Monday, January 4, 2010

My week in Singapore, after New Year's

The main reason I wanted to be here in Singapore for New Year's, besides wanting to hang out with Joy and loving Singapore, is so that I could ring in the year first in the world. :)
Joy and I headed downtown later in the evening, right before midnight, so we weren't able to get any fantastic views of the fireworks.
Here are the 2 that turned out for me:

It looks like the building's exploding, though, haha!
Pretty cool what my camera's flash does with fireworks...
We rested at home on New Year's Day, except when we went to the pool for a few hours, where I finally got my Asian sunburn. :)

It's a good thing we rested, b/c on Saturday morning, Joy and I went on a hike. She didn't tell me much about the hike beforehand, only that it would eventually involve a treetop hike. That was fun, but it was only a small part of a torturous expedition.
She and I walked 7-something km. (4.3 miles) on the moderate-intense hiking trail, which is where the treetop hike is located.
It was fun, I think, but you'll see absolutely NO photos of me b/c I looked so horrible. (I look bad enough on a Saturday morning, but looking at me after this hike was disgusting!)
Along our treetop walk, we saw some great views of the trees...













...a fantastic view of Crocodile Lake, from a distance...

...some monkeys...
















...and a snake.

It's amazing how such a small snake can incite such passionate conversations among strangers. I was the one who discovered it crawling along the tree stand, b/c I was walking in front of this slow group of people. I screamed and ran to the other side of the tree stand to wait for Joy, who was still taking photos of the treetops. Meanwhile, the women in the group loved taking photos of the snake, who was "a nice, lovely shade of green", and the men were debating about whether or not it was poisonous, based on its head shape. (Does it really matter???)
Joy's posing on one of the treacherous sets of steps.

There were dozens of these sets of steps.

Don't be deceived; they weren't as easy to climb as they look! They were hard to climb b/c it was so humid and sticky outside.

Just a random branch that I thought looked cool...but it looked much more interesting in person than in this photo. :-P

Some signs we read along our trek...


Haha! Singapore's so polite about issues on the signs here.

Yikes!

We had a Girls' Nite a few nights ago. We took the train to the southern part of Singapore, and then we walked across this bridge to one of a few random islands that lie across from Singapore.

Here, you can see my nice sun-kissed face. (Read: slightly sunburned)
We ate at a really nice coffee house/restaurant along the dock.
This was a pretty Christmas tree in the foyer in the mall along the dock.

1 comment:

Kayleen said...

This looks like you had a great time! The fireworks are pretty -- more than we had here. You're in an exciting place. We are glad you're happy.