Whirlwind 48 hours in Singapore

So Singapore was a destination for us of last minute devise. We didn’t realise that over our 7 weeks planned in Indonesia, we’d face visa challenges as you’re only allowed in the country for 30 days at a time. We had a few options to get around this dilemma, but our choice was to quickly fly to Singapore for 48 hours between our travels to the islands of Java and Bali.

Originally Singapore was missed off our list of travel destinations because it’s too expensive. We have a $25 USD/day budget and we knew we’d fail in Singapore given everything we wanted to do wasn’t on the budget end of the spectrum. But we wandered, ate at cheap hawker centres, used public transportation and we somehow managed to come kiiiinda close to budget 🙂

So what are our impressions? Well here are a few —

First, the city is sooo so cute. It is a weird mixture of feeling like Malaysia and feeling like a metro European city. There are areas like Little India and Chinatown that remind you that you’re in Asia, but it also feels simultaneously like it could just be a quirky part of London, maybe because of the old British colonialism? It’s very cool and kind of confusing at first!

The streets and areas we explored were just awesome and we felt like we could live here – maybe for like a year or so.

Here are some pics of our wanderings:

The other thing that contributed to our brief love affair with Singapore was the FOOD!! We only could have pretty cheap eats, and we had to sadly miss some of the more expensive seafood options like Chili Crab 😫 but we still had some AMAAAAZING food.

It was a mix of Chinese, Peranakan and Indian food, and the flavours just exploded with every bite. If we ever do live here, we will definitely need gym memberships!!

Here are our food pictures haha!!

Another lasting impression of Singapore for me was the amount of digital and self-service that was available, especially for transportation. They used similar to London’s Oyster Cards to tap in and tap out of their underground metro system. Also, Jetstar Airways had flight check-in and baggage service that we completed without interacting with a single person other than one lady who looked at our passports. We even went through immigration without talking to an immigration officer just by scanning our fingerprints.

And strangely the security scans and metal detectors were located at each gate and not in a central area for all passengers to go through together before reaching the shops. I’d like to do a bit of a case study or research on how this decision to change the steps in the process around came to light.

Okay and last but not least, what’s a quick trip to Singapore without visiting these iconic trees and the ship on top of the hotel?!