Singapore is pretty cool

Internet access seems to be hit and miss here... Uploading one image takes about 5 minutes, so I won't upload many even though I took a lot today.

I got up early and walked over to the Singapore Marina, and got a good shot of the city bathed in the morning sun:


Then I got on the city tour hop-on hop-off bus and basically just rode it through the city, until I got to the botanical gardens, at which point everyone was forced to get off to switch buses (not sure why). It was still early so I decided to walk through the park, and ended up spending almost three hours there! It was beautiful, especially the Orchid Garden. Here is one of the many photos of flowers I got:


After reboarding, I hopped off at the shopping district, particularly the Lucky Plaza mall. I didn't end up taking any photos there, because it was an indoor mall with lots of cell phone stores and snack food places, nothing picturesque. I did buy a couple skewers of something from a street vendor, one was chicken-something and the other turned out to be fishy-tasting. When I got back on, the bus made it down to the Little India section of town, which was all decked out for some festival:

I came very close to buying a carved marble chess set there, but I figured it would never survive shipping.

The tour ended at around 2:30 back at my hotel. I walked down to the Fountain of Wealth, and made a wish and walked three times clockwise as instructed around the small inner fountain:

The fountain is billed as the largest fountain in the world. Having seen the water show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, I'm not sure that's true... It is certainly big, but the big part (the big ring above the little inner fountain) was not turned on when I was there. When it is on, noone can get to the small inner fountain to make wishes...

It was a very pleasant day, and I'm glad I decided to go to Singapore.