John in China: Singapore

As promised, here's the entry on Singapore. Also, for those who read the Thailand entry yesterday when it was just text, scroll down as I've just added photos a few minutes ago.

We had a morning flight out of Phuket on Tuesday morning, and landed in Singapore a little after noon. A friend from school, Manling, was nice enough to meet us at the airport. Singapore was probably one of the easiest cities for us to navigate since English and Mandarin are the primary languages, but it was nice to have someone who already knew the bus/subway system. After five or six other cities' worth of public transport, I was starting to get a little confused.

The four of us stopped for lunch (fried chicken, eel, and sugar cane juice), then went to the hostel. It was there that it became apparent how relatively expensive Singapore would be compared to the other places we'd been. For about $15 a night we got three bunk beds in a room with 8 people total. There wasn't much else to the place, so it was good motivation to go out and see the city.

We met up with one of Matt's friends who also lives in Singapore, and she and Manling showed us around some of the places in the center of the city. The city/country is bigger than I expected (since it only appears as a dot on most maps), and it actually takes you well over an hour to get from one end to the other. But the subway system is very new and still relatively cheap, so it's not much of a hassle. The city operates on four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, and some Indian language (Tamil, I think). Most people spoke English very well, and it was nice to be back in a country where Mandarin is an option, as well.

That first night, we went out of the city a little bit to the Singapore Zoo to do their "Night Safari", which was pretty cool. You get to walk around the zoo at night and wake the animals up, which is probably a lot more fun for us than it is for them.

One of the five people in our dorm who wasn't myself, Doug, or Matt snored practically the whole night, making this one of the worst nights of sleep I'd had all summer. Several of our roommates from Britain also were a little upset, as they thought one of us was the culprit. In the morning, we met up with Manling again and she took us to Sentosa, an island off the southern end of Singapore accessible by monorail. We sat on the beach and went swimming for most of the morning and afternoon, then headed back to town. We spent a few hours relaxing before heading out to dinner. After that we found a German brewpub on the river and tried some of their many craft beers. The weather was great, and being next to the river in the heart of the city was really nice. Singapore's a great little city, one of my favorites in Asia so far. It helps that it's very new and modern, combined with the fact that English and foreigners are very common. So it can be Asian if you want it to be, or not if you'd rather pretend you were in America. I tend to cycle through both those sentiments several times a day, so it works out nicely.

We slept in a little bit on our third day, with a long journey back to China in front of us. Had a late lunch in Singapore's Chinatown area, then watched a very good Chinese war movie called Red Cliff (which turned out to be only part one of a two-film series) at the mall before grabbing a cab to the airport.

We had a very bumpy 9pm flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, followed by an 8am flight back to Hangzhou, where all this madness began two weeks earlier. But KL's airport hotel is still under construction, and the airport itself is located a good hour or 75 minutes from the city. So we could've gone to the city to sleep, but would've had to turn around and check out only a couple hours later. Instead, we found a few couches in the airport and spent a mostly-sleepless six hours there. It was pretty bad. Actually, it was really bad. Our 8am flight was delayed a little bit, but I managed to sleep about three of the five hours we were in the air, which is probably a new record for me.

Landed in Hangzhou around 1pm and were relieved to discover that our visas to get back into China worked without issue. Grabbed a cab and found our way to yet another hostel, one of the best so far. I promptly slept until dinner time, and then we rode the bus into town to grab some dinner. Hangzhou is a really nice city, and our hostel was situated close to the main attraction--the West Lake. But I only ended up seeing the lake and the city at night, for reasons I'll explain in the next entry...