Last Days in Singapore

Throughout his life Drew has always been surrounded by women. Moving to Singapore hasn't changed that. What a lucky guy.

It was Drew's roommate's last day in Singapore, so we went out for traditional Singaporean food and drinks. We had Chili Crab. So good.

The plan was to go to a swanky club, but they didn't allow flip flops or shorts, and guess what Drew and I were each wearing. Clearly we were out of our league. We walked around Clark Quay and took in the night life on the streets.

Earlier in the day, we went to Marina Bay to see what the hype was all about. If you love to shop or gamble and have endless money, then this place would excite you. In our case, we could afford a cupcake, so that's what we bought. It was an expensive cupcake, so we had to share.

Singapore's subway puts Boston's to deep deep shame.

By the end of two weeks, I had officially beat the heat and humidity that even superman couldn't withstand. I am awesome.

Halong Bay

I'm back in the US. The flight back was even more hellish than the first one. I woke up in the middle of the flight from Seoul sick, and it has persisted for a week and has now culminated with full blown conjunctivitis. So I type this through the slits of my puffy, watery eyes. You'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to ever get me back on a plane again anytime soon. So it's with great fondness that I look back to when I was healthy and still on vacation.

March 25-26: Halong Bay, Vietnam

Alright. So Halong Bay is overrated. Maybe it's because we visited during the wrong season. It was foggy and chilly, but even so, I don't think Halong Bay is worth a two day trip. One day would have been nice, but to stay an extra night and day to see this so called "Magnificent" Cave that takes you only 20 minutes to walk around is a big dud. I've seen better caves in Tennessee. Plus the water is pretty polluted. Maybe with a better tour company we would have had a good time, but it was a last minute booking so our first choice and recommended tour group was already full. Probably the best experience of our trip was meeting some pretty awesome Australians and an Irish couple.

The bus ride was 3.5 hours long. We stop by the usual tourist traps. We found snake wine, which is a snake infused alcohol. It's pretty much thought to be a cure all and especially used to enhance virility.

We arrived at Halong Bay. Our first stop was to see the Floating Fishing Village. These people live in houses anchored in the bay. They have a school and hospital. It seemed very peaceful.

Halong was definitely beautiful, and I think Drew and I would have enjoyed it more if we were able to kayak around freely on our own.

The huge looming limestone islands are Halong's main attraction.

All the tour boats anchor in the same area at night. Unfortunately all these tour boats contribute to the polluted waters.

On the second day we went to visit one of the caves. Our tour guide said it was called the "Magnificent" Cave, which I can't find when I google the name. It was somewhat underwhelming. I think there are better caves in Halong to visit.

Drew and I returned to Hanoi. Back to chaotic traffic. We tried to get a flight to Krabi, Thailand or Hoi An, Vietnam, but it didn't work out. We spent another night and returned to Singapore the next day. We left with mixed feeling about our trip, but overall it was a good experience.

Hanoi City Tour

We decided to spend a day doing a city tour. Our bus driver was craaaazy. Not only was he obsessive about honking that horn, but he would go through those intersections as if he were the only car in the road instead of one of hundreds trying to make their way in every direction. There were many times when all the passengers gasped in unison, our lives flashing before our eyes as we went hurtling through an intersection with a wall of motorbikes screeching to a halt as our driver completely disregarded traffic going in the cross street. I think even for Hanoi standards, our driver was one of the more dangerous, erratic ones, which is just who you would want driving a bunch of tourists.

First stop was Tran Quoc Pagoda that was built in the sixth century.

Next, we visited Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. No pictures were allowed inside. Ho Chi Minh was nicely preserved inside.

We visited the museum of ethnology, which features various ethnic minorities in Vietnam. There was also a water puppet show.

Lastly, we visited the Temple of Literature, which is the first national university of Vietnam. It was built in 1076.

After the tour we celebrated surviving another day of Hanoi traffic with ice cream. Drew got coconut, and I got taro.

We made to it Vietnam.

We survived Vietnam and have made it back to Singapore. Vietnam was such a different experience. Hanoi is one crazy city. Coming from Singapore made the comparative chaos of Hanoi even more striking. It also didn't help that we did almost no research and planning for this trip so we didn't know what to expect. Sounds pretty stupid, you say? Yeah, it was. 

Part of the craziness is that it seems like everyone's life is centered around the streets of Hanoi from tiny, compact shops selling anything and everything to food stands and food areas where people sit shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks on tiny plastic stools slurping pho or drinking whatever alcoholic concoction. 

Everyone is trying to sell you something, or trying to get you to ride in their taxi, motorbike, or bicycle taxi. One guy even came right up to Drew, crouched down and tried to pull off a piece of the rubber from Drew's shoe so that he can glue it back on for him for some money. It was so strange and it took us a bit to realize what was going on.

Hanoi is also known as the city of motorbikes with roughly 4million motorbikes on the road zipping around with only a skeleton of driving laws and guidelines to direct them. If you want to cross the street, you won't ever find a good moment unless you're at one of the very large intersections with stoplights. Otherwise since there is never a good time to cross with the steady stream of motorbikes and cars you basically just start walking, very slowly, and the motorbikes will zip around you. An example from youtube:

It is absolutely terrifying the first couple of times you do it. Drew caught on a lot quicker than I did and a couple of times we'd start crossing, but then I'd hesitate and stop in the middle of the road (which is never a good idea,) and Drew would basically abandon me there as he continued to cross despite my frantically grabbing for his arm. Drew argued that I was going to get him killed too. We don't need to go into what kind of response that got from me.

We survived our first exciting day, and the next day we booked a city tour followed by a two day cruise around Halong Bay. So, there's more to come!

Didn't make it to Vietnam

Hello from Singapore!! Yes, we are still in Singapore. So, Drew booked our tickets to Hanoi, Vietnam for an 8:30am flight. We woke up at 4:30am. Got a taxi at 5:30am and drove into the airport. Everything sounds like it's going well, right? Well, this is as close as we ever got to Vietnam:

We are newbie travelers and so we make mistakes along the way. Apparently if you're flying into Vietnam you need to either get your Visa beforehand from the embassy or  you have to apply for a "Visa on arrival" in which case you need to get a letter from a travel agency that says you're legit or something like that, and then you get your Visa when you arrive. It takes money and time to set this all up, so we've delayed the trip for one day. We held our breaths as we set up our Visas on arrival via the super sketchy looking website http://vietnamvisapro.com/. It turned out ok, and the service was very prompt. So hopefully everything will work out when we make attempt #2 to Hanoi. 

Wish us luck!

Heat Stroke and Clarke Quay

Because I unleash my stress and frustration on google, these past couple of days I've been angrily googling "WHY IS SINGAPORE SO HUMID?" "WHY IS SINGAPORE SO HOT" "HOW DO PEOPLE SURVIVE IN SINGAPORE" "WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE SWEATING?" Let me tell you, it's pretty unbearable here. Anyway, it is what it is, and so again I took my delicate pale, Boston winter conditioned skin out into the sun and played chicken with heat stroke.

We continue our gastronomical tour with some Pao. I had the veggie and Drew had the mystery meat topped with boiled egg. He's become a lot of more adventurous with his food, which deserves a lot of kudos. 

We walked around some shops and tried on new glasses for me. I thought maybe being in Asia would help in finding glasses better suited for my asian features but Singapore also doesn't seem to have that magical pair of glasses that makes me 10000x prettier, so we came up empty handed. Their $350 price tag also doesn't help. (Google: "WHY IS EVERYTHING IN SINGAPORE SO EXPENSIVE?" "WHY AM I SO POOR?")

We had ramen and curry rice for lunch. 

The subway system is pretty amazing. Fast, clean, efficienct. There are lots of rules to keep it that way. Note that durian is prohibited. 

We took the subway to Clarke Quay which is the center for their nightlife. 

There were lots of restaurants and clubs sheltered underneath these umbrellas to protect people from the rain.

You can see Marina Bay Sands, which is new hotel and casino topped with Sands skypark. Wiki tells us poor people who can only look at it from afar that it has a "mall, a museum, two large theatres, seven "celebrity chef" restaurants, two floating Crystal Pavilions, an ice skating rink, and the world's largest atrium casino with 500 tables and 1,600 slot machines, an infinity pool set on top of the world's largest public cantilevered platform."

This poor man has succumbed to his heat stroke and has become one of the baked dead forever to run around the city in midday.

Because my grumpiness and complaining directly correlates with the amount of sun exposure, we called it a day pretty early. We also needed to get back to pack, because we're heading to Vietnam for 5 days. I have to admit that I've been somewhat reluctant of this trip for whatever reasons, but I've been told it'll be amazing. Alex reassured me and noted that even his Dad wanted to go there, and he's French, so that should tell me a lot. It really doesn't, but no one argues with Alex, so off we go. Probably no internet in Vietnam, so we'll update when we get back.

Here are more pictures from the past couple of days. The architecture in Singapore is really interesting and reflects a diverse history.

By the way, this is my cancerous hair that is growing on my arm. I noticed it when it was flapping away in the wind. Drew was disgusted and made me pull it out. RIP. 

Walkabout Day

This post is by Drew.

In the morning we headed over to the Botanical gardens to walk around and get some food at one of the small restaurants there.

A pretty flower along the walk, one of many we saw.

SueAnn got very hot so we decided to leave after a half an hour.  SueAnn was very hungry so we thought we'd find a place to eat in Chinatown.

Where we wandered and window shopped minus the windows.  We then found the hawker center ( which is the name for a food court in singapore) and got some Fried Hokkien Mee but just for a snack.

Then we decided it was time to head to little india for a real lunch at the Banana Leaf. where the plates have real banana leaves on them. We got Butter chicken curry, Naan and veg. samosas.

We took the subway to the Harbor Front and Vivo city mall. Which happens to be where you catch the Singapore Cable Car that takes you to Sentosa Island.

Wandering around Sentosa was not that fun and I'll leave it at that.

We did manage to see Phillippe Starck's  $300 million mega yacht. Which we had just read about on the WSJ.  But here is a public link to the same story on gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/5519914/never-before-seen-look-inside-a-300-million-phillippe-starck-mega+yacht

Then we went for sushi and went home.
 The End.