Singapore

A few days after India , we arrived in Singapore , which I enjoyed quite a lot. Singapore was a nice change from India in terms of cleanliness, because the entire city was really tidy and didn't smell bad. No big surprise there, since you get fined/jailed/killed for just about anything in Singapore . I spent the first day at the National Museum of Singapore for a class project, and that was pretty boring, but at least I got a lot of good information for the project (which I should be working on right now, actually). After that Ben and I (a friend) went and explored a 6-storey high electronics and computer parts mall. My mom would have loved it. That night, I went with a different group of friends to Palau (it might be Pulau, but I can't remember) Ubin, a small island off the coast of the main island where it’s a lot less crowded and there’s good birdwatching. We had heard that ferries ran 24 hours from Singapore to the island, so we assumed that stuff would be open pretty late. We got there at 9 p.m. and NOTHING was open. There were no lights anywhere, but we were pointed to the direction of the police station, where we asked to borrow their phone. We hadn’t booked a hotel room (we figured there'd be space), so we wanted to make sure they still had rooms. They did, but it was going to be difficult to get there in the dark, so the cops offered to give us a lift in their car. They also thought we were crazy for coming entirely unprepared. And that, my friends, is the story of how I rode in a cop car in Singapore .

Anyway, after we got to the hotel, we went to get something to drink at the restaurant, and we found some of the staff sitting around a table. We ended up joining them, and it turned out that one of them was having a birthday party, and we got invited to hang out with them and eat cake. It was pretty awesome, but we went to bed really late, which made getting up the next morning to go birdwatching pretty difficult.

Although we got up much later than we originally intended (8 instead of 5:30...I knew there was a reason I don't bird too much anymore) the next morning, we rented bicycles and a few of us went birdwatching. I don’t remember exactly what we saw, but I know there was a species of rail, an Oriental Pied Hornbill, and a kind of kite, among other things. We also saw a snake swimming in the water, a monitor lizard, and mud skippers, which are those weird fish that can also come onto the land. It was really awesome. After that, we returned to the cruise ship terminal, ate, and got back on the ship. And that was Singapore . Considering I was only there 2 days, I think I managed to do a lot of really neat things.