The Market Cafe at the hotel does the most amazing buffet breakfast, it’s almost worth the journey and humidity just to experience it! Certainly a civilised way to start the day.
Apart from the usual extensive range of fruit platters, cereals and continental pastries cheese and meats. Cooked options include strange items such as vegitarian noodles, chicken sausages (very aneamic looking) and fish fingers which were defintly not from Captain Birds Eye. Asian choives were, Indian Roti Prata with Dahl Curry, Dim Sum, Pork Congee and Fried Carrot Cake with pickled raddish. All this for breakfast! It was hard and exausting work but we had our moneys worth.
Next stop was an indoor market where we experienced our first determined barter style sell of the day. We innocently wandered past a camera stall and were pounced on, we would get an exclusive special price as first customers of the day. Matt asked a simple question and an hour later came out with a lens converter, significantly cheaper than the original quoted price. Despite several attempts to leave we never quite managed to escape but agreed the vendor had worked hard for the sale and we’d enjoyed every minute!
It’s amazing what can be purchased in the markets, all types of strange food (seaweed flavour crisps were a disappointment) and medications for every ache and pain. Then there are the ‘fake’ goods, Mp3 players which are exact copies of iPods at £20 instead of £150 in the UK, Blueberry (rather than Blackberry) phones and many other items all at a fraction of UK prices.
Next stop China Town. It was fantastic, little shops and market stalls selling everything and anything at bargain prices, particularly if you need 36 keyrings for $10! it was almost worth buying them, just because we could…
Lunch was in the China Town complex where we were brave and ate ‘proper’ chinese food and fresh fruit juices. All for under £3
The rest of the afternoon was spent lazing by the pool before tarting ourselves up for a Singapore Sling at Raffles Hotel. We were relieved of £60 for three drinks but John and Matt did get to play a game of snooker in the Billiard Room. Very grand and so evocative of a different era – a beautiful building in a very modern city.
Our final destination of the evening was the Singapore Flyer, a revolving observation wheel bigger than the London Eye as we were constantly reminded. The city, rivers Marina, bridges and buildings all looked amazing at night and we wondered at the ingenuity of the minds that had designed it.
As we had spent so much money on just three drinks earlier in the evening, a value dinner was required to balance the finances so we ‘dined’ at a ‘Subway’.
Ice cream was our traditional night cap, you should have seen John’s face when he tried his Durian flavoured ice cream. It was a picture. He had chosen the most revolting flavour ever, the taste of which lingered long after the ice cream had been binned!!
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