We booked the two day tour of the city and headed out. This is a picture of the entrance to the presidential palace. The tour guide said that you cannot see the palace because there is a nine hole golf course that you must go through first.
This is the Singapore Flyer. The worlds tallest ferris wheel. Each of those cars holds around 30 people!
Another view of the Flyer, farther away.
This is the theatre. It consists of two sphere like this. The local people think it looks like a durian fruit.
This is one of the Parliament buildings
This is one of the flats that the residents live in. They are government subsidized housing. This is the cheapest form of housing in the entire country and the minimum to purchase these is around $80,000! I don't see how people afford to live in Singapore. If you look closely, you can see bamboo poles sticking out from underneath the windows. This is where they hand their clothes to dry after washing them.
This is the U.S. Embassy. I guess it is always good to know where it is when in another country.
This is a thieves market. It is only called that because of the type of people that used to be at these type markets.
This is a hawker center. Years ago, the government decided it wanted to have better control of the street vendors in the country. So they wouldn't allow them to sell things on the streets anymore and instead, these food vendors have set up at centers all over the city. Now, they are all given ratings (like our health food scores) from A to E (I think) with A being the best. We didn't get to stop and eat at one unfortunately.
A mosque. (Which later in our trip, would become the normal part of the landscape, everywhere we went.)
This was the Civilian War Memorial dedicated to the civilians that lost their lives in WWII. It is four pillars which represent the four races: Malaysians, Chinese, Indians, and minorities.
This is not the best picture, but on the left is the old building where the court system operated out of. On the right is the top of the new building that they use. (another building is obstructing the view of the whole thing) It looks like a spaceship! To me this represents Singapore going more and more to the modern look, while trying to get further and further away from the British look. As of right now, the old building is empty, but they are planning on putting a museum in there.
The old courts building closer up.
A Buddhist temple.
This is an area of many restaurants and night life known as Clarke Quay, pronounced "Key". I just think the huge umbrella things are cool!
Everywhere we went, there was greenery and flowers. So beautiful!
Singapore has a problem with running out of space, so much so, that they have begun creating more land by dumping dirt into the sea. The picture below is of the base of two skyscrapers that are literally less than one foot apart. You can kind of tell by looking at the motorcycle in front of them.
This is the stadium where they have a lot of sporting events. The playing surface is floating on the water!
While on a boat tour of the city
A view of Singapore
We had a wonderful day!
This is the U.S. Embassy. I guess it is always good to know where it is when in another country.
This is a thieves market. It is only called that because of the type of people that used to be at these type markets.
This is a hawker center. Years ago, the government decided it wanted to have better control of the street vendors in the country. So they wouldn't allow them to sell things on the streets anymore and instead, these food vendors have set up at centers all over the city. Now, they are all given ratings (like our health food scores) from A to E (I think) with A being the best. We didn't get to stop and eat at one unfortunately.
A mosque. (Which later in our trip, would become the normal part of the landscape, everywhere we went.)
This was the Civilian War Memorial dedicated to the civilians that lost their lives in WWII. It is four pillars which represent the four races: Malaysians, Chinese, Indians, and minorities.
This is not the best picture, but on the left is the old building where the court system operated out of. On the right is the top of the new building that they use. (another building is obstructing the view of the whole thing) It looks like a spaceship! To me this represents Singapore going more and more to the modern look, while trying to get further and further away from the British look. As of right now, the old building is empty, but they are planning on putting a museum in there.
The old courts building closer up.
A Buddhist temple.
This is an area of many restaurants and night life known as Clarke Quay, pronounced "Key". I just think the huge umbrella things are cool!
Everywhere we went, there was greenery and flowers. So beautiful!
Singapore has a problem with running out of space, so much so, that they have begun creating more land by dumping dirt into the sea. The picture below is of the base of two skyscrapers that are literally less than one foot apart. You can kind of tell by looking at the motorcycle in front of them.
This is the stadium where they have a lot of sporting events. The playing surface is floating on the water!
While on a boat tour of the city
A view of Singapore
We had a wonderful day!
We decided to spend the day just walking around and exploring the city. I was amazed by the huge trees that were in the middle of downtown. Here is just an example of one of them.
We enjoyed exploring all around our hotel and even found the visitor's center. We asked the lady working there where she recommended 
Here was some cooks actually rolling out the dough to make the dumplings. They worked extremely fast.
Singapore is a very modern city, and everywhere you look, they are building bigger, better, and taller things. Brent and I 
That night we went to the Night Safari. You get to take a tram ride through a 
Then they performed with fire. Each time it flashed, it was 
We had a great time and it was a nice end to our first day in Singapore.
The Memphis airport was pretty nice, and Brent and I got to enjoy Back Yard Burger (which they don't have in Montgomery anymore) for breakfast! We then flew on to Minneapolis. There were some very low lying clouds, and when we finally 
We had a few hours to kill while at the Minneapolis airport, so we went to Chili's and kept getting tickled listening to 
Over Alaska
We finally made it after twelve hours to Tokyo. I think Brent and I were so dazed that we didn't know what time or even day it was. We found out that it was around 5:00 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. I think we both fell asleep waiting on the flight to Singapore. Luckily the flight wasn't full, so Brent moved to the set of seats behind me so that we could spread out for the 8 hour flight. (this was blurry, but I had to include it)
We arrived in Singapore at 2:00 early Wednesday morning. I got to experience my first taxi ride on the way to the hotel, for a long awaited 
