Singapore the second

After a bit of a lethargic morning on Wednesday we went out the door and the weather was great. Poeple in Dublin and Germany please read carefully now: It was 32 degree, bright blue sky, low humidity and the sun was shining Basti was not much impressed with this as he is used to this kind of weather by now.


After a few meters, though we decided to turn back and book the tickets for the bus to Malacca. We could just do this in the hostel and we booked a bus for Thursday around lunchtime. This morning we were going to an MRT station further west called “Haw Par Villa” where we could visit another free attraction. The Chinese 10 court's of hell. It was very colourful plaster world resembling different stages of death and punishment that ancient Chinese criminals had to pass to become set free and gain the right of rebirth. There were also different scenarios resembling ancient Chinese stories (similar to Confucius stories).



As the sun kept beating down on us we weren't really sure which place we should visit next,
so we too the MRT to the nearest station that sounded interesting without any idea of what would be waiting there for us. In this case the station was Harbour Front. And indeed it was a nice area with a shopping mall that had a big food court in the basement, with at least 30 different stalls to choose from. I had Korean spicy chicken with rice at a very reasonable 4 $.



Outside the mall was a bridge that would have gotten us to Sentosa Island and probably the new pride of the Singaporean Navy. The RSS Endurance, a impressive, shiny, new ship.



In the evening we were planning to meet up with Antonio for sum Dim Sum (Chinese mostly
steamed but also fried dumplings filled with all kinds of stuff), and he suggested to do this in style at the famous Swee Choon Restaurant.
Before going there we decided to quickly return to the hostel as it was near that place anyway. On the way there we had a quick stop in china town (this time in the  northernpart) to see if we could find something interesting there. But again no luck, so we continued back home on the MRT.



Charging the batteries of our, phone, laptops, cameras and ourselfs we headed off to meet
Antonio at the Dim Sum place. The procedure here was to look through the menu and chose a couple of a big selection of small dishes, then mark these on a separate sheet of paper. The dishes then started to arrive one after another and we continued eating for a while. Some
of these dumplings are quite filling, so we decided to go for stroll and ended up in the Muslim quarter of Singapore around Arab street.


For me this area had the most authentic (as I imagine the near east – haven't been there
yet) atmosphere. Maybe Authentic is not the right word, but it was certainly a pretty cool place to walk around. The narrow passageways with tables on the street, or large carpets with pillows and shishas and a big mosque light up in different colours at the end of the street.



But after this day and the one before we really started feeling tired now., so we headed back to the hostel and we called it an early night.