Singapore Travel Report Part 2
Every guide book of Singapore tells you to go to Little India, I did so and it is nice but little 
nevertheless there was some Indian flavor about the area with the shops and architectural style. I definitely have the plan to go to the real India one day.
Next I went to Clark quay and took a boat ride on the Singapore river and into the bay with the Merlion on the one side and the Marina Bay Sands on the other. The day was very cloudy and astonishingly cool and it started raining during the boat ride.
After lunch I fled the bad weather into the movies watching Interstellar (see review here) and called it a day.
Two more days to go in Singapore and I tried to get away from the big city to a small island off the coast called Kusu, but I went to the ferry port too uninformed and found out that there are only two ferries leaving for the island per day, one at ten in the morning, which I had missed by half an hour and one at two in the afternoon.
I gave up on the plan, also cancelled plans for the zoo since it was a sunny and hot morning and just too hot for wandering around outside, and went back to the island of Sentosa where also Universal Studios is located. I had
discovered a big aquarium there on my Universal Studios day – animals as well, but indoors and cooled.
Arrived at the Sentosa train station I asked for a ticket to the aquarium and the lady told me if I pay one dollar more I can see three attractions on the island and not only the aquarium. That of course sounded like a good option and so I decided on a cable car ride to the top of the island’s mountain which includes a luge ride down again, the aquarium of course, and a laser-light-water-fireworks show at night.
In the morning I walked around the beaches of Sentosa but I’ve seen better and all those ships lying out in the harbor don’t make the water very attractive either.
The aquarium was very good, if I had to share it with too many other people. The highlight was the shark tank where I just stumbled into shark feeding time. Two divers in metal mesh gear fed the Sharks while a third one with a big long pole had the job to fend off too aggressive sharks. He didn’t have at ouch job though, since the Sharks seemed rather peaceful. They were a bit agitated thanks to feeding time and there was a lot of turbulence in the tank but none of them snapped at the three divers. I love sharks and it was great to see them in such action.
When I left the aquarium, big fat thunderclouds had appeared and the very moment I left the monorail at the southern-most station to kill some time there until the laser show, all hell broke loose and another epic thunderstorm descended upon us. I found and edge of bench and had to wait there for an hour. So much water was coming down that you would have been drenched to the bone in ten seconds.
It was still raining for the laser show but not that strong anymore. The laser show called “Wings of Time”, starring a phoenix-like bird and two humans who travel back through time, had its moments but I wouldn’t have paid its stand-alone price of I think 25 dollars for it. Sentosa is worth a trip, if you can tolerate the artificial tourist flavor of the island.
I apparently have a new-found weakness for modern architecture and I had seen these four skyscrapers from Sentosa island that I wanted to take a closer look at. I drove to Harbor Front and tried to walk there, but got blocked off by pretty gated communities and this picture is the closest I got to the towers.
It was too hot to keep on walking and look for another way to get closer, so I returned to cooled-down shopping malls at Harbor Front called Vivo City with the intention to have lunch there. In a food court I tried a noodle soup with beef inside from a Chinese stall. Sounds harmless enough but the meat was utterly disgusting and I ended up eating not even a quarter of it.
I had to kill time until sunset, since I wanted to see the Bayfront and the Gardens by the Bay at night and ended up watching Hobbit 3 for a second time. After a more successful dinner of harmless spaghetti, I went into the gardens by the bay to watch the Christmas super-tree light show together with about a million other people. I had a good laugh at a lit up pavilion which provided a “blizzard” at 19:30 where snow was simulated with foam made from soap 
Then they had light show with Christmas and other music for 15 minutes and together with a million other people I wandered to the Bayfront side through the Marina Bay Sands.
There had just been a light show going on too and I ran into another million people. (Well, a million is of course exaggerated there were a hell of a LOT of people.)
I didn’t want to wait for another hour or so for the next light show in the bay and decided to call it a day and rode back to the hotel.
Singapore is well worth a visit but be prepared for leaving some money there. The prices are all rather hefty.
On the moving to Germany day, it rained again like on the day of my arrival. In the afternoon, it rained so hard that my flight to Shanghai was delayed. We eventually lifted off with almost two hours delay and I was getting nervous about changing planes in Shanghai and whether I could catch my plane to Germany.
Astonishingly, the procedures at Pudong airport were quite efficient and I reached my plane to Frankfurt in time. Even my luggage made it to Frankfurt, if it was all wet from apparently having stood in the rain in Singapore…
After twenty hours of darkness, Germany presented itself to me in snowstorm fashion!
Just what they had wished for in Singapore the day before and tried to produce with soap, I had now in the original and cold version.
The Germany visit was dedicated to friends and family (and a bit of heavy metal ;-))
So no grand adventures here…
Where will I go next? Nothing planned yet except for Wacken *and Spain and Portugal ;-)) in the summer. For golden week some Japanese islands are on the radar again, maybe Miyakojima? We’ll see 
