Well that was a much less exciting day than yesterday. Mercifully there was no lightning, no thunder, no fizziness over our heads and, indeed, virtually no rain. No rain at all while we were outside.
Today we did Orchard Road. I had been looking to see if there was a Build A Bear Workshop in Singapore and if so, where. There are in fact three and one was in a shopping mall in Orchard Road. We are staying quite close to the bottom of Orchard Road and, it being a nice day, we decided to go for a wander. On the way we called into a couple of malls for a look see. We passed the Thai embassy and a heavily guarded complex that turns out to be the official residence of the Singaporean President (though no presidents actually live there). We found the Plaza Singapura, where the Build A Bear shop is and had a potter around. And then we repaired to a real street food area for a small spot of lunch.
Right. What to do now? We have Hippo bus passes. Let's do one of the tourist bus tours. So we hopped on the next Hippo bus that came by and off we went for a pleasant hour's drive on the "city" tour. Then we returned to the apartment.
I have a pair of bathers which I bought when we were off to Japan in August 2011. There were no swimming opportunities in Japan I haven't had any occasion to go swimming since. My bathers have remained untroubled by any watery experiences. I don't think they've been wet even once, not even in the washing machine. I brought them with me on this trip because I knew there would be swimming pools in some of the places we were going. Such as here, for example. And 16 months after I bought them, they finally got to have their first swim!!
EVENING
Back when I was first looking at what there might be to do in Singapore, I noticed that there was a zoo. The zoo appeared to have a good reputation. It also, allegedly, has mouse deer. I decided that we had to go and observe these creatures and put the zoo on my list of things to do. It remains on my list of things to do (right at the top!!) . In the event we decided rather than going to the zoo during the day we would go at night and do the night safari. So we booked ourselves onto a tour - largely because that included a tour coach that took us there and back.
I thin we all three have slightly mixed feelings about the night safari. We have all three lived in societies where the training of wild animals for human entertainment (no matter how worthy the cause) is considered to be unacceptable. The animal show that the zoo put on was undoubtedly entertaining, certainly worthy (promoting conservation and environmental issues). We were certainly surprised to find that we had been sitting in seats that concealed a large python in a cavity underneath. But we were very uneasy about watching little otters sorting the recycling and not entirely comfortable watching other animals performing, even if they weren't performing tricks. We enjoyed our "tram" ride around the night zoo, but were anxious about the two male elephants, in their separate enclosures with no obvious things to do - so no toys, no logs to play with, nothing that we could see that was particularly stimulating. On the other hand, We had a fabulous meal in the eating area at a very reasonable cost and really enjoyed our pottering around. But still. Not sure about it. Not sure at all.
The coach, instead of taking us back to Suntec, which is where it had departed from, dropped us off quite close to where we're staying, so we had a very pleasant stroll up part of Orchard Road, able to admire the Christmas lights at night.
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