Blog ≫ 2024 ≫ Singapore day two
Went to bed about midnight local time and I woke up at 8am with a headache. Is this jetlag 1? Breakfast good. A mix of curry and noodles and "traditional" breakfast things and not so traditional breakfast foods. I had coffee and juice and fruit and hash browns and chana masala and couple of local dishes, or rather my variants of them. So one was noodles with tofu and vegetables, and one was rice with pickles and chilies. I forget the names but I think I took a picture of one of the names.
Indeed so I can see it's Nasi Lemak, and there was an explanation say it is a popular and native rice dish find in Singapore with a perfet mix of flavors of aromatic rice infused with coconut milk and pandan leaves. Translating Nasi Lemak from Malay to English it means 'rich rice' and 'rich' refers to the coconut mulk that makes it oh-so sinfully scrumptions. It iw one of the most famous and hearty dishes for breakfast that usually comes with a variety of condiments including ikan bilis (anchovies), peanut and fried egg and cucumber serve with sambal... I had some of this but not most of the condiments of course. I could not have told you the rice was rich with coconut to be honest. Hmm is it weirdly inconsistent that I'm using `
tags for my own dictated content and then just putting actually quoted content in quotes? I might try a` tag here.
There's another traditional breakfast rice dish here where they cook the rice right down. I guess it's like porridge. Haven't had that yet. It's hard to tell what all the condiments are. I think they're quite keen on shrimp and they did mention anchovies in one of their suggestions. I don't see anchovies marked out so maybe they're hidden in one of the things that I already ate.
The anchovies are easy to spot actually and I did not eat them. Not sure about shrimps in the chili paste though.
I'm sitting by the pool again. Waiting for the others who come back to the room. Did I say the towel station is a VW camper van? It's an early bay like mine was, but with a high roof. And the side folds down so they can serve beach towels out of it.
Here's your first proper look at the pool complex in our hotel. The biggest bit of the pool is behind me, this is what we went in the previous night when we first arrived at the hotel, and the bit I would go in most days, as it's big enough and long enough to actually swim in. The swim up bar is just out of shot to the left and in the background is a fairly busy shipping lane in the South China Sea, how odd. Still nice though.
It's hot already. It's a fairly consistent temperature here. I think the weather says 29° today with a 100% chance of thunderstorms until 2:00, so I might get to use my new Patagonia rain jacket thing. If there is a thunderstorm during our booked slot on the luge, we might miss our turn though.
Been on the luge now, and that was fun. We had three different goes down, three different routes, and it was really good.
This was really really good. A bit of hanging around in the heat waiting for it to open, but it ran from very near our hotel just up the hill a bit, down to the beach front. There were four tracks to choose from, they all start the same way and then diverge. Fairly steep downhill concrete track, you're sat on a little sledge thing with handlebars, it's on skateboard type wheels. You pull back on the handlebars to release the brake. We could actually race each other on this, but our three goes were over quite quickly. There is a chairlift to take you back up to the top, and this is nearly as much fun. It was great! Pro-tip if you go, it's cheaper to book more single rides when you get there, cheaper than in advance.
Then we've had a bit of a walk along Sentosa. Most places not open until afternoon. Most sensible people sheltering indoors from the heat. I think all along the main strip of Sentosa is beach bar type things. They've like reserved an area of the beach and you'll sit there and we've just see one that looks really nice and has a pool, but you can walk along the beach as well. We just got a storm warning coming out on loudspeakers across the place or public places staying. We're indoors now, taking cover now as the storm come. We ducked into a Greek themed seafront bar restaurant called Blu. Quite expensive. Actually we were originally looking at coming back for dinner, but we just had a drink. I had a gin fizz with cucumber, Clare had a blood orange fizz and the boys had soft drinks and that came to about 100 Singapore dollars 2
We're having a bit more of a walk now. We're discussing going to "the southernmost tip of continental Asia", but we think it's nonsense because we can see places from where it's at that are even more southern than that. And I guess you have to pay to go there. We think it's the southernmost picturesque point. We'll walk back and forth along the sea front. Probably go back to our hotel and use the pool. We have booked a light and firework show you later, but there's some confusion about the payment going through so we don't know if it worked.
I'm a little bit annoyed. This is day two of the holiday and I posted a couple of subtle pictures to my friends in our friends group on Signal 3 and they haven't bitten yet. They haven't responded to say "Oh, are you on holiday? Aren't you cool!". Are they just ignoring it?
We went on the monorail to the mall. It's called Velocity. Very Western though. Boys bought ice creams, we didn't buy anything else. Nice to ride the monorail, looks like it is free to go one way and then it should be $4 to come back the other way. So we have a code from the hotel that we could scan and they let us back on for free. not that $4 saved is significant from this holiday.
The mall was called Velo-City, not the monorail. Transport in Singapore was great and easy.
I'm back at the hotel now at the swim up bar in the rain but raining overcast and raining. Most people are still braving the pool. Clare and T1 went back to the room, T2 still in the pool. I'm not giving up my space at this swim up bar, even though this lychee mojito is not very good. Not worth the enormous cost. Sums up my view of Sentosa 4. We're heading out again this evening. Walking down I think to a restaurant and to the light show and firework show. But if this rain doesn't stop even that might be off.
Surprising amount of rain! Should not have been a surprise, we are in the tropics. It was warm with it, and the rain didn't spoil anything. I stayed in the pool in the rain, and the rain did not stop the show later. It must have stopped, I don't remember walking in the rain.
The show was ok, animation, water, flashes, fireworks. Dinner before that ok, in the Hawaiian themed beach bar. Two for one wine, cheery service. Very quiet out. We walked to Universal Studios too to check it out for later. T2 sick when we got home. Alcopop from 7-Eleven giving me headache. Room tv not fixed.
Surely this is not really day 2? Is it because we lost a day?
Maybe all that is really jetlag, don't sound like I was enjoying it much. I was a bit jaded with Sentosa pretty quickly, and that was my intro to Singapore. It's interesting, but it's all very artificial. And yes, we did lose a day.
The show was OK. It was called "Wings Of Time" I think and it was a lightshow projected onto a bit spray of water. I thought it would be more of the history of Singapore but it was history generally. It was presented by a cartoon mythical bird, so T2 and Emu especially liked that.
The food was OK, the restaurant / beach bar would have been nice if it was busier, and if I wasn't already thinking "why they hell is everything so much?" and expecting a higher standard as the prices were so high. When we got back to the hotel T2 was quite massively sick, throwing up all night! Not sure that he ate anything different to any of us. Obviously different to me but everything he ate someone else ate too. He was off colour the next day too.
- Nope I think it was the Soju drink.
- This is a lot, this is sixty quid for this round of drinks. It does include another £6 for some water, and then 10% or so service charge and then 10% or so tax. It's expensive here.
- Messaging app we are using rather than SMS or WhatsApp.
- A bit cynical here but about right, it's very expensive in Sentosa and not worth the cost for me.
⬅️ Singapore day one :: T1 got a GCSE ➡️
