Day #2
Singapore
Breakfast time … brb!
Ok, Breakfast seemed normal enough … apart from noodles and rice for brekky.
Going to walk around lots today. Must wear myself for London trip. This will be a 14 hour trip, and the 7 hour trip to Singapore was bad enough.
Amy & I check out at 10am and begin our walk around the city. Sunday morning … lots of church services. Churches are packed here. Singapore seems to be a very religious place. There are a lot of churches that we saw in Singapore and they are very well adorned. Singapore is also a very clean city. There is a lot of work going on around the place constantly. A lot of the labourers are Indian, and it seems that there is a disproportionate number of Indians in the lower paid jobs. I didn't have the guts to question anyone on why this is so.
Walked to Suntec Mall to look for a Toshiba Laptop battery (Qantas flights don’t have power supplies for Economy Class, so it was either more batteries or sneak an extension cord into Business Class).
Suntec Mall is part shopping complex, part convention centre. As luck would have it, there was a Food & Beverage Expo on, so we decided to have a look inside ;). The food wasn’t particularly shocking but it was fun and we got to sample a lot of different things (One Singapore girl was handing out Nougat from some funny country called "Australia". She was surprised when we said we had never heard of the brand).
One thing I did notice about Singapore is that Australia features fairly predominantly in their News, so they are fairly up on what we are about. This means of course, that every time our glorious ;) Prime Minister makes some statement they know about it. This also means that unlike some countries (I presume) we were not noticed by anyone and when we told people that we were from Australia they were largely uninterested. Some even said things like "Oh, I have a son there".
Singapore is a place of massive amounts of shopping. Especially IT stuff. We went to Suntec Mall and Funan Complex and saw more IT junk than you can poke a stick at. We also saw whole bunches of geeks playing Warcraft III against each other (I watched them play a bit and saw the speed at which they played the game and decided not to sit down and humiliate myself ;).
The irony is, that after visiting all these places not one of them had spare batteries for a Toshiba laptop or a piece of string for a Canon Camera (we wanted to attach the lens cap to the camera via string). I was disappointed and realized that no matter what is IT is for sale there will always be something you cant find.
Got a river boat cruise (boat is used loosely here) that went up and down the Singapore river. It did all the usual touristy things and pointed out bridges, old buildings, harbours, lion's head statues etc (These sort of things don’t impress me much. The T-shirt on sale that said "Singapore is a fine Country. Littering $500 fine. Smoking $1000 fine, Pornography $1000 fine …" impressed me much more).
Afternoon tea, went to a strange restaurant called "McDonalds". They serve weird things like "Big Macs" and "McNuggets" (oh well, cant escape American Culture). Getting quite tired at this stage. When we left at 10am we checked out of the hotel and placed our baggage in holding. It is now 5pm and we are getting tired (I think this is exacerbated by the heat and not having a home base), so we head to the hotel, pick up our bags and head to the airport.
Departing Singapore
Got a cool taxi driver on the way to the airport. He tells us about some of the house prices in Singapore. Nobody here lives in houses, they all live in apartments. They range from about S$300,000 upward. They all commute to work in buses and trains, and in most respects they are very similar to Australians. They all understand and speak English very well (probably better than me) and understand our humour (but still wouldn’t laugh at my jokes ;).
Got to the Airport, and learnt things about Power Plug Converters. Before we went to Singapore, we bought a Australian-to-Singapore Plug converter. Now (back at Changi Airport - after check-in), I realize that I left my converter in my luggage. Damn! Not much power left in the laptop. The power sockets at the laptop area are whacky looking sockets so I decide to go hunting for an Australian-to-Singapore Plug converter (I figure the chances are slim). The guy at the electronics shop says "Yeah we have one of those" and shows me a whacking looking socket and a Singapore plug. I keep trying to explain that I have an Australian plug and he keeps saying "It will fit". In exacerbation he finally grabs an Australian power plug and plugs it into this whacky socket and explains that it is a "Universal Socket". The penny drops (sort of), so I buy this thing ($5.00) and leave very happy until I arrive at the laptop area and realize their "whacky" sockets are also "Universal Sockets" and I could plug my laptop in without any converters. DOH! (Oh well I learnt something new)
I don’t remember this at Brisbane Airport but Changi Airport has things called "Rest Lounges". These are great places with laptop areas, Free Internet, and lounge chairs. This is a god-send place (it allowed me to type my Day #2 stuff) but I have avoided sleeping so that I can hopefully sleep on the plane. Singapore is only 2 hours behind Brisbane so I didn’t get any jet lag but I am expecting worse when I get to London. Anyway gotta go, going to try out the Internet Lounge for uploading this stuff onto the Blog site for the first time.
