Marina Bay Sands: Our First Day in Singapore

by Taylor
for Monday, July 22nd

Today is our first day in Singapore! Singapore is a really nice country. Apparently, Singapore is even richer than the U.S. Everything here is kinda expensive. It is a big turnaround from the other countries we’ve been in since the stuff there was cheap compared to in the U.S. Also I guess another thing that is different is that the water is also drinkable here. We are staying in the dorms at the college that my dad is teaching at. The room we’re staying in isn’t really a dorm though. It has 3 bedrooms, a large living room, a decent sized kitchen, 2.5 bathrooms and a study. My favorite part though is that there is a basketball court right next door. This morning we had to go buy a ball though because they didn’t provide us with one. Oh that reminds me, there is free breakfast here. This morning they were serving pancakes with McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets.  I am already liking Singapore a lot.

In the morning, I played basketball for a bit, Sarah Ann did her physical therapy and Christian read while my mom worked. After lunch, we headed off to Marina Bay with our first stop being Gardens by The Bay. Gardens by the Bay is basically what it sounds like: Gardens by the bay. There are different parts though. The flower dome, the cloud dome-which is supposedly the nicest part, a walkway on top of these giant fake tree things (when you see them in the pictures it will make sense what they are), and later a light show right by the trees. When we got there though we found out that the cloud dome was closed for maintenance. My mom was really disappointed but I didn’t know what it was so I didn’t really know what to think of it. Luckily though the people said that it would open tomorrow so we decided that we would just go back tomorrow.

Here we are by Marina Bay. You can see the famous Marina Bay Sands hotel and ArtScience Museum in the background

inside the Flower Dome

We started off by going into the flower dome. It was a giant air conditioned glass dome with tons of flower growing inside of it. It was pretty neat. I mean there was nothing in particular that stood out. It was just a neat garden. Then after that we had to improvise. Originally we were going to go to the cloud dome then but since it was closed we had to figure something else to do. We decided to go to the Singapore Flyer which is this Ferris wheel thing that was used to do sightseeing. We met my dad and sister there from work. Right when we were about to buy tickets the thing shut down temporarily because of the weather. That was good because if we would’ve bought tickets there was no refund so there was a chance that we wouldn’t have been able to go up and we would’ve lost our money. We decided to eat dinner at the Hawkers or food venders nearby while we waited for it to reopen. The food there was pretty good.  Luckily the thing reopened.

the view over Marina Bay from the Singapore Flyer, a giant ferris wheel

The view from the Flyer was amazing. We could see a large part of Singapore from our height of 164 meters. After the 45 minute ride we went back to Gardens by the Bay to walk on the Sky Walk. The trees were actually pretty cool. They were like mechanical flowers that had real flowers and vines growing up it. Once we got down it was time for the light show. We laid on the grass nearby and looked up as music and colorful lights from the Super Grove trees lit up the night sky.

walking across the skyway at Gardens by the Bay

the Supertrees lit up at night