Although the conference itself finished yesterday, there were still organised activities today. These included a tour and dinner. There was a limit of 40 for the tour and I had signed up during registration. It was fully booked with some people missing out.
We started with a visit to Gardens on the Bay, a botanical garden that did not even exist last time I was here. In fact where it is located was sea last time I was hear. Asians do these sorts of things very well - large infrastructure projects, tourism and so forth. This seems to have combined both.
The gardens are very impressive with plants from all over the place, and in particular the super trees. These are large structures which are effectively trellises for otehr plants to grow into. I guess the next time I'm here they will be covered to the top. After some waiting while the organisers bought tickets, we piled into elongated golf carts to be driven through the gardens while an audio presentation described what we were seeing. We then had some time to wander about on foot, but not enough to enter the 2 conservatories.
Our next stop was the Pinnacle @ Duxton. This is an upmarket public housing complex. We were able to go to the roof garden on the 50th floor and could see all of Singapore. There are 6 or so buildings with walks ways joining them at the top and about halfway up. A total of over 1800 apartments are contained in these towers.
We had lunch at a hawkers market down near the port, under the cable car that goes to Sentosa.
From there we visited the Asian Cultural Museum, which was quite interesting. However after the late night, I found myself nodding off during a dance performance and later found a bench in an alcove on the top floor where I could pretend to be watching a film about Asian music, dance puppetry and so forth while actually taking a nap. Somewhat refreshed, I then met up with the rest of them and we walked to the bay where we could see the famous Merlion statue. From there we had a sweeping panorama that included the performing arts centre on the Esplanade, which looks like a durian, some stands for the F1 that will be run in a few weeks, the large Ferris wheel, and the Marina Bay Sands resort.
This building which we could also see from the Gardens this morning consist of 3 convex towers with what would mostly be described as a boat on top of them.
We had one more museum to go after that and as interesting as it was, I think most of us would have preferred and hour back at the hotel. This one was dedicated to the Peranakan or mixed race people. These groups started when foreign traders married local women and their were so many of them that they form a cohesive culture. For Mal, the highlight of the day was buying a $5 piece of crockery which you could then throw from the 3rd floor to break "for good luck".
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