A weekend at Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands.
A few years have gone by since my last trip to Singapore and it was a good occasion to bring my son, August, there as well (he hasn’t stopped talking about going to the Universal Studios). So there we were, arriving in this extremely well organised city, already so easy to get a taxi from the airport and one of the first things that really hits you going in to the city, is that all along the roads there’s greenery….. woods, trees and plants, they have beautifully plant Bougainvillea the whole way down to our hotel, the Marina Bay Sands.
For Singaporeans, you realise that the nature,
greenery, plants, gardens are highly important for their well-being and they pay a high price for this and I’m not surprised when I read that Singapore is the most expensive city to live in, in the world! People just don’t understand how expensive it is to keep a city clean, as well organised as Singapore. Good infrastructure, where public transport seems to work, where traffic jam doesn’t seems to be a problem and a city that breathes as well.
All this comes at a very high price! When you live in Bangkok, as I do, you see that there’s no consideration for the environment! almost no parks, no greenery, only because this doesn’t make money! Department stores make money! so we construct every little piece of land we have in Bangkok, soon the Bangkokians will turn the fabulous city of Krung Thep into an unpleasant, stressed and unbreathable city, it will be just as Beijing, Shanghai…..and some others as well.
Arriving at Marina Bay Sands,
was something incredible, I have never in my life stayed in a hotel that big! I mean they have something like 2500 rooms! crazy!!! The building is outstanding, (the most expensive building in the world) three towers which are not straight, but actually curbed and on the top there’s like a surfboard posed on the top of the towers, that’s where you’ll find the very well know “infinity pool”, in the SkyPark, where you can swim on top of the world! There are a few restaurants up there as well, like KuDéTa and Sky bar on the 57th, the last one, great for early breakfast with the sun coming up over the Gardens on the Bay and the harbour.
A weekend is usually too short,
if you want to stroll around a city, see some things and just enjoy some restaurants, cafés, parks, visit some museums and do some shopping, you probably need one more day to be satisfied. We spent a whole day at the Universal Studios on the Sentosa Island, to my sons delight! we got splashed in a “New York Hurricane” at Light Camera Action! so at the end we didn’t really get away from Songkran celebrations in Thailand…… Our second day we walked around in the Marina Bay, visited the beautiful Gardens on the Bay and then along the Marina Promenade and Esplanade Park and further towards the City Hall and up to Stamford Road where we decided to grab a taxi and go up to Dempsey Hill for lunch at the lovely place called, White Rabbit, this is an old Chapel very nicely decorated and the food was superb!
after a great lunch it’s quite nice to have a walk and if you can walk in a park like the Botanic Gardens in Singapore, you do it! it’s a fantastic place, I so much miss gardens and parks. Then we took the bus down to Raffles where I got off and my loved ones continued down to Marina Bay.
I will tell you more about Raffles…….. in a later post
In the evenings we have had our dinners mostly at the Marina Bay complex & Casino, they have some great restaurants there like, Chinese mega star: Din Tai Fung, you can’t reserve a table and the queuing is long…. we also visited the Pizzeria & Osteria Mozza, fabulous pizzas! And my son had room service one night and it wasn’t bad at all! for a mega hotel like this one, that kind of service impressed me, excellent quality and punctuality.
