Singapore

Picture a shopping centre. Picture the biggest shopping centre you know. Now extend it by a couple of miles. Expand to eight floors high and three deep. You are beginning to get a picture of Singapore. There are shops for miles. You can buy anything. From a seventy cent ice-cream, to a twenty thousand dollar watch. Actually lots of twenty thousand dollar watches. There must be a hundred shops selling them in this city alone. And in every other city in the world. Who buys all the twenty thousand dollar watches? If they all sell just one a day, that’s over two million a week, around the world. Everyone on the planet must have a twenty thousand dollar watch by now. I must have lost mine.

At the marina, there is a light show each evening. They shoot up fountains of water to create a mist screen, and project a picture light show onto this. Quite spectacular! This week, it was enhanced, by an iLight exhibition. Special light based exhibits all around the bay. One was arranged to pick out the angels, who inhabit the city. One projected images of birds and bees flying, plants growing, flowers blooming, onto the side of the Arts and Science building which, itself, is shaped like a lotus flower.

The restaurant and pool area of the Marine Bay Hotel is shaped like a long, sleek ship, or wingless plane perhaps, and is supported on the three towers of the hotel. Fifty seven floors high! Maybe it’s supposed to look like a cricket wicket? The views are good from up there. And they make a nice gin and tonic! Speaking of drinks, we had to have a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar of Raffles hotel. Well we didn’t have to. Well we did really.

Add all this to beautiful garden parks, sunshine and heat, street art, (even a little Salvador Dali), good food and rock ‘n’ roll until the early hours in the bars on Clarke Quay and ……. Well ……. That’s Singapore.