Singapore is a very pretty and very clean country, it's very open to tourism and is very accommodating to English speaking guests. One thing that I found very surprising was that shopping malls lined every. Single. Street. Not really a problem for someone who loves to shop, but on vacation I generally don't do a ton a mall shopping because I'm after the culture and history, or local arts of the place I'm visiting. We found it very difficult to find any type of historical center (other than the famous Raffles hotel) and one block near city center that contained the government centers.
One huge mistake that I made was not having a street map available, I feel like I would have really enjoyed some of the other areas of the city like Arab street and little India. Alas, we did take a duck tour and saw some great attractions, including the world famous Singapore flyer!
We did get a chance to visit the Singapore public gardens pictured below. This is a massive public space with gardens, sky-high metal tree structures which have observation decks and one has a restaurant on top. The gardens are completely free to wander through, the observation path is $5 to go up, and the domes which house some pretty interesting plant life are about $28. Overall this was a great stop for us!
Adjacent to the gardens is Marina Bay Sands, a complex of 3 buildings with a deck stretched across the top of them. There is a pool, restaurant and bar, and sun deck up there. It's a very interesting structure to say the least....
We also visited Raffles hotel to taste test the Singapore sling, but I don't really think anyone that tried it actually enjoyed it.
A few things we did learn about Singapore include that the perception of Singapore as a very strict country where you will get caned for chewing gum is very much false! Rules have been relaxing for years, gum is not confiscated at customs, and lots of people have just started looking the other way when it comes to those hard line "rules" being broken.
Final impressions of Singapore - glad we visited, enjoyed our time here, may consider coming back for a stop over for a few nights if we found ourselves back in the area (and we WILL be back in the area!). But we probably wouldn't go out of our way to make this a vacation destination in the future.
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