Singapore Diary

My 11 yo daughter had never been to a rich country, until we visited Singapore recently. This meant several first’s for her. Like seeing what a business class seat was (Domestic flights don’t have them). The size of the seats. Separators between seats. The leg-room. The prop to place your feet so you are almost lieing down when you slept. The huge display screens with each seat. Like all Indian parents, we couldn’t resist telling her that we made her study so she could afford this life…

 

When we landed at Singapore’s Changi airport, she was blown away. By the airport. “Is this a mall or an airport?”, she marvelled. At this point she hadn’t even seen the Jewel section of the airport. She did see Jewel on our way back, and she was awestruck. Singapore is the only airport that can blow a person away, making it the only airport where one wouldn’t mind their flight getting delayed!

 

We took a cab to the hotel. First time in a Mercedes for her. Impressed again. But then she added we should have gotten a limo. A stretch limo. Kids…

 

Since we landed too early to check-in to the hotel, we left the bags at the reception and decided to go to Little India for breakfast. My daughter didn’t like this one bit. The place was full of Indian shops and restaurants, after all. People speaking in Tamil. Signboards in Tamil. Places like A2B. An idli/dosa breakfast in a foreign country. Yikes! It was too much for her swallow. More worryingly, she feared that all meals would be South Indian on this holiday…

 

Once we’d checked in to the hotel, we told her that cabs were too expensive, so we’d be using the metro for the rest of the stay. She was horrified. Until she saw and experienced the metro system. Then she was blown away.

 

Before going to Singapore, we were worried whether madam could walk the long distances the city has. Our first long walk was to the Sea Aquarium. She moaned, grumbled and complained – our hearts sank, this was just Day 1. But once we entered the Aquarium, she was a different person. Exotic fishes, sharks, dolphins, sting rays, jellyfish… below, above, beside, they were everywhere.

 

From here onwards, she was a changed person. She had realized that the long walks were going to be worth the experience at the destination. Now she could walk all day. Day after day. If only the habit continues in Bangalore, where she whines after walking for less than a minute… One can always hope.

 

The trip to Universal Studio’s theme-and-rides park was fun. Since she was old enough and tall enough for all the rides, there were no constraints – except one’s own fear and willingness to wait in the queues. Even the express tickets we’d bought only helped so much in the queues. We enjoyed the roller-coasters, castles, and props from Jurassic to Egypt to the fairy tale themed ones.

 

As someone who suffers horrendously long commutes to school, she was very surprised that the city had no traffic jams. That people didn’t keep honking. The one time we saw some repair work on one small part of the road, she was impressed by how neatly they cordoned exactly that area and how smoothly traffic was diverted around that one small stretch of road. I was too.

 

We went to Dolphin Island. They split us into small groups, told some basic do’s and don’t’s, and then we were in the water to watch and touch the dolphin. It was like nothing I had experienced. How well trained the dolphins were stood in sharp contrast to how human kids are…

 

I knew wind tunnels are powerful. But until I experienced iFly (“experience free fall without the terror or cost of jumping out of a plane”), I had no idea how powerful they are. iFly is a vertical wind tunnel where the force of the wind counteracts gravity. With a little help, it’s easy to hover in one place. But when the instructor holds you and takes you and up down, that’s exhilarating. And to think the whole experience lasts less than 90 seconds. Fortunately, it’s one of those rare things in life where time slows down when one is having fun – it felt a lot, lot longer than a mere 90 seconds.

 

We also went to the other tourist spots of Singapore. The Merlion statue. Gardens by the Bay. Singapore Wheel. Marina Bay Sands. Instagram has beautiful pics of all them, but seeing them is a whole different thing.

 

If you’re non-veg and Indian, food in Singapore is heaven for the taste buds. There’s so much variety, and it’s all spicy. Plus, there are plenty of options to pick and choose ingredients into a bowl, which they then cook. My daughter had seen such things on YouTube, and decided to try it. I was nervous how it would turn out but I needn’t have worried – it was delicious. Spicy and tasty food outside India, that was a first for me.

 

Singapore is my new favourite city on the planet. It beats both Paris and Rome. Not only is it awesome, it is the most tourist friendly city. Hell, even their airport has tourist attractions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more