Nik


you can put anything here

Saturday, June 16, 2012 @ 5:49 PM PERMALINK

The day after we came back from KL, I had arranged to meet Long and his friends to accompany them around Sentosa.



I met Long when Jasmine and I went to Ho Chi Minh in July last year. Dora had first told us about this volunteer tour group called Saigon Hotpot that her parents had engaged during their trip there.

The guides at Saigon Hotpot bring you around for free, show you the sights and are able to cater their tours to what you would most like to see all for the chance to interact with people and to practice their English. I know what you all are thinking, there has to be a catch. Well, there isn't.

All you have to do is pay for the admission fees for you and your guide and buy lunch for him/her (actually, I'm not so sure about lunch, I'm pretty sure its not an enforced rule but its just basic courtesy anyway so please do) There is no hard selling or commission based selling for the guides to bring to you certain places, you can be sure that you will get a really authentic experience.

Long was our assigned guide and he showed up at our hotel first thing in the morning, taught us how to order Vietnamese coffee on the street and even tried to help Jasmine find an optical shop that sold contact lense solution.

For the super detailed post on our adventures with Long, please refer HERE.

Saigon Hotpot is becoming so popular that they now only take tour arrangements via the website I linked. If you are thinking about going to Ho Chi Minh, I promise you will not regret booking a tour with these amazing people.

Anyway, long and short of it, Long and I have kept in contact via Facebook so when I heard he was coming down, I knew I had to meet up with him and bring him around Singapore.

For someone that has lived 23 years in Singapore, when I started to think about where to bring him and his friends I started drawing blanks. I felt like I didn't know enough about Singapore or its buildings and culture and even went to borrow a guidebook from the library as reference. Long was so informative when we were in HCM and I really just wanted to be able to provide him with the knowledge.

I bought earlier mentioned guidebook to KL and only ended up flipping through it on the way back to SG before falling asleep.

Anyways, as I was in KL when Long and his friends Andy and Phuong arrived,  I wasn't able to contact them until the morning we were supposed to meet and they had decided to go to Sentosa, so the decision was already made for me.

I really love Sentosa so I was more than happy to go along with them. I brought them to the beach because they really seemed excited to be by the sea and we walked around for a bit before the heat got the best of us.

After some discussion about what to do, we decided to head straight to the Images of Singapore.

Now, the last memory I have of Images of Singapore was when we went as a school for our heritage lessons in Secondary 2. We were all mega creeped out by the place and a few of my friends even claimed to have had ghostly encounters.

Well this time round, I am pleased to say that it actually is a really informative museum. It manages to compress a ton of Singapore's history, culture and tradition into a building and it really isn't too expensive.

The three of them very sweetly paid for my admission ticket even though they really didn't have to as I was glad to have the chance to take a look at the museum for myself anyway.


Before you enter into the main museum, you have to wait in this holding room decorated with loads of fun looking old things for you to take pictures with. The doors only open when the countdown is completed and you are led into an area, invited to sit down and watch a short video clip.




I kind of panicked and thought that they had changed the entire format of the 'Images of Singapore' into some sort of digital experience and apologized to Long thinking I had just made them pay $10 for a 4 minute video.

Thank god it was just an intro about a fictionalized Four Winds trading company which the museum used to create an analogy of the different races that settled in Singapore.



The museum starts with exhibits about the founding of Singapore and moves on to World War II, Post War Malaya,  newly independent Singapore and then wraps up with great exhibits about the culture, festivals and traditions of the races in Singapore. It served as a easy to digest introduction into Singapore and our culture and I was surprised how much of my history and social studies lessons came back to me.









After we were done at the Museum, I wanted to bring the group out for lunch. When I asked them what they felt like eating, they asked if they could have McDonalds.

I was a little puzzled for awhile before I remembered that the Golden Arches have yet to arrive in HCM.  So off to McDonalds it was!

Their first Macdonalds meal (for 2 out of 3 of them anyway). Andy did a travel-work experience in America so Macdonalds is not new to him at all.

We parted ways after lunch because the three of them had arranged to meet a Singaporean family (who they also knew from conducting tours) that was going to bring them to the Night Safari.

The three of them were so sweet and even brought me gifts from Vietnam.


It is moments like this that really make me remember why I love traveling so much.

Traveling really opens your life up. It exposes you to both the good and bad in the world. I've been very lucky so far *knock on wood*. I've never been in too bad a situation that many travelers face. Never been cheated out of too much money (a little bit here and there via taxi fares and restaurants definitely but nothing major), never been robbed (although Jasmine got pick pocketed and I lost a handphone once), never been attacked...

I have however, met a ton of genuinely sweet people who go out of their way to make me feel welcome. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to talk to strangers you just met or how much they will help you.

My advice to anyone with the spare time and money, take a chance of traveling. For me, there is really nothing more fulfilling than finding out how different we all may seem yet how truly inherently similar we human beings all are.

Love to yall! Have a great weekend!

Labels: Adventures in our backyard, Sentosa

Post a Comment