Travel diary Friday: aquarium day

On Friday I farewelled dad at the unholidaylike hour of 5:30am, and went back to sleep while he flew home to KL. I had a most civilised checkout time of 1pm, so I ordered blueberry pancakes for breakfast and lazed around, listening to John Mayer and reading.

I thought I should probably venture out, but the soundproofing is so good in the room, and I hadn't looked out the window so I didn't realise it was absolutely bucketing down in only the way Singapore can (it makes the most intense rainstorm in Sydney feel like a drizzle by comparison). So I, er, got a bit damp.

After changing into dry clothes I met up with Poh Teng, one of dad's colleagues, for lunch. She is a lovely, friendly and very helpful woman and her husband works at Resort World Sentosa (where we were staying and where the theme parks are), so we got a big discount on tickets into the S.E.A. Aquarium. It was an incredible experience; sitting in front of the giant viewing window for about half an hour watching the divers feeding the creatures felt like I was sitting on the bottom of the ocean. I just wanted to get in the water. It was wonderful.

More pics here.

After a coffee I headed off to the airport. The plane trip home was uneventful, except for me having an emotional meltdown for no reason after watching The secret life of Walter Mitty and Her. No idea what happened there; both movies put me in a slightly melancholy mood (though I enjoyed both), and saying goodbye to mum and dad, and being tired, and being premenstrual and...yeah that's a few reasons. I was just surprised that I just started crying and couldn't stop. Thankfully it was after lights out and my seat mate had an eye mask on. The crew saw me come out of the bathroom with red eyes and face and were very kind; they made me some hot lemon and honey to drink and said I could come back and talk to them if I needed to. I was very impressed all around with Singapore Airlines actually - the plane, the food, the staff, everything.

We landed at 6am and I was so happy to have Kel and Huff meet me. It's so nice to have a smiling face waiting for you at the end of the walkway! We grabbed a coffee and nutella doughnut for breakfast and then I pretty much crashed. Oh first I picked up the cat from the cat hotel and she has been extremely affectionate and cuddly all day while I zoned in and out of consciousness.

So it's just me and her for the next few weeks while mum is in the UK. The extra special treat is I get to sleep in mum's super comfy bed and my bedroom can be my work room instead of my Bec Cave. Hurrah!

So so so grateful for the time away and all the lovely things that happened!

Travel diary Thursday: spa heaven

We had one more night in the Goodwood Park Hotel, then headed over to Sentosa. Sentosa is a little island off the bottom of the mainland that was used by the British as a military fort in WW2. When we lived in Singapore, you got there by cable car to see a museum and a monorail and not much else. Now it has had a bridge built out to it, and is home to a massive resort with a whole bunch of hotels, restaurants, Universal Studios (we went there last year), the SEA Aquarium and a casino.

We were booked in to the Hard Rock Hotel, which was very different to the colonial, restrained, neutral palette of the first hotel; it took me a while to get used to it because it was so over the top in comparison. The room was all purple and black and chrome and mirrored surfaces. They did have a much more comfortable bed though. And photos of Jimi Hendrix on the walls.

even the lifts are blingy

They didn't give us a twin room, so dad said I could have the bed and he took the couch. He went off to a business meeting in the city and I wandered down to ESPA for my booking. I had wanted to get a massage while I was on holidays and done some research - I guess I was looking at the places linked to hotels so they are always going to be more expensive, but whoa. Pampering is serious business in Singapore. Anyway, I found ESPA had a Mother's Day package, but they didn't say you actually had to be a mother to book it and although still expensive, it came with a meal, a free gift, and was cheaper than just booking a massage on its own.

And oh my goodness. It was seriously the best spa and massage I have ever experienced (not that I've been to that many spas, and certainly not the top end ones). Just walking in, everything was calming and quiet. The staff were courteous and discreet. I sat down to fill out my client card, drank some cold lemongrass tea and then was given a tour of the facilities - well stocked showers and dressing rooms, a quiet tea room with a huge picture window, an onsen bath, a hot and cold outdoor bath surrounded by perfect tropical gardens, a wet sauna with crystals (!), a dry sauna with a beautiful view of the gardens. I happily wandered from bath to bath, sauna to sauna for about an hour, delighting in the sense of total relaxation and nowhere to be. Being the middle of the week, it was pretty quiet so I only had to share the facilities with two giggly Chinese women, and I managed to avoid them mostly.

This is from the ESPA website - I don't have a white bikini, but this was pretty much me

Selina the therapist came and got me from the tea room. She took me up to the treatment rooms, completely separate to the spa facilities but with the same dark wood floors and pale walls. Unlike most massage places I've been, where the therapist has hardly any room to move around the table, this room was spacious.

Selina asked me how I wanted to feel at the end of the massage, then gave me a choice of two oil blends based on my answer. She filled a bowl of steaming water and added the same oil blend to it, and placed it under my face as I lay on the table. The massage was just perfect; perfect pressure, she attended to the areas I had mentioned as being sore, I felt totally mentally and physically calm by the end of it.

If and when I ever open my own massage practice, I want it to echo this kind of idea, aesthetically (just on a smaller, ever so slightly less expensive scale).

Then it was time for my complimentary meal at the Tangerine restaurant, which prides itself on extremely healthy food to match with the whole wellness aesthetic of the spa. The restaurant was surrounded by Japanese style gardens, and I was the only one there (until a gay couple arrived and carried on between themselves because they hadn't realised it was a healthy restaurant...I caught them outside later having cigarettes). The food was sensational. Light and delicious and perfectly balanced.

Then back to the room to meet dad, and we went off to meet his colleagues and watch X Men: Days of Future Past together. Loved it! A study in brown leather jackets and gorgeous men.

Travel diary Wednesday: changeover

The second day of a holiday can be less exciting than the first. You're a bit more tired, and if you walked around the whole day like we did on day one, you have massive blisters (or at least very sore feet) and you don't feel like doing much (I had blisters on the balls of my feet that were the size of my big toe. Owie.). 

Many people still think of Singapore as a good shopping destination, but it's not vastly cheaper than Australia anymore (also thanks, internet!), and we learned a long time ago that even thinking about clothes in Asia as larger Western women is just an exercise in defeat. Mum's not interested in looking at tech stuff and neither of us cares about luxury goods. So we decided not to bother with the malls.

Without any real plan (and after a false start when we caught a cab to Clarke Quay and then realised that nothing really opens there until the afternoon and it's all restaurants and bars anyway) we decided to catch the SIA hop-on hop-off bus, which does a loop around the major tourist areas. It was a good way to get an overview of the city, and to be able to go "oh yeah, I remember that place!" Mum marvelled that she had ever been able to drive around, or cope with the heat when we lived there.

ah, nostalgia

Street art in Little India

Not much of old Singapore left these days, just shophouses here and there

We did get off the bus at Little India, but mum was starting to feel unwell, so we didn't explore. We had been keen to go to a good hawker centre for food but settled for a noisy basement food court for reasonable chicken rice. And of course, going where the locals go it is vastly cheaper than any tourist-aimed version of the same dish (about AU$3.80 for a satisfying serve of chicken, rice, vegies, soup).

Back at the hotel, while mum rested and repacked, I wandered across the road to the duty free shop just for a look. More cosmetics and luxury goods. I tried on a $400 pair of Prada glasses that I had pinned on Pinterest a while ago, and managed to get a snap before the saleswoman zoomed over. It was so weird, this three storey glossy shop, divided into mini boutiques for each brand and with no one in them except a multitude of well-groomed staff.

Then it was time for the parental changeover. Mum and I had delicious xiao long bao and noodles at the airport, then she headed off to Manchester and dad flew in from KL. We were all going to have a coffee together but dad's plane was delayed, so it really was a bit of a tag team effort. So good to spend time with each parent, though the flavour of the holiday was very different with each one.

Travel diary: Do what you feel like day

It sounds weird, but one of the great things about travelling with mum is we have a similar energy threshold - she gets tired because of her knees and I get tired because I do. So it's good because you both need to have little rests throughout the day and you don't care much for ticking things off on an itinerary.

Another good thing is we have similar interests and we decided not to do anything we didn't feel like doing. If we wanted to laze around the hotel all day, that was perfectly fine (well if you're paying for it you may as well enjoy it, right?). Though lovely as it is, we didn't just stay in our room for the whole day...as if we would!

We started today with a rather expensive but delicious hotel buffet breakfast, one of the better ones I've had actually. Side note: one thing that I like about hotel breakfasts (in Asia anyway) is they always seem to have pink guava juice. I would never buy it at home but I really like it on holidays. So there you go.

We then took a leisurely stroll up Scotts Road and Orchard Road. The shops are insanely swish on Orchard Road, and there are multiples of high end shops like Prada, Louis Vuitton, etc, almost opposite one another (because heaven knows you wouldn't want to have to cross the road to buy your luxury goods). The buildings are massive, shiny temples of consumerism. It's quite staggering.

We only really went in to Tangs department store, again because it had been somewhere we used to go when we lived here. I think it's much ritzier than it used to be, but then everything seems to be around here. Or maybe I didn't pay as much attention to the ritziness when I was a kid. It was just what it was. Anyway, we wandered through the beautiful makeup section and I wish Elsie had been with us, she would have loved it.

After what was a fairly leisurely stroll up and back again, we were hot and bothered so it was time to hit the pool. It's nice being here mid-week as it's pretty quiet around the pool; there was only one other person there for most of the time we were there. After a deliciously refreshing dip I fell asleep in the sun reading Danielle LaPorte's the Desire Map (incidentally, I feel quite conspicuous toting around a book with a bright pinky purple cover and 'desire' in huge type on the front. But I'm enjoying it, and I probably need to get over the idea that anyone else is even looking).

Our timing was all out and we had missed lunch, and, well, it was afternoon tea time. How could we resist high tea?

After a nap we headed back out and caught the fast and efficient MRT to Gardens by the Bay, a sprawling place with various themed zones (eg Chinese garden, Indian garden, etc) two cooled domes (one growing flowers from all over the world and the other called 'Cloud forest', showcasing rainforest and high altitude plants) and the supertrees, which are gorgeous structures that collect energy in their solar panels and made me feel like we were in Avatar or something.

(Those are part of the supertrees on the right and the Marina Bay Sands complex in the background - that zeppelin-looking thing on the top has restaurants and an infinity pool. From the ground, it is impressively large and a little scary actually.)

Dinner was at Satay by the Bay, a hawker centre within the gardens. We had satay and popiah and lots of fresh orange juice. We were seriously flagging by this point. We ended up doing a lot of walking, but I was proud of us that we didn't give in and catch a taxi back to the hotel but managed on the train and walking.

Then Ben and Jerry's in the hotel room and turning in to read and blog and just be quiet. This holiday thing is pretty rad! I should do it more often...

(PS If you want to see more photos of the gardens, check out my Flickr photostream)

Travel diary: Up and away!

I love travelling. Maybe it's partly because I have been doing it since birth, with family living in another country and moving overseas during primary school.

I like good airports. I like getting on planes. I love the rush of the takeoff. The squished into your seat bit is less enjoyable, but the plane we were on yesterday (a Singapore Airlines A380) was pretty comfortable, the food was actually tasty, the cabin crew were really polite and efficient, and there was lots to watch (I was remembering what it was like when there was only one screen up the front of the cabin (or worse, a couple of TV screens mounted above the aisles), and the entire cabin had to watch the same thing at the same time. That wasn't so fun.).

I watched the Lego Movie - how is it possible for such a silly idea to be so perfect? - started American Hustle but found it far too depressing (I didn't want to spend any longer with those unpleasant people), laughed out loud at repeats of Miranda, loved Tangled and can't decide whether I prefer it or Frozen, so I watched the first hour of that again as we descended in to Singapore. I also listened to Lorde and read and enjoyed the ribbon of sunset that seemed to go on forever as we headed north west.

I realised I was quite energised when we got off the plane in Singapore. Mum was wiped out, and I had expected to be, but I was taking it all in. A country that I loved growing up in and yet is almost unrecognisable to me. 

We are staying at the Goodwood Park Hotel because this trip is kind of mum's semi-retirement celebration and she decided she wanted to stay somewhere absolutely lovely. I remembered coming here for high tea when we lived in Singapore, my first high tea fancy playing ladies experience, I think. Mum said last night part of it was also that this hotel was one of the few things she remembered that she could rely on to still be here - everything changes so fast in Singapore. She hasn't been here for 20 years, but even in the year or so since I've been here, things move on at a rapid pace (and last year we were basically at Sentosa and didn't see any of the rest of the island).

And the travel fairies were on our side, because we got upgraded without even asking (not that I ever ask, unless there's a major problem) - to a junior suite! We have two bathrooms! And a sitting room! This is so great.

And now I am starving and we are going to go and enjoy an expensive breakfast. Semi retirement celebration, hurrah!