On my second full day in Singapore, I was mostly concerned with something that I’m often mostly concerned with, food. In speaking with my friends the night before, I learned some stuff about the hawking stations in Singapore. I don’t know if what I learned was true, but I heard that there used to be stalls on the streets selling food all over town and the city wanted to get them off the street but not put them out of business. The solution was to build these centers and move the food stores into those.
There are a couple of huge hawking centers in Chinatown and I decided that I’d walk to Chinatown and get some food. The weather was overcast, with occasional sprinkles, but at least that kept the temperature down, so it wasn’t a bad walk, even though it was about 45 minutes each way. On the way, I passed some temples and, of course, malls, but the walk wasn’t particularly interesting.
Once I got to Chinatown, I started looking for the Maxwell Road Food Centre. At Maxwell Road, there are over 100 food stalls selling almost every type of Asian food imaginable. There were several sticky rice places, and some of them quite busy, but I wasn’t in the mood for sticky rice. Instead, I found another place that looked pretty busy (I heard that the busier the place, the better the food would be) and ordered spicy duck noodle soup. I love spicy Asian food and this was the spiciest that I had eaten since I was in southern China, so I was very happy about it. Overall, I definitely think that it was worth the walk.
After lunch, I walked around a little bit and walked to a market nearby my hotel to get some souvenirs. I also went to Bugis Street to use the free wifi. My only other goal of the day, however, was to head to the zoo to see the Night Safari.
The Night Safari in Singapore isn’t so much a safari as it is a combination floor show and tram ride around the zoo in the dark. I left from my hotel around 6:30 and it unexpectedly took me about two hours to get to the Night Safari, the entrance of which is next door to the Singapore Zoo. I had to transfer once I got onto the subway and then take a 45-minute bus ride from the final subway stop to the Night Safari. (Note: Since my iPhone doesn’t have a flash, I have no good pictures of the Night Safari so all of my pictures are from earlier in the day.)
Once I arrived at the Night Safari, I waited for about 20-minutes for a show featuring lots of the nocturnal animals. The highlight of the show was listening to the MC tell people in about a dozen different languages not to use flash photography during the show. Of course, some people still did.
After the show, I went to the tram for the 30-minute ride around the park to see all of the night animals. Of course, we saw all of the usual suspects – elephants, tigers, lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, etc. The whole trip is in the rain forest, so we probably were surrounded by unbelievable beauty, but of course it was night so it was difficult to make out much of the beauty. All-in-all, it wasn’t a bad trip, but in retrospect, I probably would have been better off if I had just gone in the daylight and see the Singapore Zoo that way.
It took another hour-and-a-half to get back to my hotel and by this time it was getting kind of late so I called it an evening. The next day was chili crab and durian day and we’ll get into that in the next post.
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