Asia

2 Quick visits to Singapore

Proof of wheel chairing in Singapore

Been to the beautiful country of Singapore twice and both times were ridiculously short visits. Singapore should be visited with more time and money. But I’ve visited it twice because I had a good friend living there and when you see an opportunity arise to visit quick, you take it and you visit. First time around we traveled to Singapore was during the 4 days off for Easter. We didn’t have a lot of vacation days when living in Australia so we decided to buy cheap tickets with Scoot for an Easter break and travel to see my friend Anissa. We had just found out that I was pregnant and Mr Merry had just broken his tendon on his right leg. He was therefore moving around with crutches and I was vomiting and having fairly good first ride of morning sickness. This had all sort of happened after we booked the holiday so we just had to survive through but safe to say this affected quite a lot our trip. We were very early on on our pregnancy so we didn’t necessary want to reveal yet that we were pregnant. But when I started randomly vomiting in the middle of a street in Singapore into a bush we had to tell my friend it wasn’t serious. Our first trip to Singapore didn’t end up being tremendously great timing but we still enjoyed every minute of it, as you would in Singapore.

Singapore really is breathtaking. I remember being very impressed by it’s technology and how green they’re trying to keep it although there’s buildings everywhere. It’s a very high end built small country of money. Everything is that tad more expensive. We were driving around in Singapore (since Mr Merry couldn’t walk around much at all) and it felt like everywhere you looked was picture worthy. It’s a little overwhelming. You stop taking photos because all places are so beautiful and you can’t choose what’s picture worthy anymore. Singapore is also a great mix of cultures. The main languages are English, Chinese and Malay. It seems there’s a bit of cultural feuds going on but I won’t go into that since I don’t know enough. But basically you can find most things Chinese, Malaysian, English or pretty much Asian in a small city like compact country. So we chose to eat and shop in Little India. Visit the more Asian areas. Visited huge shopping malls. Stopped at the touristic city centre and hung out at the bars. We had the usual photos of Marina Bay and the surroundings. Anissa almost got us swimming at the Marina Bay pool (the famous roof top pool that looks like a boat) but in the end it didn’t work out.

We lost a lot of our Singapore time because Anissa’s family is actually from across the border in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. She really wanted to show us her family and Malaysia so we divided our time in Singapore. Malaysia is really beautiful in a very different way. Singapore looks like it’s made with money., although you can see cultures etc they’re all done with money. Whereas Malaysia really was just authentic Malaysia and the difference across the border was huge. It’s really eye opening to see what people do daily (border crossing to gain money in Singapore) and how they’re actually living with their families. I could really see Singapore as a place where I could easily enjoy living for a while. But finding work in Singapore is quite hard. The government is making it harder and harder for foreigners to obtain working visas. What I also learnt from my dear friend is that houses, apartments, schools and health care is fairly expensive in Singapore. So yeh if you manage to get the jackpot of a deal (company pays most things) Singapore can be quite nice and affordable. But overall I think even a bit of hardship would be worth it in Singapore. It is very unique place, for sure.

Our second trip was even shorter. We were traveling to Perth with our family (that trip you can read from here) and on our way back from Sydney we decided to do a Singapore stop at Anissa’s for the kids to get a break when long haul traveling. Originally we planned about 3-4 days in Singapore but then one Christina Aguilera decided to come and perform in Finland so I had to shorten our holiday to make it back to her concert. We ended up just having a day in Singapore and that was once again way too little time. Although Anissa planned the best out of our day: shopping, eating, beach, fun etc, I do think it still wasn’t enough time to really get a good feel for Singapore. We started the day at Anissa’s apartment’s pool and then went for a nice day out at the Southern Island. Sentosa and Palawan Beach area I can really recommend for families. Kids had loads of fun activities and parks everywhere and for parents you’re next to the sea breeze. A lot of ice cream to cool down though. Singapore gets extremely hot and I for one do not last well in blazing sun and heat. Swimming in the sea was bizarre as well because the water was very warm. It didn’t feel like sea because it was warmer than pools in other countries. But the water was definitely salty as sea water is! I really hope that the day will come for us to really spend some more quality time in Singapore. Not just a quick visit here and there but for now these are our Singapore experiences.

Child of the World. Language enthusiast. Wanderlust running in my veins. Making the world Merry.

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