The Land of Merlion

I had my first overseas vacation early this month.. As I boarded the JetStar flight to Singapore early morning of 2nd Feb 2006, I was taking off on my first ever international vacation.. Anurag was in Singapore on an official visit and as his trip was getting planned, we had decided that I will join him for a few days there.. Finally this was the day we had fixed for.. I was taking a Thursday and friday off to join him there for 4 days..

I touched down on Singapore soil on a Thursday morning around 10:30 am.. I had been at the Singapore airport before on my two trips to Japan. But I had never come out of the airport earlier. Anurag was waiting for me at the arrival lounge. We took the skytrin to terminal 2 from where we can get the MRT.. thats the local train service..
Singapore MRT is a well planned transport system. They have a red, blue and a green line..
These lines are partially above and below the ground and intersect each other at specific stations.. The interchange stations are so well designed that the crowd that needs to board a specific line is not affected by the interchange crowd and the crowd for the other line. A specific incident that made us realize the how well they have planned is when we were coming to the airport.. the red line was passing thru the place where we were staying. So we need to switch to the green line to go to the airport.. There are two adjacent stations (City Hall and Raffles place) where both the lines pass through. The MRT announcement system urges passengers going to the airport to interchange at City Hall. Since there is always a huge crowd getting down there for interchange we decided to skip it and interchange at Raffles place so as to avoid the crowd. This we though t will give us a better chance of reducing our chances of having to stand in the train with out baggage. Getting down at the Raffles place, we found that the green line comes on a level above and we took the escalator. Going up the escalator we realized that it doesnt let us get down at the level where the green line comes.It took us directly to the entry level. Thats when we realized how efficiently the crowd is managed. The crowd going on green line will never realize the crowd waitign for red line at the same station..

Coming back to my trip, it was almost an hour journey to the hotel where we were put up ..Hotel York.. This was pretty close to Orchard.. the happening place... The first day was for me to rest and Anurag to work.. In the evening we went to Clarke Quay.. Clrake Quay has a whole lot of restaurants on one side of the river and steps on the other bank.. We waited for Jubin at the steps.. Once she joined us we went for a boat ride in the river from where u can see the Merlion statue. We could also get a good view of the Chinese NewYear firecrackers.. After spending some time at the quay, we went for a walk at the Fort Canning Park. Seems to be a big park with some monuments from the wars. But we decided not spend too muc h time there as it was dark nad none around. We took the MRT and went to Jubin's house where we had dinner.

Friday, we had plans of going to Sentosa Island. Our plan was to start early but Anurag had to work the whole night nad hence we could start only by 1 pm. We took MRT to Harbour and then the cable car from there to Sentosa.