A Whirlwind 8 hours in Singapore

We arrived in Singapore from Phuket on Tiger Airways around noon, left our bags at the left luggage counter and headed out to explore Singapore. We planned on trying to catch a midnight flight home that night, and if that didn’t work, we were aiming for flights that left Singapore at 6am the next morning. Paying for a hotel room in Singapore didn’t make sense. By the time we left the airport, we had eight hours to explore the city. We bought day passes for the train with unlimited rides for 10 Singapore Dollars. There was also a $10 deposit with each day pass so we had $20 returned to us when we turned in the passes at the end of the day. 

Chinatown

Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Chinatown

The trains are air-conditioned, easy to navigate and very clean. Chinatown was our first stop. We wandered around and ate lunch at a hawker center nearby. Hawker centers are essentially open air food courts with many different food stalls selling delicious, inexpensive food and they're all over Singapore. An hour or so later we stopped for some tea/coffee in order to take cover during a late afternoon rain storm and then headed back to the train to get to Little India. Singapore is a very clean, gorgeous city. There are many beautiful Islamic mosques, Buddhist temples, Hindu temples and Christian churches throughout Singapore, and the diversity adds to the magnificence of the city. 

Hawker center near Chinatown

Hindu Temple

The architecture in Singapore is impressive. This is the LaSalle College of the Arts.

The Little India neighborhood is colorful, and we enjoyed walking around there before making the long walk to the Colonial district. We didn’t make the “must-do” stop at the famous Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling. We did take a picture in front of it pretending to drink one, and we decided that was good enough and $40 cheaper, too. It was hot in Singapore. The temperature may have even been hotter than Bangkok, but there is a ton of green space in the city and plenty of shade, so it felt 20 degrees cooler. Much of the reason Singapore is so clean has to do with the huge penalties assessed for littering/vandalism. Also, it is very expensive to purchase the rights to own a car, so traffic isn’t a problem. These things make Singapore an amazing place to visit, but it would be difficult to adjust to living there. 

Little India

The famous Raffles Hotel

We took the train back to the airport around 9pm. We’d planned on using the showers that can be rented inside of security and maybe even renting a bed for a few hours if we were going to end up on the 6am flight. That didn’t exactly work out as we planned, and we spent a terrible night in the Singapore airport on the outside of security (nothing close to the nice amenities that the airport has to offer inside security). We  had to frantically figure out how we were going to get home. We did make it on one of the 6am flights and through another city in Asia before eventually getting back to the U.S. I think we went more than 70 hours without showers or beds, so even though it was a fantastic trip, we had never been so happy to be home.