Our last day together

Trip Start Jul 03, 2009

Trip End Jul 26, 2009

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Flag of Singapore Singapore, Singapore
Saturday, July 18, 2009

Flesh eating fish nibbling on my feet, flying high over Singapore in a 2 ton capsule, a food hawker food court, and a Night Safari were on the list today of Singapore activities, the last day of our honeymoon. Tomorrow Paul and I will head off in separate directions. He's heading to work in San Francisco and I'm going to Hong Kong, Macau, and then Kuala Lumpar. We'll meet up in a little over a week and resume our married life. At the conclusion of our honeymoon I think we are both pleasantly pleased how well it all went and more importantly how well we did traveling together. It's not that either of us had major concerns in regards to this trip; however, we just weren't sure as we haven't traveled this long or this far together before. Because it went so well we're now both pretty bummed about it ending but they'll be more trips.
Now onto more details about our tourist activities today. Paul and I started out the day with a trip to the Singapore Flyer, a new Ferris Wheel type structure, that enables riders to see the entire city. At the summit, it's 165 meters tall and each capsule weighs 2 tons and can hold up to 28 people. The ride was very smooth and you couldn't even feel that you were moving. An audio guide along with a map helped visitors decipher what they were looking at in the city. Following the Singapore flyer, we headed over for a very unique spa treatment. Over this past year, I've seen two TV shows in the US that showed pedicures involving fish that would eat the dead skin off of your feet but had never seen any spas that offered this service. Well, they're quite popular here in Singapore and I was very excited to check them out. The fish are called Garra rufa or "doctor fish" and are used to help heal psoriasis and increase blood circulation. I thought I would receive the treatment and have super smooth feet but in reality I just had a neat experience. After sticking my feet in an aquarium, the fish immediately swarmed around my feet and calves nibbling away creating a vibrating sensation. Initially, it was a very weird sensation and tickled but at the end of my 30 minute session I was used to it.
For lunch, we visited one of the city's many hawker centers. These locations are basically just open air food courts with a large variety of food. Each stall has a letter attached to it (i.e., A, B,C, or D) which indicates their level of cleanliness with "A" being the most clean and so on. We thought that was a pretty creative system that allowed consumers to see the health rating. Unfortunately, Paul and I did not find even one stall with an "A" rating so we settled on a "B" rated stall. The end result was good food and that was enough for us.
This evening we visited Singapore's Night Safari. The Night Safari is an open facility on a large piece of land in town. You have the option of taking a tram through the park, viewing a few different shows, and walking trails. We though the whole thing was going to be pretty cheesy but after numerous recommendations we checked it out and weren't disappointed. The variety of animals were quite different than in the US and we were able to see most of them at least for a brief period of time. I think we were probably most impressed with the size of the bats as we ventured through one of the trails. I seriously had no idea that bats could be that big nor that their teeth were so large. I'm glad it was more interested in the carrot it was eating than me.
We're heading to bed as we both have early flights to catch tomorrow. I'll continue to send updates over the next week of my travels. Although, I'm watching the news now and it appears that a typhoon is heading to Hong Kong which will impact our flights. Heavy sigh. We'll just have to wait to see what tomorrow brings. I hope you all have a great weekend.

Live, love, laugh,
Alicia

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