It's Singapore and the living is easy

We're sitting on a designer sofa, writing this on our complimentary Apple Mac laptop at our super trendy hotel we're staying at for our first wedding anniversary.

Well that's how we'd planned to start our blog from there, but obviously we didn't actually quite get round to it! We did use the laptop and the sofas though, but not for anything productive. If anyone is planning a bit of pampering, the hotel is called New Majestic Hotel, and the website is: www.newmajestichotel.com We really recommend it, the room was amazing, staff lovely, and decor very inspiring. It was such a cool, funky, and trendy hotel we really loved our stay there. This came as such a change for us, as we'd grown quite used to the rundown places we've mainly been staying in lately... The outside bath on our own private terrace was something we'd never seen before, how cool was that.

Singapore was a real break from the rest of the South East Asia that we've seen so far - sculptures all over the place, very clean, lots of pavements on the sides of the roads (you really miss them when they're not there, i.e. most of Malaysia!), futuristic architecture, not smelly, fantastic food, automatic toilets, and air-conditioned outside spaces. Need we say more, we absolutely loved it, it felt like a mini holiday from our year's holiday!
One of the things that really set Singapore apart from anything we've seen before were it's mega malls, that went high above ground, as well as on and on underground for miles. It was weird being able to walk around the city and cover so much ground without ever needing to go outside! We had to use our compass a lot (thank you Juha, it's been a life saver!), as it was really disorienting going from mall to mall, and popping out onto a street god knows where.

Singapore zoo is also ace, they don't have cages for the animals, but instead they have moats, which felt really nature-like and cool. Usually it's quite expensive to get in, but trust us to have good luck, and as we were waiting to buy our tickets, this couple came up to us and offered to take us in for free with their gold pass! How unlikely was that! Anyway, we ended up spending 8 hours there and absolutely loved the tigers, the orangutans and the other monkeys, and took far too many photos.

On Saturday we went to the Baybeats music festival at Singapore harbour front. It was a free indie rock festival with local as well as international bands, and a great chance to see the funky young Singaporeans out strutting their stuff. They were a great crowd, they had energy until the end of the evening, and were jumping, dancing, clapping, cheering, and crowd surfing to anything and everything. With no obvious alcohol or drugs, how they had the energy, we will never know. We were knackered just having to walk between the different stages! All of the foreign bands were really impressed that they just kept going on with such enthusiasm.

A few photos for you to break up all my writing:

Dan's wanting me to write more about the food in Singapore. Barbecue pork and rice was one of his highlights, but everything was really amazing, so it's not a surprise that he really enjoyed himself there!

I wanted to give you a quick update on my horrid rash, and the good news is that with the antihistamine tablets and huge amounts of aloe vera the blisters finally went down. Although afterwards I've been shedding my skin, in fact I've been a proper snake, but at least now I've got lovely new skin on my legs :)

We're catching our flight to Kuching in Malaysian Borneo early tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it, as Borneo has always sounded such a mystical and far away place to me, and now I'll get to see it for myself! Tonight we're staying in Johor Bahru, and in our hotel room we were greeted by this sign. Our sentiments exactly!

That's it for now, love to you all, and keep the comments coming, we love them and really look forward to getting them from you!
Jenni & Dan