Day two of Singapore was a little nutty. On ship time was 17:00 which was an hour earlier than normal b/c immigration likes to be really annoying and demanding and take forever. Especially Singapore, every time we went to the ship we had to pass through immigration and security. It was time consuming and frustrating. Going through immigration could take 5min or 25min…it all depended on the people working and how long the line was. This could really get in the way of things because you had to make sure you gauged your time correctly especially so you wouldn’t get dock time.
I had no plans for that day so I just showed up at breakfast and figured I would see people I knew and take it from there which ended up being perfect. I met up with some friends and we talked about our plans. A few people were planning on going to the zoo or the aquarium and others were just going to tour around. I ended up hanging out with Wes for the day and we made plans to go to Santos, the island that is right next to Singapore. Wes and I had some tentative plans from the information that we had picked up the day before in the mall. Once we got to the mall, we went to the Sentosa Info/Ticket Place and picked out some things to do. We decided to get a package of things to do. The ones we chose were the Segway, Fort Sentosa, a 4D movie, and Tyger Tower. Getting to Sentosa was pretty easy because they had a monorail right next to where we were that you could take back and forth for S$3 for the whole day, which was about $2USD. It was also possible to take a taxi, or a bus, or a cable car. The cable car would have been cool, but we would have had to go to another building and spend a bunch more money.
First we made our way to Tyger Tower, which was closed due to wind, so we went to the movie instead, except they weren’t going to be starting shows for another half hour or so. We knew we wanted to do the Segway’s last so we decided to go to the fort and figured that by the time we got there it would be open. We went to the fort and took a cool little tram thing to the main part of the fort. Fort Sentosa is one of three forts that were in Singapore and the only one that is still in good shape. It was remarkable how much history actually took place there. In 1942, the Japanese took over and the British were forced to surrender and the in 1945, the reverse happened. It was actually at Fort Sentosa that the treaties officially ending WWII were signed. The whole fort was full of interesting things that I would never have expected from a place as small as Singapore. Next we made our way to the 4D movie, which was a cute movie about pirates and they sprayed water on you and wind blew and it was interesting and in 3D too, but nothing terribly exciting. Before we did the segways we went up Tyger Tower. It’s called Tyger after an Asian beer and they say that it’s the “tallest glass of beer.” It went 300+ meters up in the air and you could see most of Singapore, all of Sentosa, and parts of Malaysia and Thailand. It was spectacular to look at all of it at once especially because you were seated and the top part simply spun so you could see everything. Last we wandered over to the Segway which was cool. We learned how to ride the Segway’s and then got to ride them around a course that they had set up. It was fun and funny riding them because it is a lot more difficult at first than one would think. After Wes and I had finished our adventures we headed back to the monorail to get back to mainland Singapore. We were starving and couldn’t pick a place to eat and eventually decided to go to Pizza Hut. It was really yummy…eating food from home is so weird in these other countries and often seems to taste much better too. Then Wes got Wi-Fi and I got Starbucks which was sooo delicious. I haven’t really had any sort of coffee throughout the voyage so getting Starbucks was awesome. We hung out in the mall for a while and I eventually headed back to the ship because I had nothing to do in the mall and I didn’t have my laptop with me. I went back to the ship and decided to send out some postcards (if you want one send me your address!!!). That night we all hung out and discussed what we had done in Singapore and what we were going to be doing in Viet Nam.
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