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.