Food Heaven

21122016

We woke up at a decent time by our standards, but too late for our older Aussie friends, they had woken up plenty early to attend the Singapore Zoo. Having missed the zoo, we decided to hit up the South Ridges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ridges). The South Ridges are essentially a series of interconnected parks, taking you through 10km of Singapore. We got there via the subway and a walk through the Science Park area, which is like an industrial park, but for tech development. The first park was Kent park, which had a little museum ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_at_Bukit_Chandu ) to commemorate the services of the Malay Soldiers during WWII, the Malay Soldiers led a heroic last stand defending the town of Singapore from the Japanese.

This led us to the Canopy walk, which is wandering through big hills and a few above ground walkways.

From here we hit the HortPark, which is a big Horticultural Park where there are gardens and learning, clearly geared towards teaching kids about plants. At this point in the day it was getting pretty warm, as in 95 degrees with 80 percent humidity. It was hot.

We left HortPark via the bridge over Alexandra Street, leading directly to the really tall above ground walkways. I dont remember what this part of the chain was called, but it was really cool. Walking at or above the tree tops was neat, Singapore, despite being a huge city, still has these green spots to escape to, I think that is a really important part of cities of the future.

The next link in the parks was The Waves, and it was the most spectacular.

After skipping breakfast, and walking a good 7km through near hundred degree temperatures, we were hungry. The first place we decided to stop at appeared to be a mall on the non-live google maps (we dont have service, though Singapore is totally cool with google), when we got there it seemed to be a rec center. We got some ice cream, and while enjoying my coffee/oreo ice cream i noticed there were pictures of soldiers all over the place.

Turns out this is a rec center for soldiers and their families, like the AAFES (army and air force exchange services) back home. Except way better. It kicks the shit out of all the exchanges ive been to in the US.

Now that we had enough food (and internet) in us to make a good decision on what to eat next. We settled on another food court in a mall. So we hopped on the bus, which took us directly to the necessary mall.

This was the downtown shopping area, Orchard Street. It was alot like the shopping arcades elsewhere in Asia, except, it was really hot. It was actually more like China than Japan/Korea/Hong Kong, because the malls were planned out by the city government, and they take up inside and outside space, unlike in Japan where half the mall is actually underground.

The food court had another wide selection of food, between the two of us we got three plates, some juices all for less than 25USD. From here we struggled to communicate with our friends and set up a meeting place.

We found them in the lobby of one of the malls, they were doing their own chasing of camera stuff, i guess that was their thing. So we wandered around the mall area, and ultimately it was decided to check out a certain outdoor food court that had the Chilicrab the Aussies had been wylin about.

The walk was a little longer than they were anticipating, it was prolly 1.2km away, i thought nothing of making that trek, i neglected to take into account that members of our party were missing their original joints (Maurine had both knees replaced, and everyone was over 60…). We finally got there, got a few beers, laura and i had already ate, so the beers were pretty much enough to keep us going. Laura went off to grab some fresh fruit to share with the table, and we chatted until it was “late”. We all went to the train station, and split our separate ways to go home.

Upon getting back to our hotel, laura and i fiddled around with the internets and watched a shitty harry-potter-knock-off movie before falling asleep.