count in the picture below? |
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| Big brother is watching. |
Yet for all it's sights and scenes, the thing I'll most remember about Singapore is this:
Yet for all it's sights and scenes, the thing I'll most remember about Singapore is this:
We left Singapore after a jammed 26 hours and headed to Kuala Lumpur. We stayed in an awesome bed and breakfast nestled into a hillside, tropical plants springing up all around it. You can see it here, screened by trees, next to the "Fatty Ma" restaurant.
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Speaking of the Petronas Towers:
The Petronas Towers were the world's tallest building for something like half a decade, before they were surpassed by the Burj Khalifa. They big. Real big. But to be honest, when I first saw them I was somewhat underwhelmed. It towers over all of it's neighbors, true, and is the tallest building I've ever seen by a stretch. But, in the end a big building is just a big building, even if it's a big a** building like this one.
Though, I suppose a fair deal of neck-craning was required.
We left the plaza and went to a cool market full of touristy-goods, including loads of hand-painted silks. I would have loaded up on them, but this being the second day of a 16 day trip, I was watching my spending carefully. That, and they weren't as cheap as you'd expect from a s southeast-asian market. The colorful shops made for a couple of nice pictures, though.
Plus, Jaclyn found some cool pants with a wide range of motion.
We saw some funny English grafitti, hopefully not dedicated to the same person...
...plus an advertisement that leaves the subtle approach to it's competitors...
...a cool night-scape...
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...and a two headed turtle.
After that we headed back to the towers to take some night shots. What had been underwhelming under the light of the day was nothing short of astonishing by night. I'm not sure what does it exactly, but something about the towers emanating a seemingly inherent luminosity lends a comprehensiblity to their magnitude. They'd simply been twin grey monoliths when we'd seen them earlier, gigantic, sure, but with a stony lifelessness. When lit up they gained a sort of ethereal animation which made their scale and grandeur dazzling. All that stuff, and they made for a good photo-op.
When we were all photoed out, we headed back to the B & B to grab a couple hours of sleep, then rose at some terrible hour to fly to Brunei Darusallam, a country that, despite visiting, I still have to google to spell the name correctly.
what a gif
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