And so it begins...

That is one big mother
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So 26 hours after leaving from Miami we arrived refreshed (ha!) in Singapore. Our trip began with warm cookies and milk in first class on our Miami to JFK flight, which was just a tease for 2 1/2 hours because the arrangements were certainly different once we started the Singapore Air leg to Frankfurt and then on to Singapore. We loved Singapore Air though! The flight attendants are like sweet little porcelain dolls, the food was really tasty and there were about 100 movies to watch. We got to lay across the seats and sleep for the 7 hour Frankfurt flight, which got us rejuvenated for the 13 hour cramped flight (Kevin taking one for the team and sleeping in the middle and I definitely played the "blood clot card" with that one and got the aisle) to Singapore.

A long journey across the world
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It must have been around the 30th time that Kevin said "This is the proverbial reality check" as he lay cramped in his teeny tiny middle seat, that I almost felt bad enough to let him have the aisle, but not quite bad enough. I instead asked him how to spell "proverbial" and when he couldn't, let him know that "if you can't spell it, don't say it." Haha.

This is the proverbial reality check

Swimming before dawn
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The Changi Airport in Singapore is as clean and as beautiful as everyone says (filled with orchids and fountains) and easier to get around than JFK (and it has Chinese writing everywhere). We got our bags really quickly and were in a cab heading to our hotel just in time to catch the sun rising over the lush jungle landscaping that surrounds the city.

We're staying at the Marina Mandarin, which is so much nicer than we were expecting. We thought that we would stay in a "nice" place for our first few nights in order to adjust to the time in a comfortable setting, but we weren't going to spend the money at the Ritz or Oriental, so we picked the Marina Mandarin because the price was in the middle. Well, it is beautiful. The lobby is unreal (just massive and artsy) with exotic birds in cages chirping away happily (I have a picture of one doing backflips for us).

Sentosa Island ( don't be fooled -this rock is hollow)
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We couldn't check into our room at 7:30 AM because they needed an hour to clean the room for us, so we dragged our grubby butts to a noodle place nearby called Quiji for breakfast. Our first meal in Asia! I survived! No stomach sickness, nothing. Ha! Let's see if I'm still saying that a month from now. By that time we were able to check into our room and had the best showers of our lives after sweating in the same clothes we wore on the plane for 26 hours in the 80 degree humidity. Oh, by the way, it is HOT in Singapore.

Renting bikes
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We checked out China Town for a little while, eating some interesting food at a hawkers stall, but the jet lag was beginning to make me delusional as I could not stop laughing at a picture of a crazy man in a cell phone ad on the side of a taxi. Kevin decided to take me back to the hotel for a nap.

That "nap" turned into an 18-hour ordeal. We woke up at 5:30 the next morning (Saturday the 10th). We were both at a loss. How we slept for that long, nobody knows. We jumped out of bed like two crazy people and got straight into our swimsuits and headed to the 24-hour pool for a swim before the sun came up. The pool is on the 5th floor, with the city surrounding it, so it was beautiful with all the flourescent lights, surrounding city buildings and the moon and stars over our heads. We then remembered we had a complimentary breakfast to go to, so we showered and were the first people in that puppy at the crack of 6:30. Let me tell you, BEST complimentary breakfast EVER. They had everything you could ask for. We had to share our enjoyment about our Saturday breakfast with our parents enjoying their Friday evening back in Florida.

A nice construction worker climbed and got coconuts for us to drink the milk with him
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After breakfast, we headed out to Sentosa Island: a beautiful, lush, tropical... tourist trap. Not to say it wasn't fun. We walked the deserted beach for a while while we waited for the bicycle rentals to open. As soon as 10:00 hit, it was like people popped out of the sand, they came so quickly. And tons of people.

We took our bikes along the trails around the island, our favorite being the Jungle Trail. The whole time, I'm saying "Where are the spiders? Where are the spiders?" (I had heard about these alleged spiders from another person's blog on this website) but there were none to be found, until we got off the bikes to venture into a walking trail, where there were these mammoth creatures surrounding us from every angle. I don't know if they're poisonous, but I wasn't sticking around to figure it out... (Kevin just informed me I'm writing too much, but I'm just so excited about this whole journal thing and I love typing so much - I promise the other journals won't be so long- Sorry! Don't give up on us already!) So, anyway, we biked around some more, me picturing myself running into and getting tangled in spider webs the entire time, got lunch at a sushi place on the beach and then headed back to our hotel via cable car (really high up and pretty much a sweat box) to refresh ourselves by the pool. Ahhhh... pure bliss.

Sentosa Island from the chair lift - this is the southermost point of Asia's continent
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Note to self: Elaborate exactly on what Mandarin you are heading to when in Singapore. There are many. Marina, Meritus, Oriental... Our driver Zack (a lead singer in a band, Stepping Stone) got a little sidetracked as he sang to us the entire ride and dropped us off at a completely different hotel. "Is this our hotel?" "Oh yes, it is the Mandarin, this is the back entrance." Yeah... not so much.

      -Holly

Singapore - a beautiful city, but definetely a 2 dayer.  It was certainly the best city to get our bearings after the 26 hour marathon.  The city actually holds my personal best - 18 hours of straight sleeping record.  So i guess it was a good idea to start off in a (what i thought decent hotel) really nice hotel.  Very excited about our next step, which will be either Bangkok or Chiang Mai (the beauty of having no set plan), which i think will really be the "Perverbial reality check".  Good talk.

The city from the gondola
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Kevin