A night flight to Singapore was like all the other night flights – nobody slept, except Risto. After watching a Spiderman cartoon he grabbed his sleeping toys, closed his eyes and was fast asleep. The rest of us didn’t sleep that much.
Entry to Singapore was easy, no hassle at all. Even our backpacks were almost the first ones to arrive. The taxi driver suspected though, that our stuff wouldn’t fit in his car, but we proved him wrong.
Our two star budget hotel was neat, and even though we arrived there way before the actual check in time, we got our rooms right away. Since there was a bed and an AC, we decided to have a short, three hour nap.
After the nap we took a stroll to the nearest metro station, because the closest ATM was there. No money, no food – the small street food stalls accepted only cash. We also also found an automated laundry place near our hotel.
In the evening, Marko took a walk to the city center and the Raffles hotel. The only slight minus was that the hotel issued only one card/room, so Jaana had to stay awake. If Marko had taken the key, the electricity and air conditioning would have been down in our room.
The next day we had breakfast at one of the local food stall. Eventually we ended up buying just toast and eggs, because all the other items there were somewhat unknown to us. The eggs were boiled by pouring hot water on top of the eggs in a plastic bowl. When the water got cold, the lady replaced the water with hot one. The result wasn’t even close to hard-boiled eggs, but we got spoons to tackle with them.
After the breakfast we took the metro to China Town. The smell of durian was very strong and even the masks we still had to wear in the metro wouldn’t filter the smell. We walked around the area and ended up buying kid’s sticks for eating. Those sticks were attached to each other from the other end to make it easier to eat with them. Ronja and Risto tried them when we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and they did quite ok. The lady in the shop told us that the kids here start practising eating with sticks when they turn two. There are special sticks for the young ones too. Those sticks have rings to place the fingers, so the kids learn the right grip right away.
When we got back to the hotel we did some laundry at the local laundromat next door. While waiting for the laundry to get washed and dry, the kids did their school work for today. Two birds for one stone!
The next morning it rained so we stayed at the hotel until one o’clock. We had also asked for a later check out time, because the next backpackers hotel Galaxy Pods, would let us check in only after two. So while waiting the rain to end the kids had few hours of school.
The Galaxy Pods looked like little space ships. There was even a button for space light mode, which the kids chose, of course, and insisted on also sleeping in that blue light. There was a little table attached to the wall of the pod, and also a TV. We didn’t check on the TV though, but I guess we didn’t miss out on anything. Even though the pods looked like spaceships, inside wasn’t as quiet as in space. You could hear the karaoke version of “I did it my way” sung in the bar downstairs even through your ear plugs. The place had shared bathrooms, and since the toilet and the shower were in the same space, the toilet was sometimes very wet.
Since we had explored China Town already, we took a metro to Little India instead. We had some Indian food and checked out a Hindu temple. The kids were looking at the different statues of different Gods and especially the one eating the intestines of a dead man raised a lot of questions. Risto was wondering if the God was actually a bad one, or was he a good one and was just eating away all the bad people. We never got an answer to that question.
From Little India we walked to the bus station a couple of kilometres away. We wanted to buy tickets to a bus going to Kuala Lumpur the next day. While being there the kids needed to go to a toilet. Unfortunately it wasn’t one of the nice ones, so both of the kids were rather shocked when they saw only a hole in the ground. Nevertheless both of the kids went, did their business and came out. Risto told that his “number two” could wait until a nicer toilet though and Ronja was wondering how it was possible that we needed to pay 20 cents for using a toilet that horrible.
The toilet visit was apparently such an eye-opening experience for the kids that they kept talking about it all the way to the Marina Bay Sands hotel and the observation deck on the 56th floor. The view was amazing! There would have been a restaurant on the 57th floor for hotel guests, but since one night at this hotel costs about 600€, we figured that the restaurant was probably a bit too pricy for us. So we ended buying chips and two non-alcoholic Singapore Slings for the kids from a small kiosk on the observation deck.
After admiring Singapore by night from a bird’s eye view, we returned to China Town and crawled into our capsules for the night.