After my Chinese New Year experience of Singapore it was interesting to get back and see it in full swing. Initially this meant more food choices around the hostel - chicken rice, fresh soy milk and tofu pudding as well as, somewhat disconcertingly, an Australian themed place called Mad Jack which apparently serves ridiculously large burgers. So I had two full days to do - stuff. To be honest I was pretty exhausted by this point and didn't feel like doing much.
Singapore is an interesting place but I felt I needed more time and energy to really do it justice. As it was on my first full day I spent hours in bookshops and found the bookshop of my dreams - Kinokuniya on Orchard Road. It took me 2 hours to browse through the fiction section alone! The store is so big when you do a computer search it prints out a map of where the book you are looking for is located. Heaven! I caught up with my old workmate again who showed me around his 'hood - he lives in Holland Village which consists of lots of high rise apartment blocks but in the middle is a single street of restaurants, hawker centres and bars
that is a strange sight amongst the towering concrete jungle especially at night. On my final day I went to a couple of museums, had lunch at a hawker centre and had a wander to the Raffles Hotel thinking I might have a Singapore Sling in the Long Room bar. Well, every other tourist had the same idea, so much for romantic notions of a bit of old colonial charm! So I left without trying the cocktail it is famous for and Tom Waits sings about in "Shore Leave". It just felt too cliched. And with that my adventure drew to a close, 7 hours on a plane (have I mentioned how much I love Singapore Airlines?) and back to old Melbourne town and weather that doesn't have you seeking out mega malls just for the air conditioning.
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