2013 Highlights (November - Part 2)

We went to Singapore for a week.  It was my 30th birthday surprise.  It was so fun and relaxing! It was also the first stamp I've ever gotten on my passport - woot! David booked himself to do a speech for work out there and worked it out so I could go too. He never told me he was doing this speech and come to find out had been working on booking it for a few months. David says it's a good thing he'd never cheat on me cause there were several times when he had calls with the client at around 2 or 3 in the morning and he would sneak out of the house and go up to his work in Alpine to take the calls. I had no idea he even left!
This is on the plane on our way out there. It was about 20 hours of flights to get there and 20 hours of flights to get back. I think I was the only weirdo on the plane who wasn't watching the free in-flight movies. I hadn't read a book in sooo long, so I decided to spend my quiet time of no interruptions to read. I finished 2 books!

We visited some of the temples. We also went to Little India and China Town, but we didn't get any pictures of those.

First time riding a subway.


The Botanical Gardens. So beautiful!

By recommendation we went to a Hawker Center. It's sort of like a food court. They have ratings (A,B,C,D, or F) on all of the different restaurants based on their hygiene and cleanliness. From what we read, if you stick to the ones with A and B ratings you should be safe. We haven't died yet, so I think we're ok ;). We got satay, which is pretty much marinated meat that's barbequed and you dip it in peanut sauce. LOVED it! Thanks for the recommendation, Rachel! I normally hate peanut sauce, but the REAL peanut sauce they have out there tastes amazing. We also got smoothies and a noodle dish that had shrimp and squid in it. I didn't like the noodle dish, but David did.

For some reason, I was surprised to see that they celebrate Christmas there. We saw huge Christmas trees and lights everywhere we went.

We had a bit of a rough day food-wise on our first day there. We were a little too excited to see a McDonalds the next day for lunch.

We explored and visited the Raffles hotel. It's a HUGE, beautiful, colonial style hotel. They have shops all around the bottom of it and walking around the grounds surrounding it was absolutely beautiful! We ate at a bakery there and came across an outdoor bar/food place that was playing all Boyce Avenue music over the speaker. We ordered some drinks and enjoyed the tunes for a little bit.

We visited the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. The architecture on this place is AMAZING!! We went up to the observation deck and looked at the view. One of our favorite parts of the trip. There's a pool that drains off of the side of the building on the top floor. Only guests of the hotel are aloud to swim there. I managed to get a mediocre picture of it from the observation deck, though.

Gardens by the Bay. They were really pretty, but we got there close to dark so we didn't get very many pictures. There's a running trail that goes all around the bay. We ate at a food court type place (they don't consider this a hawker center. It's a lot cleaner and nicer) and got chili crab. Sooooo good!! It's apparantly #36 on a list of world's best foods you need to try. We also got more satay - I could eat that stuff everyday and never get sick of it.

The first part of our trip, we stayed on mainland Singapore. The Second half of our trip we stayed on Sentosa Island, which is a resort/vacation type place. They call it "Asia's Playground". This is where David would be doing his speech. He only had to work about 1 1/2 days of our trip, so most of it was vacation time which was nice. The client paid for our hotel for the time we were staying on Sentosa. Nicest hotel I've ever stayed in. It has a very modern, party type feel to it. There was a design above our bed that lights up and also lights underneath the bed and behind the tv. You could make them shine purple or pink. The purple lights were named "flirt" - I don't remember what the pink lights were named. Hmmm ... I wonder why those were put in there? haha ;) yep, definitely a party atmosphere.

Sentosa Beach. We went here a couple of times. It was so warm and relaxing! It's the first warm ocean I've ever swam in (I guess technically it's the South China Sea, not an ocean).

David doing his speech. Doesn't he look awesome up there?! The client was thrilled with how things went. I wish I could have been there. I wasn't aloud to attend. They did have a dinner that night that I was aloud to go to, though. We visited with nice people and ate great food.

We rode the zipline at Sentosa Beach.

On our last day there, we rode the skytram back to mainland Singapore. The malls there are incredible!! They have lots of high-end expensive brand stores that I would never purchase anything at, but they were fun to window shop through. The malls stretch on for blocks and are several stories tall and are PACKED with people. We shopped around until we went to the airport.

Sleeping at the Starbucks at the airport until Delta would let us check in for our flight. It's a long story and I don't want to type it all out :).

This is what my ankles looked like after our flight home. Crazy! I always swell a little when I travel, but never anything that someone would notice except for me. This is the worst I've ever swelled up before. This was also the longest flights I had ever been on, so I'm sure that had something to do with it. The swelling was completely gone within a couple days. Kind of funny though.

We LOVED our trip!!