Not too surprisingly we slept like logs on our first night in the hotel. Breakfast was the usual buffet-style, with a huge range of different types of food – some western and several completely different asian styles. These included a couple of curries. Val says there’s lots of stuff laid out that she’d love to eat but not at breakfast, and I agree with her.
After that it was time for some practicalities. We needed to explore the local area and get a pass for the MRT, Singapore’s excellent underground system. On previous visits I’d bought a 3-day Tourist Pass for the MRT. This costs 30 Singapore Dollars (S$) of which S$10 is a deposit for the pass and S$20 is for three days’ of rides. Then it expires and you have to buy another one. You can hand in the first one and get the deposit back or, if you’re buying another one, use it for that one. Then when you leave you’ve got to hand the pass in to get your deposit back, and that’s a problem. The Tourist passes are only sold or refunded from a small number of MRT stations and often at unhelpful hours. To be fair, the station at Changi is one of them, but my recollection is that it’s a goodly walk from the terminals. If you’ve gone to the airport in a taxi then it’s a faff to go to the MRT station just to get your S$10 back (although that might pay for a coffee in the terminal).
All of the above is a long-winded explanation as to why I decided this time to get the pay-as-you-go pass EZ-Link pass instead. This costs S$10 from MRT stations or convenience stores, and of that amount S$5 is the (non-refundable) cost of the pass and S$5 is the initial stored value. Additional value can be added via either cash or cards at any MRT station. So that’s what we did.
Armed with our MRT passes we went for a walk around three sides of Marina Bay. This is the heart of the ‘public’ city and includes a couple of Singapore’s iconic sights (yes, I know, but this time it’s justified) – the Marina Bay Sands development (the hotel towers, the Art/Science Museum, and a mall), and the MerLion (the symbol of Singapore). There’s a walkway round the Bay. So we took the MRT to Bay Front, from where we walked through the ‘Shoppes at Marina Bay’ shopping mall – seriously high-end, with all the luxury brands you can think of. It also has a food court (like all Singapore malls) where we were bold and drank ‘kopi’ – the Singapore version of coffee. Basic kopi (Val’s choice) has coffee, sugar and evaporated milk while kopi-c (my choice) has coffee and condensed milk. It’s not what we normally think of as coffee, but was surprisingly tasty, though sweet. Standard western coffee is available here and there but at about twice the price of kopi. We continued the walk and ended up at the Merlion – the symbol of Singapore. You have to do it once, along with everyone else. For lunch we wimped out and went to Burger King; then we went back to the hotel, explored, and having found the outdoor pool and bar, sat outside drinking sparkling mineral water.
Late in the afternoon we explored a bit locally and visited the ‘Fountain of Wealth’. Visiting it and thinking the right thoughts is supposed to help increase your wealth, but with the prices here I don’t think it’s working….
For dinner that night we explored the local area and found a hawker centre not too far away where we each had a curry – butter chicken and naan. I was going to have chick tikka + naan, but it was ‘off’ – I got the feeling that the only dish that was ‘on’ was the butter chicken. However it was very fresh and very tasty. Basically this was a small shack (alongside a number of others) serving a limited range of dishes, cooked to order. Wonderful stuff. The meals cost us S$12 each, plus S$4 for a small glass of beer, which we shared (I didn’t know how large the glass would be until I’d got it) – S$28 altogether.
After that we took ourselves to Clarke Quay, a popular spot on the river where we found a bar and had two half-litres of Tiger beer. Readers, they cost S$33 – more than the meal! I suspect that anything on the riverside costs a fortune. Then back to the hotel feeling replete and wanting our sleep.