Singapore!!!!

Director Chick, me and small fry one and two have just been to Singapore for Christmas - God it was good, apart from the hideous cold I picked up that turned into bronchitis and sinusitis - I mean you know it's good when you spend $4 and eat aMAZINGLY yummy hainanese chicken rice, or 90 cents and get a great cup of tea/coffee :-) :-) Also loved that whenever i broke a note in Singers i ended up with loads of $2 notes, so felt richer than when we began....such good foodcourts/hawkers centres in Singers - they put western foodcourts with their hideous greasiness to shame!!! So good that i took hardly any photos, too busy eating and coughing all round Singapore.

I did get photos of some Char Siew rice dumlings down in the basement of Carrefour in Suntec City - like a gigantic Kmart with a massive grocery store underneath.. and the choice! I thought we had choice in Australia, but we really don't. I was paralysed by the range of stuff you could buy and fascinated by the different signage - in particular the "adult diaper" sign.

Good and GREAT food places we found - the foodcourt stall on level 3 under the Swissotel the Stamford where they carved off the noodles by hand, Din Tai Fung at Raffles City (amazing dumplings and you can stand there and have a cup of green tea offered by the staff and watch as the chefs make your dumplings by hand and then cook them), J Co Doughnuts (those coffee cream filled ones were a killer!!! I ate like 10 of them!!!) downstairs at Raffles City, carrot cake at Newton Hawker Centre - and not the carrot cake we know and love, a savoury version made of radishes and eggs and such - Ananda Bhavan in Little India, the best vego food I ate, Thunder Tea Rice, a freaky combination of brown rice, yummy mixed veges, peanuts, dried shrimp and tea broth, Hainanese chicken rice everywhere was pretty good, i got obsessed with teh tarik - pulled milk tea with condensed milk - and dipping roti prata into it. I tried some of those fried savoury donutty looking things - they were ok with tea!!!

Not so good food - i adventurously tried a kaya toast set - two half boiled eggs (yuk! they're all boogery and you crack them into a bowl and then mix them with soy sauce and pepper), kaya toast (thick slabs of butter and kaya jam made from coconut milk between two slices of toast) and a cup of teh or kopi (tea or coffee) - eek!!! it was weird. But just to make sure it wasn't my starvation clouding my judgement i went again another time - and it was just as bad :-(

Highlights? Being whisked thru immigration as soon as they spotted our tired grrl sitting on her bag, our hotel, spending Xmas Day at Singapore Zoo breakfasting with the Orangutans, the beyond family-friendly vibe of Singapore...

Did I love Singapore? Why yes I did - it was the ideal first overseas trip with two little ones :-) yeah yeah can't wait to go back and finish our list of things to do!!!