Crowded clean

Our first day in Singapore Fred decided to take me to places I may actually go to on errands.  Saving the touristy stuff for another day.  Onto the metro and it's basically standing room fitting in as many humans as possible.  We end up at the fancy huge mall that seems to be for both locals and tourists.  It's got the high end store and the payless type of store that I was in need of.  My sandles were not quite as comfortable as I thought. After a $4 flip flop purchase it was a non stop walking adventure checking out the area.

The fancy mall was nice but think of a U.S. mall at Christmas packed on just a regular Saturday.  I wish I could figure out how to upload photos on this and share the crowds.

We ate a good lunch at the food opera basically a mall food court but we didn't follow the local rule.  Get a seat leave something on the table then get your food.  We walked around looking for a seat with food.  We will NEVER do that again.  Lesson learned. Oh yea and no napkins provided.  I guess if you have to use your sleeve you won't find napkins as trash on the floor.  The place was immaculate! The entire area is completely clean not one speck of trash to be seen.

Off to another nearby mall that  I'm dubbing the expat gift and whole foods mall.  Inside was way less crcowded and not filled with the local crowd.  There were touristy shops that sell Asian items to send home.  There were really beautiful but horribly expensive stores from England.  The best yet was the whole food type of grocery store downstairs with the most expensive produce I have ever seen.  $38 for a small bunch of cherries. Yikes

Back to our area of town and the local crowd.  Since we live in houses it's more suburban at the northern end of Singapore.  As with any area, distance from the city means less expensive so we live near huge condo complexes that might be govt subsidized but are still very pretty.  Just not the condos with gyms and pools featured on househunters international. The mall at our subway stop includes a local grocery which is not overly priced for local items.  However, I found $9 Ben and Jerry's ice cream there.   There is a food court that has lots to choose from including pig organ soup -icky won't be trying that.

I'm not quite sure what my opinion is of Singapore yet but it's not exactly what I expected.....