Saturday, January 3, 2009
















Well, we have just a few more hours in Singapore! Everyone is finishing up their shopping, gathering their last souvenirs and spending their Singapore dollars!
Yesterday's tour took us to a Balinese neighborhood with a beautiful Mosque, a hundreds-year old Chineses temple, a Gem Factory (gorgeous stuff, by the way!) and a cruise along the Singapore River. After the tour, dinner was along the waterfront watching all the folks enjoying the lovely evening. Our attempts at visiting Chinatown for the Lunar New Year Lighting Festival proved to be impossible! Roads were jammed and closed to traffic, streets were mobbed so we all decided to head back to the 38th floor of our hotel and enjoy the city sights by night with a cold drink in our hands!
Today we visited Sentosa Island which is a 15 minute taxi/bus/tram ride from the center of the city. We went up in the Sky Tower to look at the city from all angles and saw the massive construction going on below us where Resorts World is building a mega casino resort on the Island. According to yesterday's river guide, it's unlucky to only build ONE casino so they are also building a new hotel/casino on the opposite side of the river as well. Everywhere you look you see construction and cranes. The city population right now is 4.8 million in 73 square miles! Everyone lives in multi-generational high-rise apartment/condo towers but the city is green as well. There are flowers and parks everywhere.
We also visited the Underwater World at Sentosa and saw a few critters that we missed in our diving at Sipadan. I've enclosed a shot of a tiny, tiny, tiny mimic octopus! They also have leafy & weedy sea dragons, leopard sharks, guitar sharks, lots of different rays and eels...we also saw a pair of harlequin shrimp, so we had fun at the aquarium!
After an aerial tram ride back from the island, we checked in with Singapore Air for our return flight later tonight and we're back at the hotel resting before we finish packing and check-out! Our flight leaves Singapore just before midnight tonight so we're all planning on sleeping our way west towards Frankfort & New York, with a late Monday morning arrival in New York...I'll be back in the office bright and early Tuesday morning!

That's all for now....see you all soon!

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