20/11/08 We had quite a scary moment after passing through passport control and having our bags x-rayed at the Singapore border; there was a 'no photography allowed' sign inside the building, so I was careful not to take any photos, but once we were outside the building I thought it would be safe to do so, so Dave took a couple. Straight afterwards, we got back on our coach; literally 20 seconds later, a uniformed female guard appeared inside the coach and asked if we had just taken a photo! When Dave said that he had, she made him go outside with her, bringing the camera and his passport with him. Although she was quite softly spoken and seemed quite nice, I was really worried in case she made him delete all our photos (all our photos from Bangkok onwards were on that memory card), and I thought she might take him away and interrogate him or something. I watched out of the window - after a while she radioed for another guard to join them (Dave told me later it was because the new chap was a better English speaker), and Dave showed him the two photos he'd taken, and the new guard spoke to him for quite a long time. Eventually, however, he came back onto the coach, with all the photos intact bar the two most recent ones! He said he'd noticed that both the guards had handguns on them, and that the second guard had told him that according to correct procedure he could have hauled Dave off and treated him like a suspected terrorist! We were very relieved at our escape, and didn't take out the camera again until we'd arrived in the city centre...
The coach had dropped everyone off at the bus station near to the area of Singapore called Little India, so we looked around for accommodation there. The backpacker places were booked up, and we were too knackered to go all the way into Chinatown, where we'd heard more backpacker places were, so we landed up at the next cheapest place, a grotty little hotel in a 'compact' room where the air conditioning didn't work properly and there wasn't enough room to swing a cat. The receptionist was quite unfriendly and abrupt, too. For dinner we decided to get food from the Southeast Asian version of fast food, a hawkers' food court. There was stalls offering such delights as pig's organ soup, chicken feet rice, roasted duck's head and chicken gizzards, but we opted for the more tempting-sounding option of claypot chicken rice. When it arrived, however, it wasn't very nice. The rice was in a clay pot, and had the chicken pieces on top, with some meat that looked like pink and black bits of bacon but could easily have been pig's ear or something (I thought it best not to enquire too closely.) These tasted quite strange. The chicken had bone, gristle and skin attached, and the rice also tasted quite odd. Dave didn't like it at all, but I thought it didn't taste bad as such, just strange. There was rice burnt onto the bottom of the pot, and I ended up leaving about half of it.
The next place we went to was - the Raffles Hotel! They'd decorated for Christmas, and these were about the first signs of Christmas we've seen on our travels. We went inside to the famous Long Bar and ordered two Singapore Slings - how could we have ordered anything else, given that this is where they were invented! As we walked into the hotel, I felt distinctly out of place; I've never been inside a hotel this posh, and we were just dressed in light combat-type trousers and t-shirts. The Long Bar was more relaxed, however, and the Singapore Slings were delicious. There were wooden boxes of monkey nuts all along the bar and on all the tables, and the nut shells were all over the floor. In any other place this would have made it seem a bit grotty, but in here it just added to the atmosphere, and added even more class! Punkah fans rotated above our heads, nut shells crunched beneath our feet when we stood up, the bar staff were in white suits, and it was easy to imagine people like Noel Coward and Graham Greene walking through the door and sitting up at the bar next to us. Dave asked one of the barmen how many Singapore Slings they have to make in an average day; the answer is just over 1000! After our drinks, we walked round the bits of the hotel that are open to the public. We walked through lush courtyards with fountains, past an outdoors restaurant (complete with white-hatted chefs cooking in fornt of the diners' eyes) and some of the expensive shops in the hotel's arcade.

21/11/08 The next morning we decided to just wander the streets for the day. The roads are just so clean compared with the other Asian countries we've been to, and the cars all look very new and shiny. It's quieter, too, because there aren't any taxi touts (I read a sign saying that taxi touting is illegal here. You can also get fined quite a lot for jaywalking, dropping litter, stepping over the yellow line on the train platform, and a lot of other things.) We went into somewhere that had caught Dave's eye the evening before - a giant shopping mall entirely filled with shops selling electronics goods and IT supplies! It had about 6 floors, and we had a good look around, but didn't get anything. There was a food court in the basement, and we played it safe this time by getting chicken rice like the sort we had in Malacca. As pudding, I tried 'Longan Almond'. Longan is a fruit which looks and tastes a lot like a lychee, and they came on crushed ice with some pieces of what seemed like a more solid and rubbery type of blancmange. We got talking to a chap from London who was sitting at the same table - he was very nice and said that he'd been to Australia and absolutely loved it!

After our food, we started walking to the historical centre of the city. On the way, we passed by a famous Chinese temple, beautifully decorated and surrounded by stalls selling incense, flowers and other offerings to be used inside the temple. There was a shop selling this sort of thing too, and had a large statue of what I took to be one of the Chinese deities. (You can see this in our photo album.) We carried on, passing by the Raffles Hotel again, and then came across the memorial to all the civilians who died during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. After a look around there, we came to the Padang - playing fields, with the colonial Singapore Cricket Club house at one end, the military war memorial on one side, and other British colonial buildings down the other side. Then we arrived at Singapore River, where we saw the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and walked over the bridge and along a bit to the more modern statue of the Merlion, the symbol of Singapore. As you can tell by its name, it has a lion's head with a fish's tail, and sprays out water from its mouth. Unfortunately our photos of this didn't upload properly on our website.

When we got home and had rested for a bit, we went out to get a couple of soft drinks from the 7-Eleven shop, and then wandered around Little India for a while. It's genuine in that a lot of Indians (and Bangladeshis) still live and work there, Indian music is played from loudspeakers, and the streets are lined with fruit and veg stalls, shops selling saris etc., but it wasn't like New Delhi, Calcutta and Agra in that it was just too clean, and there weren't any dogs and cows wandering around or beggars asleep across the pavements. Also, it was crowded with jewellery shops, and the other shops were all a lot more sanitised than in real India.