Singapore - Day One

Oh wow. I don't know where to begin. After not getting much sleep, we woke and met the rest of our group at breakfast in the hotel/inn/hostel/place...Then we decided to adventure a bit before we had to meet up with the entire group, so a few of us walked to the nearest mall and looked at all the shiny stores and pretty things. It is not quite difficult to get around and find things, since everything is in English...but all the same, there was a lot to take in. We walked across from the mall to an open air market-type place, except it was sort of indoors because it had a roof over it. There were food stalls everywhere and different sections based on what you wanted - fish, vegetarian, etc. It was very overwhelming. We eventually found some lunch, and I had my first Singaporean meal! It was delicious. I suppose it's a good thing I am not a picky eater and I do enjoy asian food!
It was pouring while we were eating lunch, and it continued to do so for the majority of the afternoon. It seems that it will be raining a lot while we are here, but it doesn't seem to bother the locals. They all are used to it, I suppose. Everyone carries an umbrella. I shall have to go buy one at the many possible locations for only about 6 US dollars. There is another interesting part of the country...Food everywhere is relatively cheap unless you go to a nicer restaurant, but even then with the exchange rate it is much cheaper than in the US. Other amenities are cheaper as well, but all the alcohol we saw in the grocery store ran up to 50-100 US dollars, or more! Very expensive in that realm.
We had orientation in the afternoon, and we walked to the National University of Singapore to do that. Apparently this is where we will be having lecture and such. It is a very nice place, but very very big! I suppose it reminds me of OSU. It is definitely bigger than Wittenberg, and I don't know if I could handle being in such a place where you have to take a bus to get to your next class! The schedule for our next two weeks looks very exciting, and we have evenings mostly free, so we will have a chance to explore a bit on our own too.
For dinner we went into the city, which was quite an adventure. We decided it might be a good idea to walk to the nearest metro station - which was a really really long walk, it turned out. Then the metro wasn't too bad to navigate. I always thought it would be much more efficient to have such a system in the states. Anyway - we eventually came to our destination, which was very very touristy. Even though we are tourists, we didn't quite feel like we fit in that general theme, and it was considerably more crowded. We were hungry, though, so we settled on a random restaurant by the river, which was nice. Post-dinner we decided we were too tired to explore anymore, which was sad because the whole place was a lot nicer and more exciting once it had gotten darker and different crowds of people were milling about. We may have to go back to that place sometime, but who knows. There are many, many things to do here!
Getting back to the Inn was a bit more of an adventure since we didn't feel like walking. We tried to wait for a bus but that took forever so we moved to the taxi bay and got one of those instead, since the Inn really wasn't that far away by vehicle. People drive on the left side of the road, and I sat in the passenger's seat of the taxi this time. It was a little disorienting, and I'm just glad that I don't have to drive while I'm here!
Now I am very very tired, so I will probably forget something in this particular blog..But I'm trying not to slack off right away! So this is what you get for the first day - perhaps I'll remember exciting things to add in later. Good night!

I am also going to post pictures, but I'm not quite sure how to do that here...so I will put them on Facebook for now and figure out a way to have them here as well...but later, not tonight. Haha - bedtime.

**edited 3/18/09 - figured out how to get pictures (i think). I got a Picasa account through Google to upload all my photos into albums I can link to on here. This way they can be separate from Facebook and visible to everybody..also I can post more interesting pictures there haha.

Singapore Photos Day One

Oh - and the first few pictures of this album are actually in the Hong Kong airport.