View of the city from the bus to the airport
Ana bought a huge bowl of rice noodles which we shared (they had a lot more texture and chew than rice noodles I've had before, which was pleasant) and a mango smoothie that was not as good as the last one and for some reason gave me enormous brain freezes.
Better lunch than I expected in the airport
On the flight I amused myself by holding a contest between movies I'd never seen but knew to be bad. I was hoping for the amusing kind of bad. The worst movie would win. I selected Broken Arrow (cheesy 90's action movie with John Travolta) and 2012 (recent disaster schlock) and unfortunately they both turned out to be worse than so-bad-it's-good and into please-make-it-stop territory. I'm going to give Broken Arrow the win but cite 2012 with some kind of lifetime achievement award for largest plot holes*, bad science**, and having several nearly identical escape scenes. In any case, I recommend to any and all to avoid these movies unless possibly you're looking for something to make a drinking game out of.
Anyway, aside from the trauma I inflicted on myself with these movies the rest of the flight and airport experience was pretty uneventful, except that we noticed that Changi Airport in Singapore has a free butterfly garden available to all travelers to relieve stress and so forth. We walked by but didn't go in, and I account that a fairly unusual airport feature, hence the mention.
For our second stay in Singapore we switched from the low-cost hotel we'd used the first time to a room in a pretentious arty hotel that we'd gotten about 50% off on, which still made it the most expensive hotel we stayed in by a significant margin. The hotel was down in the upscale riverside district, which we learned is not particularly close to any major subway stops yet constructed (if we could wait until 2011 or so we'd have been all set) so we did a lot of walking to get ourselves and our luggage from the subway station to the hotel. By the time we actually got there it was getting pretty late at night so we ordered dinner from the expensive-but-not outrageous room service menu, which took a while to arrive but hit the spot.
Artsypants hotel we stayed in
In the morning we got some pictures of the room we were in. This particular hotel, Hotel Gallery, has a lot of standard rooms and then a couple dozen themed and named rooms. We weren't in the upper tier of what they'd be happy to ask you to pay for, but our room did have a name, that being Glasshaus. (the German spelling costs extra) As you can see from the pictures, there was no shortage of glass present. We were in the corner room outlined by yellow.
The next entry will include the Singapore Orchid Gardens and the Singapore Zoo's Night Safari.
And here's a notice that you'll probably only ever see in Singapore, for the road
*Watertight doors dramatically seal characters to their doom, but they're only separated by mesh from a large chamber that spans either side of the watertight doors that are thereby demonstrated to be totally pointless, except the big room doesn't flood because, why, exactly?)
**Fine, there's massive tectonic activity, whatever. That doesn't mean there can even be a tsunami big enough to go all the way across India and then still be high enough to flood the Himalayas. It would have to have been hundreds of miles tall at least and it was clearly shown to be less than half a mile tall at the shoreline based on the skyscrapers! How does a 2,500 foot wave swamp 29,000 foot mountains, let alone cover the intervening distance? Urg!
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