Sing-land Trip Part 1: Singapore

sorry for the delay (read the previous post for more on that) but here is the first half-ish of our awesome trip to Singapore and Thailand.

on thursday we left mysore immediately after our big comprehensive test that marked the end of our training, more or less (we managed to talk to the right people, who let us blow off a couple of days of our worthless 'soft skills' training crap). our flight out of india was scheduled for midnight, so after the 4-hour bus ride to the Bairport, 4-hour flight to Bangkok, and 2.5-hour flight to Singapore, we woke up to find ourselves in Singapore (funny how that works out). there were 10 of us on the trip: Jon, Ryan, Steve, Paul, Sean (who is from perdue, gross; he also just left the company), Rafal (who is Polish with a Green Card, which lead to a whole other set of fun little problems), Compton, Tom, Gagen, and myself.

we checked into the Oxford Hotel, a pretty crappy, expensive little hotel in the city (which i think is fun to say, because it implies that the country of Singapore is more than a true city-state). my first impression of the city: it's pretty freaking awesome. after coming from india, where people literally relieve themselves (in whatever way necessary) on the side of the road, not to mention their great affinity for littering whenever and wherever possible, Singapore struck us all as being quite possibly the cleanest city any of us has ever seen. this is possibly because of the severe laws of the land (which include the death penalty, no exception, for smuggling drugs, and canings for littering; chewing gum is also illegal and one of the guys had his eclipse confiscated by customs). after that, we wandered around downtown for a bit.

we did some shopping at a couple of malls and the massive open-air market near our hotel, then ate some delicious duck for lunch. we also saw a true Asian arcade, which was pretty impressive. it was also such a novel experience being in a country where people not only had the ability to make change, but did so without complaining or trying to refuse our business (again, india is stupid).

for dinner we went to a nice little sushi bar, which had a computer screen at every table. customers sit down, look at the menu, then order their food on the computers. after an incredibly short period of time, the food is brought out and the reciepts for the most recent batch of food are placed in a box at the table; at the end, you request a cashier come over to your table so you can pay. the whole experience was incredibly efficient. finally, we wandered over to a local tourist spot and had a few really expensive drinks ('expensive' as in 'close to american prices'). end day 1.

for day 2, we kind of slept in a lot; the sleep was nice, and quite necessary after the traveling nightmare of the day(s) before, but it's still a bummer to sleep that late on a sight-seeing trip like this one was. anywho, we spent most of the day on the little (man-made) tourist island resort thingy called Sentosa Island, just south of 'mainland' Singapore. we took a cable car ride to the island, went up in a fake little tower thing, saw that almost half of the island is under construction for a big new resort / casino / universal studios monstrosity, saw the aquarium, and got to see a dolphin show (with pink dolphins, which was pretty cool).

while we were in the aquarium, Rafal had to go visit the polish embassy and get a temporary passport, because his passport expired before his indian visa did, and apparently Singapore had a problem with that. none of us were surprised in the least to discover that India had no problem with this whatsoever, or that Indian officials did not even notice this.

after feeling like tourists for a while, we went back to the open-air street market and bought some more souvineers. then, for dinner, we ate at the Hard Rock Cafe (quite possibly my favorite franchise ever, now). i had a bacon cheeseburger, just like every other time i have gone to a Hard Rock in a foreign country. there was a really cool band there doing covers of all sorts of songs for charity (a big breast cancer thing, i think) . . . . like bon jovi, deep purple, nickelback, and a dozen others. end day 2.

day 3 started with us visiting the Fountain of Wealth, which is apparently the biggest fountain in the world (too bad it wasn't on when we went, but it was still pretty neat). this was on our way to the airport for our flight back to Bangkok, Thailand.

the second half of the trip will follow shortly.