For our first day in Singapore, Alex and I were mostly on our own - Nina had to work both Thursday and Friday, but she had a lighter day on Friday. We decided to go to the Singapore Zoo, as it's a pretty acclaimed place to visit and we hadn't been to any zoos thus far. We took public subways and busses over there (they have an amazing public transporation system, super efficient), ate some pizzas, then wandered around for a few hours. I learned some stuff and saw some animals not common in American zoos. There was a really cool part where we were in this enclosure where some lemurs were, and they were super unafraid of humans and hung out really close to us, people were even touching them - though we didn't, cause the sign said not to :(. We also rode elephants, which was alright, a little scary. We didn't get any real pictures of that though since we were both on an elephant at the same time.
After the zoo, we headed towards this place called Haw Par Villa where we were going to meet Nina around 5:30pm. We stopped at a mall on our way because we thought we had enough time - bought ear plugs, a pasta snack, aloe vera for my sunburn, more sunscreen, and Alex got his glasses adjusted because they were being really annoying to him. We ended up being a bit late, but we still had enough time to get through the Ten Courts of Hell exhibit before it closed at 6pm. Luckily, the rest of the park was open for another hour. We went mainly because of the Ten Courts, but the rest of it ended up being super amazing. Basically it's like a park / garden where there are a MILLION statues and different sculptures of random mythology or cool animals. Nina had come with her boss, Ray, and her coworker Andrew. Ray posed us a bunch of times to take cool pics, and Nina and I scrambled up on top of quite a few animal statues. Our most epic one was a golden deer that was perched rather high off the ground to start with, though Nina said a giant gorilla was harder to climb.
Sadly, my camera had run out of power while Alex and I were at the zoo, so I didn't get to take any of my own pics. :( But I'll steal the ones from Alex's camera and I'm sure I'll get some back from Ray eventually.
Once the park closed at 7, Alex and I showed them how to get back to the main part of town on public transit (Ray usually took cabs, but with 5 we would need two). We got off in Little India for dinner. Alex bought a belt when we were wandering around the streets, because he had lost one in Brastagi, but this new one broke like two minutes after he bought it. Ray bought us all a delicious Indian meal, and I was incredibly satisfied by my food, it was actually mild enough that I could eat it all.
Afterwards we went to this store called Mustafa's, which is GIGANTIC. It had multiple floors and seemed to stretch for blocks. We wandered through it for a really long time trying to find shoes because Nina's new sandals (which we had picked up for her in Brastagi) were killing her feet. We eventually found em, and she eventually chose some shoes that were decent. Ray bought some interesting juice drinks for us all to try, and paid for a van taxi that we stumbled upon to take us back to the hotel. Then, sleep.
The next day Alex and my morning adventure was: find a place to do laundry! Conveniently, there was a self-service place 20 minutes away on public transit. Google maps also showed a vegetarian Chinese food place there, which sounded exciting. We headed over with our clothes, started laundry, then attempted to find the food place. After a ton of wandering and asking locals where it was, the eventual conclusion was that it was no longer existing. :(. So instead we went to a food court where one of the places was labeled "vegetarian." Food courts in Singapore are basically like, small shopping areas with tables where all the people who used to be street vendors were set up so that they would be off the sidewalks. I got some bland noodles and a cabbage dish with a fake meat in it that I didn't like too much. Also, a can of cold chrysanthemum tea. It was around this point that I started consuming massive amounts of that. So delicious. Then we switched laundry and hung around at the place until it was dry.
After our laundry was done, we went back to the hotel and had perfect timing - we ran into Nina, Ray, and Andrew when they were on their way out for lunch. We went with them because I hadn't been fully satisfied with my noodles earlier, and we were waiting for Nina before doing our next activity anyway. The place we went only had one vegetarian item other than rice, lady fingers (okra) with garlic sauce, so I got that and it was also kinda meh. The service at the place was really bad, too. We had to order our drinks three separate times, and they didn't even come until after we had gotten our food.
After lunch, Alex, Nina and I caught a taxi from the hotel to a nature reserve in central Singapore. We did a 1.5 mile-ish hike to the highest point in Singapore and back. It was alright; fairly standard rainforesty area and I don't like hiking all that much. There were a bunch of monkies in the parking lot, which was cool, but we didn't see many while actually hiking. We had read earlier how to avoid monkey aggression, and were careful not to make eye contact, keep our distance, and not bare our teeth at all. They didn't pay much attention to us.
We taxied back to the hotel, then changed really fast and jumped in the pool really quick before we had to leave for the airport. Nina and I had been craving nachoes, so we ordered them from the pool bar, but they were very strange and made with Doritos. O_o. Whatevs, they were pretty satisfying. Quickly changed, Nina dropped off part of her luggage at the Fairmount desk, and then we were off to the airport. The taxi driver we had there was a very bad driver, and by the time we got there I felt super nauseous. I bought a grilled cheese with tomato after my stomach calmed down, and then two bao for desert - one filled with lotus paste, one filled with red bean. All was delicious.
Our flight was super short, only like 45 minutes, and then we got a taxi from the airport to KL proper. At first we thought we had been overcharged because we had purchased a taxi from an airport booth (came to like 25 USD) but then it turned out that KL was like 75km away from the airport, sooo actually not that bad of a deal. We checked into our hostel, went online with the wifi there for a bit. This guy whose name we later learned was Freeman (I have no idea how to spell that name) talked about how despite all the hype, the best views of the city weren't from the KL Tower or the Twins but from these two hotel bars, Luna and Sky bar. We chatted with him a bit, then went to our beds and slept. We had three beds in a dorm-like room of about 12. Alex and I had been a little unsure about staying in a hostel, as neither of us had ever done it, but in total it ended up being a really great experience, everyone there was fantastically nice. The bed I slept on the first night was right under the vent, though, so I was rather cold (the next night I traded beds with Alex).
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