Singapore - A Very Modern City

Singapore is a city of contrasts, combining a mixture of cultures, each with their own district, ultra modern with Colonial buildings and food.... Oh the food! It is amazing!! You can eat authentic Chinese, Malay, Thai, Indian and the usual Western fayre, for prices so low, they are quite frankly upsetting!! Let's start with the Airport at Changi - super-sophisticated and efficient, but has green areas with live birds(in cages) singing away. Just take a look at the 1st photo of the luggage collection area.
Singapore is also gearing up for the forthcoming Formula 1 GP, which they will be hosting for the 1st time ever and to make it more exciting it's being held at night. The 1st hotel we stayed in had a life-size Formula 1 car made of chocolate in the lobby. Have at look at the stats to get your mouth watering....
The last 2 photos are probably how you picture Singapore, so we thought we'd put them in.

Hever Castle & Suraya

Before we show and talk to you about Singapore, we found some photos on our phone that we had to share with you.

The 1st two are of baby Suraya only 3 days old, en-route back from hospital - how cute!

The photos that follow are of Hever Castle, the old home of Ann Boleyn - Henry VIII's 2nd wife, for those of you who have been watching "The Tudors".

The last 4 weeks

The last 4 weeks have been so hectic, that we haven't had a moment to update the blog. So here we are trying to tell you about the last 4 weeks in one short post, with lots of photos.
You can tell how hectic it was as we spent the time seeing two new born babies, attending 2 weddings and plenty of events in between, not to mention trying to spend what little time we had with family and friends.
We flew from Tokyo to Singapore, just for a few days, which we'll tell you about later, as we are back in Singapore now.
We flew from Singapore to London, arrived at Heathrow, 1st stop to see Sima and Anit's new baby girl; the beautiful Suraya. Sima is Shivani's sister and Anit her husband, for those of you who don't know. We went to see both sets of parents, who fed us like there was no tomorrow(we think it's because we looked thinner than they remembered us). Next we went to see Tina's cute baby Jia, which you can see Sandip(Shivani's brother) holding in the picture. The photo of Sandip sleeping is on the day of his registry wedding and the pictures that follow were also taken on that day. Our favourite photo is of Sandip and his new bride The Beautiful Bhavini, who is a regular Blog reader. It was nice to see that Sandip scrubbed up well for the day.
After the registry, Sandip had a ceremony done called "Vidhi", which part of included the females of the family covering him in a yellow mixture called "Pithi", a tradition designed to make him look more handsome for the Indian Wedding ceremony. You can see Sandip and Bhavini sitting at the head table just minutes after getting married in one of the photos.
We did try and fit in some sightseeing whilst we were in London, after all we were technically still travellers. So we went to Hever Castle with Andrew's Mum and had a brilliant day out, but forgot to take our camera. The next and only other place we visited was Cliveden House, a very picturesque place, which we visited with Shivani's Mum and visiting Aunt & Uncle from America.
We had a major crisis though....... We lost our camera with 4 weeks of photos on it, so most of the ones you see here are borrowed. We are even more upset that we lost all the amazing photos we took of Suraya and Jia. The Photos are not in order, so we apologise.

Sayonara Japan

We've had a wonderful time in Japan and wanted to say goodbye or "sayonara" with a few photos of the people/characters we came across along the way, that you haven't already seen.

Cool Japan

As we near the end of our time in Japan, we thought we'd show a few of the other pics we took of various cool stuff.
1st up is a sign in our hotel foyer; as you can see, we think they want us for a meeting in the lobby?!
The 2nd is of a "Love Hotel", which you may have heard of. They are often themed hotels that hire out rooms by the hour, for the busy Japanese to have a "rest". They are mostly automated, to avoid human contact and any embarassment the guest may have.
The 3rd photo we took as we were walking down the street. It is of a man collecting his car from a car park. The cars were being moved around on this rotating carousel-type machine, until it got to the man's - very cool.
The last photo not only reminded us of home, but we thought it was pretty cool to have Posh staring at her husband Becks, in his pants from on top of a building.

Obligatory Museam Visit

We couldn't visit a major world city and not take in one of the many museums on offer, but we could visit the coolest one with lots of robots and flashing lights.
As you saw from a previous post, we visited The Museum of Science and Emerging Technologies in Tokyo, so here are a few more pics for your perusal.
The building in the photo is not of the museum, but a neighbouring office tower in Tokyo Bay, which housed a TV network and looked much more futuristic.

Macau II

What's this? We thought we were in Japan, did we just stumble back to The Venetian in Macau? Where's the casino?
No, this is a shopping mall in Tokyo geared towards female shoppers called Venus Fort styled in the same manner as The Venetian.
We found another dog and adult clothing store, this one specialising in Labrador and Retriever stuff.
Thankfully, there was a car display there as well, including the "Back To The Future" car, so Andrew was catered for.