Bodhi Bum

Just a quick entry here to post up some pics from the weekend spent day-tripping around Singapore. It was the usual weekend spent working for a few hours each day, so I took off Saturday and Sunday afternoon to see how the Singaporeans spend their weekends off. Saturday I spent the afternoon rambling around Orchard Road and experiencing the capitalist hysteria which is Singapore. My god these people know how to shop. Orchard Road consists of one street about 8 blocks long with about three shopping malls per block. It's like every country in the world wanted to build a shopping mall here, so they just all went ahead and did it. There's Japanese shopping malls, Chinese ones, a few French ones, the standard low budget Indonesian ones, American malls, and everything else. Plus with so much competition they have to get people inside using not so subtle tactics, like placing stages with massive sound systems and really, really hyper sales people screaming in loudspeakers everyone who walks by. Great place.

Sunday I caught the cable car out to Sentosa Island and spent the day hiking around the island. It's incredibly overpriced as there is about thirty different attractions like Underwater World, Dolphin Lagoon, Buttefly World, Sentosa Tower, the old Fort, etc, etc, which cost an arm and a leg. Me, I paid for the 10 Sing ride out there and spent the day for free hiking around the hiking trails looking at bugs and stuff. Check out the pics of this really cool giant spider I found in the jungle. I wanted to take it home, but thought the custom officials on the flight back to London wouldn't approve. I wasted about an hour feeding the thing until I remembered that Singapore was in the middle of a Duenge Fever problem and I was standing in the jungle without fly dope and getting eaten alive by misquitoes. Good thing it wasn't morning when the deadly mozzies are usually out.

Bodhi