Marina Bay, Singapore

I took Singapore’s subway, the MRT from my hostel in Chinatown to Bayfront. It let’s you out right inside the famous Marina Bay Sands hotel. Of course, I took the wrong exit though, and ended up across the street in the gardens.

I took the skywalk back across the street to the sands and was greeted by it’s expansive high-end shopping center complete with a canal through the middle of the bottom floor.

Everything in this part of town is architecturally stunning. Large window, lots of natural light and huge arching ceilings.

I walk around for a bit, getting lost in the expansive shopping center until I get hungry and look for the food court. It’s yet another hawker center, with very reasonable prices, especially considering Louis Vuitton is just a few steps away. I order pork satay. I’m not a huge fan of the peanut dipping sauce it comes with, but the meat is delicious.

From there, I go to the Art Science Museum. Definitely the most worth while ticket I bought. I got an all access student ticket for about $23.

The first exhibit is light and projection based and clearly targeted for kids. Butterflies and flowers dance over the floors and walls.

Deeper into the exhibit there are animal coloring sheets. Once you’re done, your animal appears, walking or flying around the floor. It works as an ecosystem… Aligators eat Birds who eat Lizards. If your animal eats enough prey, it multiplies. If you step on the animal, it splatters and dies. There was a create your own hopscotch course, and an absolutely stunning mirrored room where you walk through strings of LEDs programmed to simulate Cosmic events like super novas and gravity waves. It wasn’t clear which phenomenon I was seeing, but it was damn pretty.

Next up was a beautiful exhibit on Richard Feynman. I really enjoyed videos of his lectures. My electromagnetics teacher, Prof. Goldhar has been telling me to watch those for a while. I’ll probably get on that now.

Finally was an art exhibit on minimalism. I’m not a huge art person, I just don’t really understand it, but there were some cool pieces including a maze made of sheets of colored celophane and a motorized sand circle that drew perfectly spaced lines only to erase them 30 seconds later.

The building itself is also gorgeous, I thought it looked like a flower, but according to a plaque, it’s also designed to look like Buddha’s hand. It clearly blends in with the rest of central Singapore’s utopian architecture.

After the art museum I went to the dome gardens In Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay. The flower dome and the cloud forest were full of stunning natural beauty and blessedly air-conditioned. I took way too many flower pictures to put here, but enjoy a selection in the “Flowers by the Bay” post.

Hungry again, I try to find the hawker center. On my way I run into a dozen otters, eating fish in the bay and scurrying across the road into the gardens. A few steps later, two huge blue tongued lizards amble down the road like they’re on an afternoon stroll. There was something jarring about seeing wildlife so confidently coexisting. In this place, that is so pristine and built to run so efficiently for humans, I had forgotten about the animals, but they seemed to be doing just fine.

Finally arriving at the food court, I order sugar cane juice with lemon, and fried dumplings. Pro tip: freshly cooked food is hot! Also, you’re not supposed to shove a dumpling into your mouth all at once. But it smelled so good and I was starving, so can you really blame me?

By this point, the sun is starting to set, so I wander into the gardens to find a good spot to watch the tree light show. The gardens are as beautiful as everything else here, and I take my time finding the tree grotto. I’m about 45 minutes early for the light show, but the place is starting to fill up with people, so I stake out a spot and read my book while I wait.