We arrived at Woodlands Station and caught a cab to our hotel, the Millenia Ritz Carlton. We have stayed there before and it was excellent, but this time it just seemed a little... less excellent. Service was a bit poor, which I think was the main problem. And they charged us a fortune for wifi, which is inexcusable.
This is the view from our lounge window at night:
During the day we had views of the Marina Bay Sands hotel which is the one with the crazy ship sailing across the three buildings:
And they have an excellent shopping centre with many nice shops at the bottom.
One day we decided to go to the Art Science Museum, which is the lotus-shaped building you can see in the photo above. We paid our $25 (each!) to get in, went up to the top floor to start looking at the exhibits, and found... nothing. Turns out the Art Science Museum (a misleading name if there ever was one) only has travelling exhibitions and all they had was a Titanic exhibition which had already been in Melbourne two years ago. Talk about disappointing. There was no art, no science. The boy was furious and argued with three different people to get our money back. He succeeded in the end, but it was a total waste of an hour.
We also met up with some friends from Melbourne who moved to Singapore a couple of years ago, and had lunch and a wander around Dempsey Hill, which is locally known as the Aussie Expat centre of activity.
It was a lovely day out and we ended up back at their place for dinner. So great to see Melissa and Dave again after so long!
On another day, we also went over to see the Merlion, which has been the symbol of Singapore for ages. It's a massive tourist attraction:
And then we had the most wonderful experience coming home. If you fly first class with Singapore Airlines, you get to go through customs at Changi Airport via a special separate entry where you sit in leather chairs while they stamp your passport and clear you through Immigration. Then you get escorted to the first class lounge, and if you are regular customers like we are you get to go into the Private Lounge where everything in the known universe is available to you. God it was good.
So all in all it was a wonderful holiday. I would definitely recommend the Eastern and Oriental Express train, it was a fantastic experience. Next time we go to Singapore we'll be staying at the Mandarin Oriental, as our experience there in Bangkok was top notch.
