VidyaK/My Singapore Trip
From ShareYourHoliday
First Day
Our flight to Singapore was at 3.30 a.m from Bangalore. We started from home in a Taxi at around 11.30 and reached airport by 12.00 am itself.(The Taxi driver charged us 400 rupees!!!) There was no queue at the check-in counter. We checked-in our luggage immediately. We had to wait for another 3-3.5 hours for our flight. Gundu(My sweet dear husband) was already feeling sleepy(Gundu can control everything except his sleep). I had a black-forest pastry in coffee day outlet there(the pastry was 40 rupees. I felt it to be very costly). We got done our immigration stamping and customs declaration. Somehow we managed to spend rest of the time in the waiting area talking to each other, commenting on other passengers. We finally boarded aircraft at 3.30. We both had a good sleep in the plane. When we opened our eyes it was 9.30 am Singapore time. From the plane, below us we could see beautiful sceneries (ocean, greenery). We had a first glimpse of Singapore from the plane. I felt Singapore to be a very beautiful and clean city at that moment itself. In the meanwhile I was cursing jet star asia for not providing us any food or drinks. They didn’t give us even a bottle of water!!! (I was disappointed because during my earlier travel in flights I was always offered something or the other to eat). Gundu was silently listening to me. (He never complains about anything). Our flight landed around 10.15 a.m. Changi Airport is very big and clean. Our immigration check was done quickly. And yeah, we were offered chocolates at the immigration counter. Both of us were very hungry. We saw a Burger King outlet in the airport but could not find anything vegetarian there. We rushed into another counter which had information about sight seeing places, shopping and maps. We took few pamphlets from there. We went ahead looking for a Taxi to our hotel. We gave our hotel address to the driver and got ino a Taxi at the Taxi stand. (I didn’t like the Taxi driver). It was 11 a.m when we reached the hotel. The hotel was a pretty decent one though not luxurious. We were informed that the room was not yet ready. We put our luggage in one of the rooms and set away to have our breakfast. (Oh!! not breakfast, lunch) We went in search of a hotel. The hotel receptionist had told us that there were Indian hotels close by. We started looking for hotel in Geylang street and this part of Singapore actually astonished us. This area was no where near what I thought was Singapore. You can see garbage on the road (like any Indian road) and the people there were also low profile ones. We saw quite a few hotels, but didn’t find any clean ones. Finally we settled down for lunch in a hotel called Banana Leaf restaurant. We ordered for lunch and actually we got everything there. We were served rice, ladiesfinger curry, sambhar, rasam, papad and curd. But nothing was of quality. So one more disappointment for me. We had that lunch and were on our way back to hotel. Suddenly it started raining. We never expected the rain because the weather was very hot when we had landed in Singapore. We found a shelter and waited there for around 1 hour. Took a few photos in that place. After the rain stopped we went back to the hotel. The room was ready by that time. Our room was on the 3rd floor. Gundu felt that the room was very small. But still it had all facilities like T.V, A.C, shower and even a DVD layer. We decided to take bath and then start exploring Singapore. We had already planned what to see on which day so we didn’t have problem in deciding where to go.
We set off to see the places near Singapore river. I wanted to travel by train there but Gundu was of the opinion that its good to travel by Taxi since we were new to the place. Anyway finally he agreed to travel by train. We enquired about the train station in the hotel reception and got other details there. The train station(MRT) Kallang was 10 minutes walk from our hotel. At the station Gundu enquired about train tickets and we were told that there is a vending machine which takes care of tickets. We both stood in front of one ticket vending machine (GTM) and were trying to figure out how what to do. A person standing at the next machine showed us how to get the tickets. By the way we took tickets from Kallang to Raffles Place MRT. We saw that people were swiping the ticket to get into the platform. We followed them. We waited for 2-3 minutes when the train arrived. I was excited since it was first train journey in Singapore. Raffles MRT is 4 stops from Kallang. So in just 5 minutes we were at our destination. I was very much impressed with the way train service works there. We came out of the station and didn’t know where to go. We took out the Singapore map we had and found out the way. The river is just 1 minute walk from Raffles MRT. It was just behind the station. I was amazed looking at the high rise buildings there. There is hotel there called Fullerton Hotel which has a very beautiful building. We took photos in front of that hotel. It has a very beautiful fountain also. We walked along the river side and decided to take the bum boat ride in the river after some time. There is a bridge connecting the two roads on the sides of the river. It’s a metal bridge and looks very strong. Its built around 100 years back. We walked to the other side of the river. On the other side is the Asian Civilization Museum, Arts House, Victoria Memorial Hall, Supreme Court, Old and New Parliament House, Singapore Cricket Club. We saw all these places. Gundu was hungry by that time and so we went to IndoChine restaurant near the Museum. We had some kind of juice and cake there. The bill was pretty hefty. 20 dollars if I remember correctly. Then we took the bum boat ride in Singapore river. It’s a half an hour ride. An audio is played in the boat which describes the places around the river… We saw the theatres on the bay (Esplanade) and the Merlion Park from the boat. Merlion Park ha s a big Merlion statue which spills water from its mouth into the river. Unfortunately they had stopped the water flow from Merlion’s mouth because of some cleaning activity. We also saw the old parliament members’ quartes and boat quay from the boat.
Gundu was very tired by this time. He got shoe bites because of the old shoe and so his legs were paining badly. We thoudght of buying new shoes for Gundu. We also wanted to have a look at music system for our new house. We were searching for some shopping mall. We went to Funan IT Mall which has all kind of things. We had icrecream in the MacDonald’s there. Then went about looking for some shoe shop. Finally found one shop and Gundu got his new Reebok shoes for 40 dollars. We also bought a wireless router and few DVD’s for our camcorder. It was 8.00 pm by that time and we were hungry. We started searching for some vegetarian food. Its very difficult to find vegetarian food in Singapore in places where there are less Indians. We had to be satisfied with Veg Pizza and Veg Pasta. (I already forgot the name of the place where we ate).
We returned to the hotel in train and our first day in Singapore ended. BTW, we also watched a Tamil channel on T.V and then went to sleep.
