Wed 27th Dec – Singapore (Marina Bay Barrage, Stadium)

We’ve been waking up at the Fullerton around 8.30am. I booked the cheapest room, which is an atrium room that opens into the interior of the hotel with very little natural light so it’s not hard to roll over and go back to sleep. A successful strategy I am employing to reduce my kopi intake is to have a pod coffee at the hotel in the morning while Declan wakes up. Doing so probably grants me an extra year of good health in my life.

It’s a consistently wet day and it’s a little challenging to think of the best way to spend it. Declan goes to a sci-fi exhibition that he’s pretty disappointed by. We walk to Marina Barrage, which is at the end of Gardens by the Bay, to see the masses of queuing cargo ships and military aircraft coming in to land. There’s a thunderstorm that comes through so again we’re stuck for at least an hour milling about. At Marina Barrage there’s a permanent sustainability exhibition, and it’s undercover and free, and I now know a little bit about Singapore’s waste schemes. All non-recyclable landfill is incinerated but as a land-poor country, the refuge from incineration fills a man-made island 8km south of the island. It’s estimated that by 2035 this man made island will be full. There is no reference to what happens after that.

Having spent as much time in the sustainability exhibition as possible and with a supposed break in the rain, we head off towards the Stadium area. Stadium is where Taylor Swift will play six shows in March (her only South East Asia shows). It’s kind of like a shopping mall equivalent to the Entertainment Quarter in Sydney. Features of the Stadium precinct include: a wave pool, a robotics school, a gymnastics, a VR games centre and various other assorted expensive ways to entertain children between the ages of five and twelve.

After heading back towards the city and eating a lot of dumplings for lunch/dinner, we’re both pretty tired and spend the evening in the hotel room. Declan figures out how to cast YouTube from his phone to the tv. We watch a lot of YouTube.