Walking in the rain… in a very small world! (Wednesday)

First stop today was Orchard Road- Singapore’s shopping Mecca. We visited several of the malls and felt slightly overwhelmed by the sheer volume- those puppies are BIG! We did manage to spend about half and hour test driving massage chairs… mmmmmm….

When we set out today, I declared that we HAD to visit the Raffles Hotel. Unfortunately, the rain set in about the time we were getting our pressure points massaged and so by the time we emerged into daylight, it was hosing down. Anyway, determined I was, so off we went. We arrived at the hotel dripping wet and a bit cranky and decided to have a drink in the famed LongBar. It’s fabulously reminiscent and you can just imagine Kipling sipping away on a Singapore Sling. However, in an effort to steer away all but the most determined, the drinks are the price of a reasonable meal. To add to the insult, the bar also adds a 10% ‘service charge’ and 7% gst to the bill at the end, making the total for one beer and one juice s$37. In response, Marty and I set about eating our own body weight of the ‘complementary’ peanuts. Fabulously, the bar staff simply sweet the piles of peanut shells onto the floor when you are done at the table…

Meanwhile, the rain continued. Our final stop for the day was the IT Mall. Six stories of IT shops with all sorts of fancy gadgets and widgets just calling out to us. Yikes. Fortunately for my bank account, by this time my feet were sore, I had been damp for several hours and the peanuts were beginning to rattle. And in all truthfulness, there was very little that you couldn’t get at Noel Leeming, anyway.

We had planned to go to the Night Safari tonight but not feeling inspired by the inclement weather, decided to hunker down for the night and see if the skies cleared. However, just as we were settling in, the phone rang and lo, it was Liz- an old friend from Christchurch and Dunedin days! She, hubbie Mark and their brood now live in Singapore and Liz saw a message about our travels on that great global stalker machine, Facebook. She found the blog, rang the hotel and before you could say small, small world, we were sitting in their condo in S’pore. In a case of excellent good luck, we were able to catch a bus to Liz and Mark’s place from directly outside our hotel. Go Singapore! It was fab to catch up with Mark and Liz and we felt very glad of our decision to skip the safari.

POSTSCIPT
Just to prove that it is, indeed a smaller world than I care to ponder on, the message that prompted Liz to track us down was from Keren, another Christchurch and Dunedin personage whom Liz and Mark also know. She now lives in Fiji but sent us a message from Singapore Airport as she flew out- the day after we arrived.