Marina South City Park

For the last 6 days I've been in singpore hanging out with Christie which has been so much fun! For our first two days, i was quite jet-lagged and pretty lethargic so we mostly just slept in and went shopping. The singapore shopping experience was a little mixed, it was good fun to wander around the crazy big malls and check out all the cool stuff but I struggled to find much to buy because they don't really stock things in my size. We also found it pretty hard to get from mall to mall because the streets don't have any crosswalks, you have to use underground tunnels intead. We found trying to navigate the tunnels so disorientating and half the time we would walk through only to find ourselves further down the street on the same side of the road still, argh. The highlight of shopping was getting kaya toast from the food court. Kaya is a Singaporean sweet coconut jam type spread which tastes soo good, it was so amazing we bought some jars to bring back and have in Perth but unfortunately they got taken off us at airport security.

We stayed at the shangri-la hotel which was really fancy. Every night they provided bottomless champagne and cocktails as well as some really tasty canapes which all came free with our super expensive room. The problem was that in order to access the drinks you need to sit in the bar/dining area but it had a dress code and during the first day and a half we kept getting turned away for not being "business and smart elegant" enough. We were both super bothered by this because neither of us packed nice clothes so on the second night we went all out: I washed my cons (ruined a few of the hotels hand towels in the process), ironed a bunch of my clothes and then we tried on a bunch of stuff for each other until we felt we looked good enough. We were properly nervous walking up to the waiter but to our relief we got let in. We stayed at the bar knocking back champagnes for several hours until they closed. We were planning on going out but ended up just going up to our room and playing some music, it was mint.

The next day we ventured out further into the city to have a look at the Marina Bay sands boat hotel and the big metal trees at gardens by the bay. We didn't go up to the bar at the top of the boat hotel coz we were mostly keen on swimming in the pool up there but learned you can't unless youre a guest, it was still cool to see the building tho. The gardens were also really cool, we did the treetop walk and then went to the flower dome and the cloud dome. The cloud dome was my favourite, it had a huge waterfall in there and was pretty much just a gigantic pillar completely covered in really lush green plants and vibrant flowers.

For lunch we went to a Hawkers market which is like a food court with lots of different street food stalls. The street food scene in singapore is bonkers and a few of the stalls in the markets even had michelin stars! I think the fact that food stalls have a chance to get a star here is so awesome because it makes all the vendors so motivated and the quality of everything we tried was amazing. Most of the stores are super specialised and only sell a handful of dishes that they've mastered so you have to walk around the market getting all the food you need from different places. Its pretty obvious to see which stalls have a star because they have wayy bigger lines, that also means there's a bunch of stores trying to copy them by doing the same dishes and having the same shop logo ect.. but despite this, there's still a really diverse and vast selection of foods to try. Going to Hawkers markets kinda became the main thing we did on the trip, we went to a different one every day but the first was the best, we got a michelin hainanese chicken rice, Laksa, dumplings, some fried bananas and a coconut :)). The coconuts were great we got one every time!

Our fancy dinner for the trip was at a place called candlenut, which is a restaurant that serves super amazing peranakan food. It has a michelin star too but like a proper legit one. We got the set menu which meant we got small serves of heaps of things off the menu. I've been trying to think what dish was my favourite but they were all so nice in different ways I genuinely can't decide. It was an amazing night and probably the best food I've ever eaten!

The next day we went to a famous Singaporean hotel called Raffles. I'm not sure why it's famous but it definitely felt very iconic and rich with history. We went because the bar at Raffles invented the Singapore sling cocktail and we wanted to try it. The bar at Raffles was unique in two ways: one was that the floor is covered in peanut shells and two was that they charge $50 for 1 cocktail!!! Im a bit embarrassed to admit we got a little caught up in the hype and got one each anyway, it was better than the hotels version but not mind blowing. The place as a whole was super cool though and I'm very glad we went to check it out. After that we went out for chilli crab at a place called Jumbo which was very tasty. I brought home a bunch of leftovers and then forgot about them which I'm very sad about.

For our last activity we went to the botanical Gardens. We didn't explore the whole place coz we were rushing to have time to go to another Hawkers market before our flights, but the highlight for me was the cool room filled with orchids. The room is meant to simulate the climate of high altitude rainforests, I'm very keen to go to one now because it was all so colourful and lush like you'd expect from a rainforest but also nice and cool instead of hot, wet and sticky. The air in the cool room was so nice it's was like breathing a cool floral soup.

Chrsities flight was a few hours before mine so after i said goodbye i went to check out the waterfall at the airport which was really cool.Read more