18th January 2011
No photos to attach to this blog, ‘cos we didn’t take any. Today felt more like being back home. We got up late, we went out and had breakfast. First stop was for a haircut, long overdue. Then the serious business of going shopping. This is the first time we’ve “gone shopping” in six months, all our purchases so far being either souvenirs or a quick stop for necessary re-supplies like toothpaste.
Probably typical of any visitors entirely new to a big city and with no local friends to help, we found ourselves bouncing from malls stuffed with designer brands like Bvlgari and D&G intended to milk money from 5-star hotel guests, to malls stuffed with generic high street names like New Look and Gap intended for the local masses. What we were after, eclectic and individual shops selling interesting stuff, were no doubt tucked in some out-of-the-way neighbourhood as they are everywhere.
That said, central Singapore is as crammed with shops as London, although less visibly as they almost universally hide in giant air-conditioned malls, and so we managed to find what we wanted more or less. It wasn’t a huge binge like we might accidentally engage in back home on a day trip down to Brighton, but it’s satisfying to have a couple of new things. Now we just need to work out which other things have to go back home to make room.
Shopping done, we discovered it was past 8:30PM so we found a cinema and watched a film on a big screen for the first time in six months. It was “The Fighter” and a worthy couple of hours entertainment; good performances from Wahlberg and Bale. Can’t really report much difference between Singapore cinemas and London ones, except being about half the price and doubly full of cinema-goers. Might be a correlation there.
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