Friday, June 1, 2012

Touring Singapore with the Parents

My parents spent half of May visiting us. After an extremely long flight, they arrived at 2 am via taxi (luckily B and I are often up at that hour anyway, so it was no problem to wait up for them). We spent the next few days touring around Singapore. We visited:

West Coast Park
Looking at a small pond/wetland area: we saw what I think was a wild otter here!
The ocean, with all the boats and container shipping apparati: I love this view of industry in action
Grammie pointing out boats to R
The National Museum of Singapore
The museum is in a historic colonial building: R is clutching the museum map
Listening to an exhibit on local music: she liked it
Pa and R checking out the puppet exhibit
Fort Canning (where Singapore was established by Sir Stamford Raffles back in 1819)
Parents strolling along: Singapore is so lush!
Huge, ancient tree covered in vines
The Peranakan Museum (I wrote about this ethnic group before)
The museum building is an old Peranakan mansion
Clarke Quay and the surrounding river area (we took a cruise, one of my 101 in 1001 goals)
The weird building is the Marina Bay Sands casino and hotel, built on landfill
R at Clarke Quay, looking at the Singapore River
She loved the boat ride, especially when we saw the Merlion statue (Singapore's mascot)
View of the old shophouses and the modern city, from the boat
Jurong Bird Park
Scarlet ibis: so beautiful
Did you know storks sit like this? It creeps me out.
It's open concept so you can get pretty close to the birds (this one lives in the jungles of New Guinea)
Pa fed the parrots (and got a little scratched due to their food competiveness)
We also took them to our local wet market, hawker centre, and mall to give them a taste of typical Singaporean life. They especially liked getting coffee and masala dosa at the kopitiam near by, and went every morning for breakfast while they were here (they are early risers, while our family doesn't get up before 8 or 9).

Grammie in front of True Blue Cuisine
Food we ate:
--hawker centre southern Indian food (masala dosa, chana masala, various vegetarian relishes and curries)
--European food at Novus Restaurant. We had fettucine bolognese, rosemary fries and a garden salad.
--Peranakan food, at True Blue Cuisine. The ambiance is fantastic (it's decorated with Peranakan antiques). We ate prawn crackers, longan and red date tea (very sweet), banana heart and cucumber salad, sweet potato leaves in candlenut sauce, ngoh hiang (shrimp and pork sausage), ayam buah keluak (chicken stewed with 'black nuts': you scrape out their insides with a tiny little spoon), and pineapple tarts.
--Malaysian food, at Penang Place. They have an absolutely amazing Malaysian buffet (usually I dislike buffets, but this one is exceptional). It was a little weird for my mom, because it's really authentic and thus full of things like salted dried tiny fish in chili and stingray (they do have normal food too), but the rest of us liked it.

On the afternoon of the third day, we left Singapore, bound for Malacca.

2 comments:

  1. I couldn't respond to your comment by email but I wanted to say thank you so much!! Appreciate it and look forward to getting to know you!

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