Touring Singapore

I bought tickets for a tour package. I then started with, of course, a Duck Tour!





Suntec City from the water.



We went past the Singapore Flyer, which I'll come to in a future post.



They are building the first casino in Singapore, partnered with a casino in Las Vegas. And it's being built on a Las Vegas scale! They built a retaining wall and pushed back the bay, are building 3 hotels, and overall is enormous and being built very quickly. Here they are building a new vehicle bridge and a new pedestrian bridge to it.





Enough cranes for you?





Here is a stadium with if I heard right the largest floating platform in the world, which they use only once a year to celebrate the birthday of Singapore.







This exhibition hall has an area reminiscent of the one in Sydney, Australia, where they play free concerts every weekend in the summer, and two buildings shaped like durian, a trademark (and very smelly) fruit of the area (an acquired taste, at best!).





Apparantly there is a trademark statue at the center of the bay, called the Ma-lion. Unfortunately, it was hit by lightning the weekend before and damaged, so they were working on putting it's ear back on.





The main downtown area was just enormous. Very impressive.



The are actually building a dam to the left of the marina here. On the tour they said Singapore essentially has no natural resources of its own. They get most of their fresh water from Malaysia. So they are turning this bay into a resoviour.



Very cool condo complex, called something like the birds nest or bird cage or similar.



Dragon boats are popular!



Kayak lessons.



Another tour included in the package I bought was a bus tour. They had double-decker busses, open on top. You could hop off / back on as much as you wanted.



So more pictures of some of the same things, but from land now!





A green in the middle of the city. The building with the flying saucer on top is of course the new Supreme Court building.



They were playing cricket!





The cricket country club, at the end of the green.



A monument on the green. Something about Japanese war heroes.





Again, the downtown area is very impressive. And very fung shuea, with the tallest buildings in the middle.



And here I think is the old Supreme Court building (or some British-looking government building).





We drove past several enormous, very crowded malls.








The 4 towers of Suntec City, one at each finger.



The tallest round building in the world, or so they said. It's a hotel.



A very British looking bridge. As you see, this is a very western city, with the British colonial influence very clear.

Singapore - The Fountain of Wealth

The Singapore Changi Airport has a great tourist association dealy. The offer 2 hr bus tours of the city for free, and free shuttles to and from the city if you have longer to spend - which I did! So I checked most of my stuff at a "left luggage" place, took just what I'd need for sightseeing, and went through customs.

After about a 25 min ride, I got off the free shuttle at Suntec City - a huge 5 building complex. The bottom floors of 4 of the buildings are a shopping mall, and the 5th (more or less) is a convention center. They are arranged like an outstretched left hand. In the center (where your palm would be) is the largest fountain in the world - the Fountain of Wealth. See, it even says so on the sign.



They chose the left hand because in Asian culture you recieve money with your left hand (and pay it out with your right hand).

There is a smaller fountain in the middle of the fountain.



Water is flowing "inward". And in Asian culture water represents money. So the fountain represents recieving wealth. Every now and then they turn off the bigger outer fountain.



Then two security people came out to make sure it was safe (because obviously this requires TWO people, not just one).



Then they let people come out and touch the water for luck.



I didn't have time to figure out how to get down there, so no, I didn't touch the water. No wealth for me I guess!

From Penang to Singapore

On to Singapore on the way home. After having already seen most of Penang, I moved up my flight home from Sunday evening to Sunday morning, so I could spend the day looking around Singapore.

The Penang airport had a shop selling batik items. These dresses were only RM 25 (about US$7)



Instructions on how to wrap it around onself:



Lots of neat looking stuff - mostly too small for me, and very light weight fabric, common to most clothing I saw for sale in Penang outside of the big shopping malls.



Typically unusual things for sale to drink.



My ride is here!





They have started building a second bridge to the mainland.



Saw lots of these - not sure what they are, maybe some kind of fish farm?



Saw several very twisty rivers.





Made it to Singapore. Forumla racing must be big here. The Intel race car was at the mall next to my hotel in Penang, and this ING one was at the Singapore Changi airport.