Singapore

So we had three days, give or take, in Singapore, the capital of Singapore. Unfortunately, the guys I was with were much more interested in seeing the bars of the city rather than the city itself, but I was able to have a good time anyway.

We went to the zoo, which has a nighttime tour, and it was awesome. There were quite a few animals that were awake... You know how you go to the zoo and half the animals are sleeping because they're nocturnal? This tour remedied that. It was really cool. They had this bat aviary thing, and the bats were free-flying, and the walkway went straight through the aviary with no barrier. You could literally reach out and touch a bat if you wanted to. One of the guys tried, and it was this ginormous fruit bat--it was like the thing in The Neverending Story, you could have mounted a trapeze bar on the thing and hang-glided. Hopefully I'll be able to lighten some of the pictures I took enough to make them worth posting.

We also did a lot of walking through the city. I didn't know it, but Singapore is one of the cleanest, most prosperous cities in the world. It looked like any American city, except clean and with lots more Asians.

Like I said, we spent a whole lot of time in bars, and that was not the most pleasant part of the trip. There were a lo-ho-hot of prostitutes, which was no fun for me, and like zero dancing, which is the only really good part about any bar. Anyway.

On the last day, I went with a different group of guys to the Raffles Hotel, which is not only one of the most famous hotels in the world, but also where the Singapore Sling was invented. So we had to go try it at its place of origin. You could get so sloshed off that drink, because it doesn't taste like anything but wedding punch. You'd have a wicked, wicked hangover, though, 'cause it's so sweet and you'd be so dehydrated. So I paid $180 for two rounds for four people. Which is crazy, I know, but you only live once, right? And the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel was like the coolest bar ever--it looked like it was straight out of the days when Singapore was a British Colony. Which, now that I think about it, it probably is.

Those two paragraphs appear to completely contradict each other, I know. I guess it wasn't the bars that turned me off, just the fact that we weren't out seeing anything else.

Oh, we did do this pretty sweet reverse-bungy thing--like a cage attached to a slingshot. They stretch the cables up, up, up these scaffolding looking things, and then let go the cage. Then you rocket waaay up, and bounce on the slings for a few minutes, and then they lower you back to the ground. It was fabulous. And I think the boys got some sweet pictures of that, too.

I'll post them when I can! Right now my boss is being an unprintable word, is about to make me go home. Which seriously gets me, because he just made day crew stay an extra hour and a half, but I can't stay and do this for fifteen minutes. Hypocrite. Whatever, eight months to go.