Singapore

This past week a couple of friends and I went to Singapore for the weekend. Whats cool about Singapore is that they mixed Chinese, Indian, Muslim and Malaysian's together in a small island and made it into a super city that was meant to challenge Hong Kong for the position of Asia's economic hub. Even though its putting up a good race, Hong Kong is still victorious. Regardless, Singapore is considered one of the most advanced, cleanest and safest cities in the world, but the most insane/awesome part is that they do public whippings to the offenders.

We arrived early in the morning and went to our hostel, which was conveniently located in the red light district.. thats another thing thats legal in Singapore.. Anyways we had some Malaysian breakfast and started exploring the city. We went to the city central and walked around the streets for a while. We went through some crazy art museums and got to a mini-soccer stadium, F1 track and the Singapore Flier (a giant ferry's wheel with cabins of 10+ people for which each rotation takes 30 minutes). We saw an awesome building that was composed of three big towers and a ship-like structure on top. We had to go there. We crossed the DNA Cycle bridge and finally got to the building. It turns out that it was the sands hotel/casino which had a spa/bar on top. We convinced the receptionist to let us go up without paying the fee and ended up spending that money in some Sangria on the 57th floor of the coolest building I've seen.

From there we headed back down and walked around for a while until we finally found the Merlion, the official sign of Singapore. Its a statue that is half mermaid and half lion. There are a couple of them spread around the island but the biggest one is close to a shore to signal the boats that they are entering Singapore. The one we found was way smaller than I expected so we where rather disappointed. We started to get hungry so we headed to Chinatown for some food. We were pretty surprised when we got there because it was the most western chinatown we had ever seen. It had asian facades on top of panasonic stores. We looked around for a while and found the food street. We ate there and then explored a little longer. From there we headed to little india and found this massive building complex filled with shops where you could bargain everything. Being from china we knew how cheap stuff could actually be so we didn't buy anything.

We headed to a place called Clark Quay where the majority of the nightlife happens. We found a bar that I was looking for called The Clinic, in which you sat in golden wheelchairs and drank out of Syringes, Test Tubes, and my personal favorite, IV's! We raced a couple times, tried doing some wheelies and then went inside the giant fountain.

The next day we decided to go to the Zoo. We had heard good things about it but never imagined that it was going to be that amazing. When we first got there we where amazed after realizing that a big part of the zoo were free-ranging animals, which was extremely cool since you could be walking next to a monkey or ducks or bats and others. We headed to the Africa Expo first and saw a shitton of cool animals such as zebras, giraffes, lions, jaguars, leopards, rhinos, etc. We kept walking and found what had to be the most amazing elephant show in the world. The riders had the elephants walk on a log, drag it, lift a hat from the floor and place it in his head, stand in two paws, etc. We kept walking and saw a bunch of monkeys along the way. From there we found the Asia/Australia section where they had white tigers and kangaroos! Epic way to end the trip. We left the zoo and headed back to orchard row, the most expensive street in Singapore. We went inside the mall and found an awesome ice cream shop that served sliced ice. We had to order them. We got 2 Strawberry/Mango and 1 Green Tea. Truly an amazing flavor. We capped the night of walking around the red light district but where disappointed when we saw it since it was only 4 streets and it barely had anything on them.

The next morning we woke up fairly early and went across the island to Sentosa, a place where they built Casinos, resorts, adventure sports and amusements parks and packed them all up in a small beach area. Unfortunately we only had two hours to spare so we couldn't do much. Poon, Peter and I went zip-lining and chilled in the beach while Dave went indoor surfing. Overall it was an awesome experience but it was a shame that we didn't have enough time to go to the casinos, universal studios, wind tunnels, etc. Sentosa is definitely the place to go while in Singapore however it has become a highly touristic area so expect to have to pay a lot to do everything.