Singapore 2018
Day 3--Singapore Shangri-La Hotel, Orange Grove Road
Today was great. The zoo, mostly, then Robert took big kids to hotel pool while Helen napped on me and I went to the happy hour at the hotel for free tuna tartare, fried fish, saag paneer mini cups, chicken bao, tiramisu mini parfaits, truffles, red bean mochi colored and shaped to look like beautiful plump little eggplants, and many other delights. Robert went back to grab a second round at 7:15 after the pool and we ate bananas and guavas and adorable 1" diameter clementines in our room along with the free appetizers as "dinner" before passing out.
It's a very nice hotel--there's an entire family floor that we're on, with the suites having animal-themed mailboxes outside them. We had a non-suite, but still had two couches at right-angles to each other that the big kids slept on, a nice dining room table and chairs, a little kitchenette, a big bed for us, a desk, and a large bathroom. The floor has a washer and dryer you can use at any time (Robert ended up using it twice) and a room you can check out bath toys, strollers, high chairs, or anything else you might want (we didn't, but it seemed like a neat idea). After the second night, we had to switch to a smaller room because we had pushed our reservation back and they needed our room for someone else, but we were still on the family floor and still had access to the club room with the free tea and happy hour upstairs.
We took Ubers back and forth to the zoo, about 20 minutes each way, passing the robot traffic cops (yellow raincoats, orange safety vests, and moving hand waving a flag).
At the zoo, we took a picture of our baby tiger; we sometimes joke that Helen's "smile" looks like a baby tiger about to pounce, so here are my girls with a cut out of a tiger in some conservation/preservation display.
There was a water play area in the zoo that was deserted because of the "bad weather," and we were cautioned many times about allowing the children to play there when it was so cold. They splashed around anyway, and then we rode the carousel and then headed back to the front of the zoo. The zoo cafeteria food was quite pleasant--a mix of Indian and Indonesian and Chinese, all pretty decent.
I love these open-to-nature bathrooms with the little man-made rivers with fish right there--we saw some of these in Vietnam too. Western style toilets alternated with squat toilets in the stalls, and Helen washed her hands multiple times at the shorter-than-normal sinks.
The hotel breakfast buffet is fantastic--huge, at least 6 live cooking stations and another 6-8 separate buffet areas, scattered all around the restaurant, so we can't even see them all and getting up (Helen was eating something on my lap, Robert was helping Samantha peel fruit) was a pretty big effort. Marcus announced he wanted a noodle soup just like Samantha's but with shrimp instead of fish cakes, and after a little encouragement he got up, found his way to the noodle guy, and managed to come back with a noodle soup to his specifications--or close enough, with his ownership of it, that he ate it all.
Day 4--Singapore
Marcus has gone 6 meals in a row eating miso soup (among other things) and is thrilled. There's a light drizzle here and it's 75 degrees, super comfy, though people keep apologizing about the weather. Apparently it's breaking a low-temperature record. Hilarious!
It's 2am here and I've slept since 8 and am awake. Oh well. Helen slept since 4 and is now up but quietly nursing. Big kids also slept since 7:30 and are still going. We are pretty chill with jetlag and just see how much we can do before we crash, but it's nice to have them wake up as close to normal local human time as possible. We'll see.
Today we took the MRT to Marina Bay and then took a bumboat ride along the river. It's still a bit drizzly but not bad out.
The narration on the boat was hilarious. In a proper British accent, it kept making surprisingly off-color allusions, and it cheerfully mentioned torture, and then it went on and on about each bridge you passed under, and how exactly it was built, and for whom it was named (Robert said, "uh, do they know these aren't the Brooklyn Bridge?").
When we got off the boat, we posed for some silly pictures near the Merlion, which Samantha really enjoyed.
Along the way we stopped for these J-cones. Helen loved them--but man, were they messy! The cones are clearly a novelty and were sort of mass-produced cronut-like. They reminded me of an incredibly sturdy churro actually--very crisp, clearly fried, and the neat part was when the two different flavors of ice cream met in the hook. I guess theoretically two people could eat them but what actually happened was Samantha rejected it entirely as "tasting weird" (I think she meant bitter--it was a very dark chocolate flavor), Helen claimed it as hers (she can say an /m/, as in "mama" but in the word "mine" she somehow has an initial /n/ instead, so she yells out "NINE! NINE!" Or perhaps it's "NEIN! NEIN! depending on how you look at it...), I tried eating it super fast to prevent it getting quite allllll over us, and Marcus kept squeezing in trying to get some bites.
On the other side of the river we had really good Hainanese chicken with rice, and some nice tart lime juice, and then we walked around the corner to a dessert place where we had walnut paste with mochi balls (sesame and peanut) in it, and a nice mango dessert too. The kids just had plain scoops of ice cream, but everyone was happy.
Taxi back to hotel, a bit more pooltime, afternoon tea at the hotel (also free), and then the night safari. This was really cool, but the kids were massively tired so we didn't do most of the walking trails around it. We basically just rode the tram (45 minutes, nice, though) and went home. It was great to see all the animals quite so active, but back at the hotel, everyone went almost instantly to sleep!
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Created: 1/22/18. Last Modified: 1/22/18.