Tourist Delights, Part One of Many

Last week was the first ‘free’ weekend for us – both boys healthy, all shopping done, and the weather forecast was decent, too. So, to get started with our Singaporean bucket list (there’s only so much you can do in four months), we went to the Botanic Gardens. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, they should be good, right? 

Let me get this out of the way: you’ll have to get used to getting all the news one or two weeks after the fact. It’s amazing what two kids can do to the amount of spare time you have. Hint: there are many zeros in that number. So. Back to the Gardens.

These boxes are located at all the entry points into the gardens. Singaporeans, apparently, are nice enough to return their park maps in a usable state. Imagine how that box would probably look after a couple of hours in other countries. All the things teenagers or drunk adults would do, just to have a laugh. So many things come to mind… Here? Works! (Europeans that we are, we knocked ours around so much that we didn’t dare return it at the end. Let’s pretend the kids played with it, shall we?)

However, even here there is this very special brand of people who will stand next to a perfectly readable sign (multiple languages and internationally unmistakable iconography) that says not to feed the animals, and then go ahead and feed the animals. This aggravated us to no end, and we left a bunch of turtles and black swans to their fate, just so we wouldn’t have to murder anyone.

Our first stop was the Jacob Ballas Children’s Garden. It is a fenced-in area that is actually only accessible for people with kids. How nice! Suddenly, we’re not the annoying people with the screaming, stinking baggage in tow; instead, we’re the VIPs now. Move over, entitled single rich person! The Children’s Garden has its nice spots, it’s well-structured and it feels totally okay to let your 1-year-old wander off on his own. But it wasn’t the massive hit we’d hoped for, so after exploring it for a bit, we went for a quick lunch, marveled at all the consideration Singaporeans put even into public restrooms, watched a kid almost step on a big-ass reptile, and moved on. (Oh, you want to know more about the reptile? It was only about one-and-a-half meters long and hence very easy to overlook; also, the animal was faster to notice the danger, but the kid might just have stained his underpants a tiny wee bit when he finally noticed what was happening. I would have.)

We were hit by our first tropical rainstorm of the day, then, and while we were still in the transition phase between “How nice, we’re finally cooling off a bit” and “Oh man, we’re getting reeeeally wet, here!” (after roughly 8 seconds), we were picked up by a service buggy and brought straight to a nice, bright, large sheltered area. Albert and Kaspar were delighted by the ride in the little car (“Wroom!”) (although it was a completely silent electric car), we were kind of happy to avoid the worst of the storm, and the service buggy zoomed off to rescue other people surprised by the elements. Because that’s, it turns out, what the service buggy does. What a nice job! “Selfless Savior of People (who are unable to properly prepare for or simply take the inconvenience of the weather conditions that are perfectly predictable and recurring every single day)”.

Coffee time came and went, and we decided to take a look at the ‘National Orchid Garden’ before heading home. Along the way: chicken and roosters that can fly! Crowds with selfie-sticks! Another tropical rainstorm! Palm trees! Colorful weird plants! Figs that grow out of tree trunks! A personally significant clock! A nap! So let’s have some pictures.

The Orchid Garden, then, costs a reasonable 5S$ admission fee. We paid it, walked through the thing in the third tropical rainstorm, and it was… flowers? I guess? Here’s the thing about flowers: they’re flowers. They don’t move much. They don’t do interesting things (even though a lot of weird people do VERY interesting things AROUND them). They might be pretty, but they’re usually prettier in photos on the internet. (You also find funny weird people and their embarrassing actions there.) So, yeah. We came. We looked. We left the place philosophizing about the exchange rate EUR <-> SGD. At least we contributed to the ongoing cultivation of famous Orchids. And this guy, who was way more interesting than all of them:

We made our way back to the MRT (which is the local subway system), where a small army of eager people wiped off the hand-rails along the stairs and cleaned the metallic surfaces on the escalators’ sides. You know. Keep ’em shiny. This is also not the first time I’ve seen them in my extensive commuting experience of two weeks. These Singaporeans sure do like their city clean. (Happy to report: it is!) (Devastated to report: I took a Wild West Gunslinger-style waist-shot of one of the eager service persons, but I seem to suck at that and the photo is unusable. It’s a good thing gunslinger showdowns at high noon are a thing of the past!)

Back at the apartment, the boys dropped dead into their beds an hour earlier than usual, which is why there was a blog the same evening. They didn’t do that since, which is why, so far, there weren’t any photos to accompany it. But once we’ve posted up our backlog of pictures and little curiosities, findings and opinions, we’ll hopefully get to a point where we can actually keep you up to date in a more timely fashion. There’s always hope…

So long!