Singapore: First Impression

I am on a business trip to Bangalore India. The trip via Hongkong and then Singapore on Singapore Airlines elapsed 32 hours (my longest air travel so far), which made the 11-hour trip to Shanghai seem trivial. I wanted use the other route via Frankfurt (22 hours) but it was completely sold out. Well, this 32-hour trip turned out to be not nearly as bad as I thought. Travelling West definitely helped. I adjusted to the Hongkong time (GMT -8, same as Singapore time) first and then 3.5 hours more to India time during one long day. I was able to sleep quite some on the 3 flights. The Singapore Airlines agent at San Francisco Airport was great to book the best seat in Economy Class for me, an isle seat in the first row of a segment (and thus now seats before me and more than ample leg room). BTW, she didn't ask. She just figured I am tall I guess.

The 9-hour lay-over in Singapore turned out to be great. I didn't faint walking under the scorching sun with sleep deprivation. Singapore looks very Chinese to me because most people you see are Chinese. But it also feels weird to hear good Mandarin spoken by the average people in a foreign place. Most signs are in English (Is the average Joe on the street really that good at English?). Singapore is indeed a clean place, as I had heard before. All the way from the aiport to down town to around the city, I could hardly find one building that was not clean. The whole place just seemed so orderly. People were very easy, unlike in other large cities where you have to fight your way all the time.

Before you see the pictures, make sure you remember to click on each picture to see its caption IF you view them in a slide show. Flickr doesn't support seeing the captions in a slide show, which is a missing feature in high demand.

Link to the pictures.