A bit of a slow start, but that seems to be a feature these days. I was eventually driven out of bed by a message from the hotel asking if I wanted my room tidied up today, so I had to get all of the crap I was storing next to my bed out of the way for that to happen.
I’m sleeping better, it seems. Maybe I’m getting used to the heat, but maybe the trick of completely closing the capsule blind, which causes the fabric to balloon outward in an amusing manner from the pressure of the air conditioning, also cuts down on the chilling draft? I’d found that at around 5am, the capsule was in a state of “too cold outside of duvet, to hot under it”, but that was with the blind open an inch or so at the bottom.
Something to mention is that there are people turning up in the hostel/hotel because their Bali flights were diverted or cancelled, so there are a lot of exhausted people trying to figure out flight plans, and others trying to figure out a whirlwind Singapore itinerary.
Chinatown, with clouds looming.
Turns out that the bowl waterfall thing is more impressive when they pump extra water into it.
I decided that I really did need an umbrella or something before I went into the gardens again, so I eventually¹ found a pharmacy in the mall next to the Marina Bay Sands, & got a nice orange umbrella. I’d looked for one on the way here, but wasn’t overly impressed with the ones I found in Chinatown. Got to say, I think the first rule of bargain hunting in Chinatown might be to leave Chinatown.
¹ I tried looking it up on a printed mall map, after Google Maps was unable to help, and found it was in the smallest font imaginable.
By the time I’d done the umbrella thing, then got some lunch from a mall food court with district Hawker Culture vibes, or at least as close as I’m likely to get to Hawker Culture, because I was suddenly hungry, the rain was threatening to arrive, so I got a coffee & found a good location to watch it roll in.
A family braved the rain to get pictures with the Ponyo statue.
I actually resent seeing this & getting the pun.
I wandered through the gardens again along the waterfront, and it immediately started raining heavily, so I wandered to somewhere a bit more scenic in the rain, and wound up in the middle of the gardens, where a bunch of art seems to live.
Supertree from below; Those things aren’t easy to photograph, because they’re really big.
Did the Cloud Forest … Thing. It’s an enclosed biosphere replicating a cloud forest, hence the name, and it was awesome.
The post pretty much devolves into pictures at this point.
Wollemi Pine, just hanging out.
I’m sure that, at some point, somebody has balanced a fake Guinness on the beak.
A bit hard to tell, but there’s a sculpture there. It’s not just a bunch of branches.
The floor ‘responded’ to footsteps with ripples in the projected water, and if you stepped on certain bits it’d bring up a plant image from swirly lights. Kids were having great fun with it.
So was I.
Putting this in for some context & scale reference.
Some of the flowers were so small that they had magnifying glasses so that you can see them.
Again, a bit hard to see, but there’s a big ant sculpture there.
This is what the area I was sheltering in yesterday looks like without all the rain & cowering.
The bridge out passes through the Marina Bay Sands hotel. It’s a ridiculous building from the outside, but probably odder from the inside, when you see that it’s three sets of two buildings, each one hotel room thick, slouching into each other.
Christmas decorations at the mall.
