Clean and westernized Singapore

Singapore
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After almost 6 weeks in the "incredible" India, it was time for us to move to our next destination: South East Asia. It was not without a little sadness that we left India, we will keep a great memory of our time there, which is due for a great part to the people we met there... I cannot tell you how much I (Maite) was touched by the way Soudha's mother hugged me when we left Chennai and said "come back!" "as mister and misses"! But this is also part of our trip, we come in a country, meet people, discover their history, culture and wonders, get attached to them and one day have to go to discover another country. After India which was known by Hugo but not by me, it was my turn to show him, Singapore where I worked 8 years ago already. We staid there at Uriell and Dimitri's place, my friends that have been expatriated there now for 1,5 year. Surprisingly we were not very shocked by the cleanness of the country (even after India) but more by how short Singaporean girls’ dresses were! Here you can see a big contrast with India and its colorful saris. I (Hugo, yes Maite makes me do this) was quite disappointed by Singapore as in all parts of town I still found garbage on streets and nobody even arrested me when I spat by accident on the street (have to admit I was actually quite relieved that it was not as sterile as expected).

Singapore
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Our hosts were great and took us for the first evening to a friend of theirs who just came back from France for a nice evening among the French community in Singapore. As is customary their friend took from France some saucisson and French cheese which was devoured with some nice Australian wine. Maite still can not stop raving about how good it was to have cheese from France again when she already had this during xmas in Aurangabad, for me (Hugo) this was again a lesson in French culture and made me understand the importance of French cheese, seeing as well how much everybody else was enjoying it that evening. The evening itself was really nice and provided some insights into life in Singapore as expatriates/ foreigners.

Singapore
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Our days in Singapore were filled with sightseeing the different areas of the town (e.g. China town, down town etc), sleeping long in our aircon room, loading pictures and having nice dinners in the evening with our hosts. I (Maite) was happy to share the pepper crab and roasted duck experience, but we were much less successful with the sate and the Mohammad Sutam Road (which was famous in my time for its night life and is now completely deserted). We have to admit that on Sunday after having visited the downtown area we could not resist to take a little detour on the metro and visit little India, having seen the quite busy streets in Singapore it was great to be back home again in the packed streets of little India, maybe this was a little show on how India can be in 5-10 years? We spend our last day visiting the Singaporean zoo, been quite some years that we were at a zoo but it was truly nice, which is ranked among the finest in the world as it is set in a tropical setting where you can hardly see that the animals are in enclosures. We even learned a lot during our trip like did you know that tigers can jump at you with 60km/h over a distance of 10m and snap your neck at the same time? Or that polar bears (yes they had polar bears there) have a black skin and can smell a seal from 40km distance? Well for sure not and left the zoo with a wealth of new knowledge. After another nice meal in a former monastery eating New Zealand beef and talking about tanks we headed in the morning to the airport to catch our flight to Pucket for some serious diving in search of the elusive Manta ray.