Singapore = hot

February 16th 2015 - Singapore

We landed about 2pm on the 15th and our friend Chieh kindly picked us up and dropped us at our hostel. Chieh studied medicine with us at UCL and moved back to Singapore to continue his training afterwards. 

We are staying at Tree In Hostel: http://www.treeinlodge.com/

The people who run the hostel are really friendly and have loads of advice on where to go and what to see - most of this involves food recommendations. Singaporians love their food!

We were really exhausted when we got to the hostel so just slept. We are currently still jet-lagged 5 days later and are running out of patience!!

On the 16th we decided to explore the city on foot. Singapore is a lot hotter than we thought it was going to be. We ended up walking ~10 miles taking in all the sights!!

We first headed to Chinatown which was preparing for Chinese New Year.

The streets had been decorated with gold coins hanging from the trees and a parade of goats (the new year is the year of the goat) running down the middle of the road, both of which lit up at night.

We then headed across the river to Raffles, and then on to Orchard Road, which is the main shopping area and is lined with loads of designer shops - we have concluded that Singaporians are pretty rich!

That night Chieh took us out for dinner and we tried some Singaporian delicacies such as chilli crab (Chieh asked them to tone down the spice level and it was still pretty hot!), white pepper crab, clams, duck and bean curd. The food was delicious and we felt very full, which only exacerbated the tiredness. 

We then went to a bar called Level 33 which is on a floor high up one of the business buildings in the business district. It gave us incredible views of the Singapore skyline at night.

We went home very tired, but again stupid jetlag raised it's ugly head and we couldn't get to sleep until about 4am. Fantastic first day though.