hiding from Singapore in Sentosa for a day

Oh dear, haven't updated in a while, I have a backlog of events to talk about, but we'll start with a big one, Sentosa Island :-)

Sentosa Island is Singapore's man-made resort island, filled with beaches, a golf course, hotels, and amusements like aquarium, walking trails, observatory towers, butterfly garden, museum, etc. -- and this humongous iconic Merlion statue of Singapore.

>> Facebook album here << In the morning, we took the cable car starting from Mount Fable - it passes Vivo City over Harbourfront to Sentosa. Quite a nice view, but it's hard to take good pictures from inside a cable car. Also, the side of Sentosa that faces Singapore is under massive construction so it's kinda ugly, but cool in a mech-e ugly metal way haha. They're expanding the resort island to include a Six Flags! and other amusement park stuff, wow it's scheduled to open in 2010. A nice relaxing ride to Sentosa --

We had a package ticket, so the first place we went to was the aquarium. I've been to Atlanta, Georgia's, which is the biggest in the world, so this aquarium wasn't amazing and much smaller, but it had a really good collection of crabs, haha, and the fish here are extremely big. The underwater world is such a mystery to humans, they subsist in their tiny little microcosms, watching them is amazing. A complicated dance for survival. Truly, to a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower...

I was sort of afraid of touch the starfish o.O

Okay too many fishies pictures to put up, the Facebook album has only a few of them. I'm adding a jellyfish one here because it's cool :D

Then we went to those 3D Cinemagic things where you wear those weird glasses and sit in this box that moves around and simulates the experience of a roller coaster. The 15-minute movie simulated the audience as a log that was going through a processing factory, oh my god -_- We got rolled around, chopped up, plummeted downwards, soaked through, thrown away.... my eyes were dizzy and my head hurt O.O haha but it was quite fun besides that --

And to make my headache worse, we decided to go down a hill on a luge, lol. A luge is kind of like a go-kart type thing you can steer on a track downhill, ahhhhh I suck at driving in real life, how can I drive a luge haha. You can see the luge track and people in the right side of the picture, this was taken when we were on the chair lift back uphill:

When we were on the chairlift back, the girl in front of us dropped her purse onto the hill below. When she first shrieked, you could see it all in slow motion -- she is trying to grab the bright yellow bag at the last second but it falls just below her grasp, the bag rotating in the air due to the shifting momentum and spilling out her wallet -- then gravity speeds up the free fall and the bag lands decisively on the green green hill below, its contents in a disarray like guts spilled after a hari-kari. (Haha okay not as morbid as my analogy.) We all laughed, herself included.

Afterwards, we had lunch with a nice beer overlooking part of the island and harbour, relaxation and a breeze. Good food, good drink, good company, good environment -- what more could one ask for? :-)

We went to catch the Dolphin Show at the lagoon -- I thought pink dolphins were fake -_- haha but apparently there are some pink dolphins, the color coming from the water they live in and eat. The ones we saw, only the snout, head, and some fin parts were pink, the rest became the shade of normal dolphin grey. It started raining hard soon after the show started, and the show itself wasn't great anyway. I was out on the beach area without any overhang, so I got soaked, but I didn't mind too much. The rain stopped when the show finished actually, haha.


We had to wait forever to get on the bus to get back to the main area because it was all rainy and there was a massive amount of people waiting for the bus. We went to take a look at the gigantic Merlion and took a few pictures, typical must-do tourist thing :D

We decided to go into a Singapore museum, Images of Singapore, that chronicles Singapore's whole history from beginning of colonization to modern day. It's filled with wax people and little scenes from different history periods and explanations of cultural groups, traditions, customs, etc. Singapore was originally composed of the Chinese, Malay, Eurasians, and Indians, so there is lots of varied history. It ended up being extremely interesting (I'm still a history buff at heart) and we started there longer than anticipated. I came home and realized I took way too many pictures of wax people and furniture, for no particular reason or use, hahaha.


We wanted to go to the Butterfly Garden, but it was already closing. I took a picture at the entrance, then after I finished, this group of Indian men came up to me and asked me something unintelligible. I thought they wanted me to take a picture *for* them, but one of them smiled and said: "If tiz oh-kay wit you and if tiz oh-kay wit yur friend." I'm like... huh? Why do you want to take a picture with me?? O.O.... so I bewilderedly took a picture with them, my friend took the picture along with the other Indian men just so I could have a record of it haha... as you can see, I was trying to space myself from them and hence sort of blocked the sign, plus I had a weird smile/look on my face lol

Normal picture >>>
Creepy what-is-going-on picture >>>

That wondrous event basically marked the end of my Sentosa trip, afterwards we took the cable car to Vivo City for dinner and rest, so incredibly tired from walking around and being in the hot sun all day -- wave good bye to the great Merlion :-)

To return to the city... sigh it seemed like we were so far away, yet we were just across the strait. The strait where worries and stress cannot cross, where even time does not obey normal physics. Time slowed down for us that day; I could feel it as I sat on the Vivo City terrace steps, looking over the harbourfront at the Sentosa that I just left behind, looking over Sentosa at the Cygnus constellation flying south. Every breeze that flew by whispered in my ear to cherish that day. Carpe diem.