Day 262: Skyship (and Rain)

Without anything terribly pressing to hunt down in Singapore, my first day was a meandering exploration with another guest at the hostel. The exact route we took doesn't much matter, but we covered the majority of the city center, including the bay, the business district, the Muslim, Indian and Chinese districts, and a variety of other places, mostly while lost and not really knowing where we were going.

As I mentioned before, architecture is pretty impressive in Singapore. They have a lot of money, a lot of people, and not all that much space, so the inclination is to build up, and to build fancy. Things in Singapore don't get much more fancy then the Marina Bay Sands. Marina Bay Sands is a hotel/casino/shopping mall resort complex standing over the bay. It cost $8 billion (yes, billion) to build, and the hotel consists of 3 towers that support a giant ship/park. I know that sentences is confusing.

Three towers, giant ship, see? The bay has a lot to see around it, including a double-helix shaped bridge and a skyline of a bunch more tall hotels and office towers. We walked around the bay once earlier in the day, then again at night to see all the lights. Here are a few random mix of pictures from the area.

At one point late in the afternoon we were walking through a park when we saw dramatic black clouds coming towards us as if the armies of Mordor were afoot. Just as the rain started to turn from drizzle to downpour we jumped into a random shopping mall (Singapore is one of the few places I've been where seven floor shopping malls are truly random buildings strewn about). The ground floor was littered with cafes and restaurants, but a few odd things caught my attention and led me to investigate the mall more thoroughly. My suspicious about the mall proved correct when I checked out the 5th floor and found 6 video game stores, 2 video gaming accessory stores, 4 stores relating to other forms of games, and 5 stores selling figurines and models. It was a nerd mall. It was actually more of an electronics mall, and the 5th floor was where the nerdier elements of it gathered, but still, a fortunate refuge from the storm.