Malaysia Photos batch 6 ~ Singapore
Mon, Dec. 7th, 2009 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annarti
This didn't come yesterday cos I was at the cricket~ and got sunburnt, so I was exhausted and went to bed early. But here it is now :D
So, from KL we took the train to Singapore, because, despite the short distance, getting to Singapore by plane from Malaysia is LOLEXPENSIVE. So are cars. Basically, the Singaporean government doesn't like the locals going to Malaysia for cheap clothes/electronics/etc so they stop them by making it expensive to get there and back again. Sucks to be Singaporean. Anyway yes. The train station in Singapore is, curiously, Malaysian-run. We kept being told that it was your laaaast little taste of Malaysia, and upon arrival, it was obvious where this came from XD NOTHING MADE SENSE <3 The luggage came straight off the train onto the platform, no carousel or anything, the trolleys were down the other end of the platform and didn't work, there were no officials but for the ones who didn't know anything (namely, where do you go to take a taxi? Where do you go to get OUT of this building?) and~ there were no directions anywhere until you actually found the place, then in big letters it was EXIT or TAXIS. Combination of lols and ARG here, because damnit we were officially, legally and geographically in Singapore by this point, things should make SENSE. Malaysia is like a weird cross between Singapore and Indonesia, I swear.
Welcome to Singapore o/ SUCH a beautiful city, it really is. This was just outside where we were staying, close to everything really. Not hard to be close to everything, but yeah :D Colin and I have decided that the one thing it's missing--beyond general entertainment, of course >>--is a feature building. Sydney's got the Opera House, KL have their Petronas Towers, everywhere in Europe has three or four icon buildings per city, even Adelaide's got the Festival Centre. Singapore has bugger-all. It really is a businessman's city, BUT IT'S SO PRETTY. Orchids and tropical treeeeees (and Colin would make me add expensive and slick cars) and stuff EVERYWHERE. I love <3
Just up the road from us, a huge sparkly new department store/mall/thing was opening the day after we were due to leave, alas. But we got to see the sparklies outside, fountains and stuff. And workmen still working on it at 10:00 at night. Because they DO that in Singapore, unlike in Australia where you see roadworks and there are 5 blokes standing around a hole with an iced coffee watching while one bloke digs said hole.
View from the hotel room. Mostly we could just see facades of buildings around us, then this one. No idea what it was. Some official's residence, probably.
But a small part of the menagerie that parked outside our hotel. Not one but TWO Lambourghinis. YES. OKAY. WE WERE AT THE HILTON. DON'T MOCK ME DAD GOT A CHEAP ROOM DEAL D:
We went to an air force museum. Cos. Colin pointed it out. It was quite interesting, actually. Even tho this place was out in the sticks, it still had a bus going past every 15 minutes. Frigging Singapore. But yeah~ museum. It had planes and stuff. The old emblem for their air force looked like a red target which I thought was a pretty silly thing to have on the side of your plane, really =/
Mum and I went shopping and found a shop at one of the train stations that was FULL of Engrish. I don't think it was even Singlish, because this particular shirt--which I bought--didn't mean anything to a pair of Singaporeans I met later this year. That shop was bloody awesome and I want to go back XD
GOLD~ :D As you may recall, we each had our one thing we REALLY wanted to do on the trip, and Mum's was to get gold from Singapore because it's high quality and sosopretty. But of course in the windows they had this type of stuff, predominantly calling out to the Indians, who don't have money so much as they wear their entire bank account on their person. This is but one display in one window of one shop. There were about~ 5 such displays in each window, 3-5 windows per shop, and a good hundred shops. That's a shitload of gold, people.
Mum specifically wanted some of these beautifully detailed dangly earrings that we saw a lot of Indian women wearing, but we found out that Indians have much bigger holes in their ears, so the stick that goes through your ear is almost the thickness of a pencil lead =( Sadly, every pair of these kind of earrings was made with that in mind and, rather than live in pain, Mum decided to go with something simpler. She ended up with some little stud earrings in a sort of woven mat appearance. They're lovely :D
Lunch~ at the Banana Palm restaurant somewhere in Little India. They give you a big banana palm leaf to eat off of :D It was awesome food, too <3 We got a seafood curry, in the middle there, which had prawns and bits of fish and crab and a REALLY nice sauce, then that one on the left, which I think was possibly lamb but my god it was dangerous. Mum ordered it. It said 'hot' on the menu. I did lol.
Final day, struggling for things to do, we went over to Sentosa Island purely to go to the aquarium. It's ma thing, y0. Many other things on the island, didn't look at any of them, but we saw the beach from the bus window and ahahaaaaa it was so plastic and fake XD; Give me Aldinga or Glenelg any day. The aquarium was fun tho :D I took a picci of this tank because I recognised every fish in it from the Maldiiiiiives *^^* Including those tiny little neon blue ones :D
Seahorse, sea dragon and leafy sea dragons for my Sallie :D
Octopus and cuttlefish for Kinky-J :D They didn't have any squids, sorry >>
I'm a sucker for lit-up jellyfish, me.
GIANT Japanese crab and some sort of cute little shrimpy thing.
I don't know what this thing is.
Baaaaaaby sharks. They were about 15cm long :D SOCUTE.
DUGONG <3 <3 <3 They're my favourite sea creature, they are. Second is the wobbegong, because its name matches what it looks like :D I like dorky sea creatures, apparently. I've never actually seen a live dugong before, so this one was bloody ADORABLE with her big floppy mouth munching on seaweed. They have the cutest grin when they're facing you, too c:
And then~ holiday over, we were up at arse-am the next morning to get to the airport. Check-in was... interesting... They asked me and Colin if we'd like to stay on in Singapore, presumably because they'd overbooked the flight. Stared at the guy a moment and said no, we wouldn't, so he went off for a few minutes, then came back and checked us in as normal. So that was a new one oO All went smoothly after that. Bought our duty-free booze, hung around the airport for another 20 minutes to say goodbye again to the koi pond and the orchids and the whole summer aspect of everything, then boarded our plane back to Perth =(
Perth airport sucked as much as going over, with the added feature of the baggage system breaking for half an hour, so we were sitting there on the floor in the ironically named 'quick bag drop' queue. It did, however, mean half an hour less time in Perth domestic trying to find something to do. We ended up getting a muffin and slowly eating it over the course of an hour and a half. Poor Perth =(
Adelaide was slick and easy as always. Got off plane, went down escalators, picked up suitcases from carousel, went outside to grab taxi home. Wished it was summer again for the next month or four, and now it is so we're all happy :D
So, from KL we took the train to Singapore, because, despite the short distance, getting to Singapore by plane from Malaysia is LOLEXPENSIVE. So are cars. Basically, the Singaporean government doesn't like the locals going to Malaysia for cheap clothes/electronics/etc so they stop them by making it expensive to get there and back again. Sucks to be Singaporean. Anyway yes. The train station in Singapore is, curiously, Malaysian-run. We kept being told that it was your laaaast little taste of Malaysia, and upon arrival, it was obvious where this came from XD NOTHING MADE SENSE <3 The luggage came straight off the train onto the platform, no carousel or anything, the trolleys were down the other end of the platform and didn't work, there were no officials but for the ones who didn't know anything (namely, where do you go to take a taxi? Where do you go to get OUT of this building?) and~ there were no directions anywhere until you actually found the place, then in big letters it was EXIT or TAXIS. Combination of lols and ARG here, because damnit we were officially, legally and geographically in Singapore by this point, things should make SENSE. Malaysia is like a weird cross between Singapore and Indonesia, I swear.
Welcome to Singapore o/ SUCH a beautiful city, it really is. This was just outside where we were staying, close to everything really. Not hard to be close to everything, but yeah :D Colin and I have decided that the one thing it's missing--beyond general entertainment, of course >>--is a feature building. Sydney's got the Opera House, KL have their Petronas Towers, everywhere in Europe has three or four icon buildings per city, even Adelaide's got the Festival Centre. Singapore has bugger-all. It really is a businessman's city, BUT IT'S SO PRETTY. Orchids and tropical treeeeees (and Colin would make me add expensive and slick cars) and stuff EVERYWHERE. I love <3
Just up the road from us, a huge sparkly new department store/mall/thing was opening the day after we were due to leave, alas. But we got to see the sparklies outside, fountains and stuff. And workmen still working on it at 10:00 at night. Because they DO that in Singapore, unlike in Australia where you see roadworks and there are 5 blokes standing around a hole with an iced coffee watching while one bloke digs said hole.
View from the hotel room. Mostly we could just see facades of buildings around us, then this one. No idea what it was. Some official's residence, probably.
But a small part of the menagerie that parked outside our hotel. Not one but TWO Lambourghinis. YES. OKAY. WE WERE AT THE HILTON. DON'T MOCK ME DAD GOT A CHEAP ROOM DEAL D:
We went to an air force museum. Cos. Colin pointed it out. It was quite interesting, actually. Even tho this place was out in the sticks, it still had a bus going past every 15 minutes. Frigging Singapore. But yeah~ museum. It had planes and stuff. The old emblem for their air force looked like a red target which I thought was a pretty silly thing to have on the side of your plane, really =/
Mum and I went shopping and found a shop at one of the train stations that was FULL of Engrish. I don't think it was even Singlish, because this particular shirt--which I bought--didn't mean anything to a pair of Singaporeans I met later this year. That shop was bloody awesome and I want to go back XD
GOLD~ :D As you may recall, we each had our one thing we REALLY wanted to do on the trip, and Mum's was to get gold from Singapore because it's high quality and sosopretty. But of course in the windows they had this type of stuff, predominantly calling out to the Indians, who don't have money so much as they wear their entire bank account on their person. This is but one display in one window of one shop. There were about~ 5 such displays in each window, 3-5 windows per shop, and a good hundred shops. That's a shitload of gold, people.
Mum specifically wanted some of these beautifully detailed dangly earrings that we saw a lot of Indian women wearing, but we found out that Indians have much bigger holes in their ears, so the stick that goes through your ear is almost the thickness of a pencil lead =( Sadly, every pair of these kind of earrings was made with that in mind and, rather than live in pain, Mum decided to go with something simpler. She ended up with some little stud earrings in a sort of woven mat appearance. They're lovely :D
Lunch~ at the Banana Palm restaurant somewhere in Little India. They give you a big banana palm leaf to eat off of :D It was awesome food, too <3 We got a seafood curry, in the middle there, which had prawns and bits of fish and crab and a REALLY nice sauce, then that one on the left, which I think was possibly lamb but my god it was dangerous. Mum ordered it. It said 'hot' on the menu. I did lol.
Final day, struggling for things to do, we went over to Sentosa Island purely to go to the aquarium. It's ma thing, y0. Many other things on the island, didn't look at any of them, but we saw the beach from the bus window and ahahaaaaa it was so plastic and fake XD; Give me Aldinga or Glenelg any day. The aquarium was fun tho :D I took a picci of this tank because I recognised every fish in it from the Maldiiiiiives *^^* Including those tiny little neon blue ones :D
Seahorse, sea dragon and leafy sea dragons for my Sallie :D
Octopus and cuttlefish for Kinky-J :D They didn't have any squids, sorry >>
I'm a sucker for lit-up jellyfish, me.
GIANT Japanese crab and some sort of cute little shrimpy thing.
I don't know what this thing is.
Baaaaaaby sharks. They were about 15cm long :D SOCUTE.
DUGONG <3 <3 <3 They're my favourite sea creature, they are. Second is the wobbegong, because its name matches what it looks like :D I like dorky sea creatures, apparently. I've never actually seen a live dugong before, so this one was bloody ADORABLE with her big floppy mouth munching on seaweed. They have the cutest grin when they're facing you, too c:
And then~ holiday over, we were up at arse-am the next morning to get to the airport. Check-in was... interesting... They asked me and Colin if we'd like to stay on in Singapore, presumably because they'd overbooked the flight. Stared at the guy a moment and said no, we wouldn't, so he went off for a few minutes, then came back and checked us in as normal. So that was a new one oO All went smoothly after that. Bought our duty-free booze, hung around the airport for another 20 minutes to say goodbye again to the koi pond and the orchids and the whole summer aspect of everything, then boarded our plane back to Perth =(
Perth airport sucked as much as going over, with the added feature of the baggage system breaking for half an hour, so we were sitting there on the floor in the ironically named 'quick bag drop' queue. It did, however, mean half an hour less time in Perth domestic trying to find something to do. We ended up getting a muffin and slowly eating it over the course of an hour and a half. Poor Perth =(
Adelaide was slick and easy as always. Got off plane, went down escalators, picked up suitcases from carousel, went outside to grab taxi home. Wished it was summer again for the next month or four, and now it is so we're all happy :D