Cultural Activities

We are officially on day 7 of our adventure.  As we pointed out in or previous post, the national pastime of Singapore is shopping & eating, and not to brag, but at this point we are experts.  In order to not bore you with shopping stories, we will stick to eating and exploring in this post.  Although it is worth pointing out the avg. temperature in Singapore is 80 degrees, yet all the stores have their winter collections out, no joke, they are selling sweaters and wool coats in 80 degree weather.

Over the past few days we have done some more exploring of Singapore, specifically their very culturally diverse neighborhoods and cuisine in Chinatown and Little India.  On Saturday, we participated in the Chinese New Year kick-off parade and ate an enormous amount of soup dumplings.

These people are really taking the year of the rabbit seriously and celebrating for an entire month with parades, pop-up markets and musical productions.

After we had our Chinese fill, we headed to Little India.

It was a great experience as it really seemed like being in India even right down to the smell.  For dinner we stopped a recommended restaurant, Andhra Curry, where AB had an awesome Chicken Tikki Masala and ML had some Briani with Naan.

Finally, we will end this post with a lesson we learned in China, but have since begun to appreciate here in Singapore-- when it suits Asian governments and their people, they have a way of, lets call it, bending the truth.  Here we have experienced two instances, which are quite funny.  On Sunday, we visited an island to the south of Singapore called Sentosa.  It was originally a base for the British when they fought the Japanese in WWII, then became an industrial wasteland, until it was redeveloped into a very contrived "beach" resort.  Think Singapore Disneyland.  The two funniest parts were the "MerLion"  a mythical creature created by the tourism board in the 70's to draw tourists, but now referred to as the national symbol of Singapore dating back hundreds of years.

Second, there is a small island accessible via chainbridge, which they claim as the "Southernmost Point of Asia Continent", however, 1) Indonesia, more specifically Pamana Island, is geographically the southernmost point of the Asian continent, 2) if they really meant the southernmost point in the Asian land mass and not Asian continent this would be Tanjung Piai, Johor, Malaysia, and finally, AB's favorite, 3) Singapore is an island and is not considered part of mainland Asia.