Singapore to Bangkok
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Our flight from the very modern Sri Lanka airport was 1:30 a.m., so the boys were tired when we got on the plane and went to sleep right away. The flight was almost four hours, with Singapore time two hours ahead. Local time on arrival was a reasonable 7:30 a.m., except that it was really 5:30 a.m. for us. They were not at all happy about getting off the plane.
Again we hadn’t booked a hotel; we’d stayed in Singapore before and this time found rates on the internet 200 to 300 percent more than previous, probably due to the air show. We wanted to avoid having to pay an extra night for checking in at 9 a.m. which we would have by booking over the internet. The hope was to locate a hotel driving around in the taxi, stopping at each of our short-listed hotels. After stopping at a couple of sold out places full of mainland Chinese, we saw the YWCA on the map, and this proved our salvation. Not only did they allow us to check in immediately, we found later they have an excellent pool on the roof, and for Carmen in the fitness center, a “bhangra aerobicz” class.
After forty winks, we jumped on the bus to take us to Newton’s Hawker Center La, which we’d never been to before but somehow imagined we had. They had a variety of Singaporean hawker food and it wasn’t bad, but the place we were really looking for was Wismira Atria on the corner of Scott and Orchard. It’s much fancier, slightly more expensive but more variety. There we found an array of delicacies from different parts of the world. Singapore likes to think of itself as the food capital in Asia, and with food courts like these it’s not hard to see why. Carmen and I think more favourably of Hong Kong in this regard, although HK seems to lack good Indian food. Still, we were very happy to arrive in Singapore after the relative food desert of Sri Lanka, and see the boys stuffing themselves again. Afterwards, we wandered along Orchard road with its wide sidewalks fenced off from the road, allowing the boys to run around in all directions. We got a little lost on the way back and had to cross the road in some non-pedestrian sections of the road. Luckily no-one saw us and we didn’t have to receive fifty lashes of the cat o’ nine tails. When we finally made it back to the Y, we went for a late night swim on the roof pool with a nice view of the neon-lit buildings.
Next morning we went to a nearby mall that specializes in school books, to try and locate some home schooling math’s books for Toby. Singapore is supposed to have the best math’s learning system in the world, and we were a bit shocked when we looked through the books. They expect a high degree of literacy and understanding problems and place a large emphasis on repetition of similar types of problems. They were also very heavy so we ended up not purchasing any. The Singapore and Kumon math books you can buy in the States seem better suited for the boys needs.
We took the bus to the airport. Fortunately we had a lot of time on our hands as it took a bit longer than expected, and we checked in for our departure to Bangkok with only two and half hours to spare. Thanks to Singaporean efficiency, we checked in and got through customs so quickly that we still had two hours and fifteen minutes to eat and shop.