3 days in Singapore (2022)

This August 2022, we were #blessed to have one of our incredible bffs invite us to a week-long stay in Bali, Indonesia for their birthday. Since I didn't want to be traveling for three days nonstop to get to Bali, we decided to turn our layover in Singapore to a 3-day stopover so we could rest and get over jet lag.

Day 1: exploring Changi Airport

The flight to Singapore was brutal: close to 18 hours direct. Also brutal was having to share the same air with people who seemed to enjoy spraying their potentially COVID-filled particulates everywhere -- like literally sometimes into my face -- as if they were one of those people who work the mall perfume counters and misguidedly believe you would want to be covered in their latest fragrance. It's still baffling to me that a lot of people are unable and unwilling to do something as simple as sneeze and cough into a tissue or their elbow, especially after enduring a pandemic 2+ years long with a highly-transmissible and deadly disease (618 million cases, to be exact). This is a habit we should all practice regardless of COVID! I too, am tired of the pandemic, but I do my part as best I can. It's not like I enjoy getting "maskne" (aka a pimple outbreak from your mask) from sweating in my KN95 for 18 hours.

We landed in Singapore at 6AM two calendar days later. Haggard and delusional from fatigue, we spent the next hour running between terminals looking for the mythical day-use showers. Changi Airport has several airport lounges scattered throughout its four terminals, where you can snack, drink, take showers, and even book naptime in private rooms! Some were closed and some didn't allow you to use only the shower, but the Plaza Premium Lounge in T1 does. The rates weren't the SGD16 listed on the website, but closer to SGD42 (~$30 USD). We felt that it was worth the money to start the day in a new country feeling fresh. The showers were clean and well-equipped with bath towels and a small toiletries kit!

Since we wouldn't have a lot of time to spend in Changi on the way back, we decided to do all our exploring there on the first day: seeing the butterfly garden, art installations, and of course, the Jewel at Changi.

Jewel is a several-storied mall across a walking bridge from the airport that has everything you could think of to keep you entertained during your layover. There's a giant indoor park on the top floor with sky bridges, mazes and slides and walking nets, four floors of food courts and high-end restaurants (some Michelin-starred!), and of course, several floors of luxury-brand shopping. It's absolutely wild. We were only planning on being there to kill time until we could check-in at 2pm, and ended up staying until 3pm feeling like we still had more to explore. And neither of us even like shopping.

Sitting at the heart of Jewel is the rain vortex: the world's tallest indoor waterfall. The falls cascade 70 feet down through the center of a terraced rainforest that outlines the inner atrium of the mall. It's absurd and incredible to have the option to walk trails where 900 full-grown trees and palms and 60,000 shrubs are growing indoors in a mall airport.

I was so hangry by the time we got to Jewel, and frustrated to discover that most food stalls didn't open until 10-11AM. United Airlines did not have any vegetarian food for me because their buggy mobile and web app did not save my dietary accommodation request. They had one meal available (through pure luck) for the first service and it was completely inedible: bread so stale that I couldn't rip it in half, and a noodle dish that had more salt and oil than noodles. I luckily brought granola bars and fruit from home onto the flight to tide me over for the 18 hour flight.

The Hainan Story: Chapter Two on B2 was one of the few restaurants open at 9AM. The restaurant has a bakery in the front where you can buy goodies such as mochi and pineapple breads, cakes, and traditional Hainanese desserts while you wait for your meal. The menu surprisingly had decent vegetarian options; I had my heart set on the Hainanese claypot curry with stewed vegetables and jasmine rice. Alas, they didn't offer the vegetarian menu items until 10:30AM! I really wanted an actual meal, but settled on the kaya toast set. D ordered his first bowl of laksa of the trip and said it was pretty good!

Both of us started to crash after breakfast. Luckily for us there was a gorgeous Starbucks Reserve in Jewel and we spent the next hour doing a coffee tasting and chatting with the barista. Hopped on caffeine, we played with literally every single gadget at the Miniso and Muji stores for the next couple of hours.

At 3PM, it was finally time to head to our hotel. I did a decent amount of research before picking a place, but was still happily surprised with the fantastic location of our hotel! Our cute loft was nestled in the alleyways of the City Hall district of Singapore, only a few blocks from the MRT station. After we dropped off our bags, we headed off to our first hawker market: the Maxwell Food Centre. The walk took us across the Singapore River and into Chinatown.

I loved walking among the colorful Peranakan buildings squished next to shiny, modern skyscrapers, listening to old Asian people sing American country music and doing Tai Chi in the neighborhood square, and watching locals filter in and out of Buddhist and Hindu temples and mosques. It was nice seeing that people of different languages, cultures, and religions can adapt to existing alongside one another.

We also passed so many beautiful bonsai trees -- many just casually sitting in front of a house or on the sidewalk. D told me that bonsai is a really common hobby in Southeast Asia and that you can randomly find bonsai trees more beautiful than those you'd find in a curated garden in Los Angeles, versus it being a more inaccessible (read: expensive, sometimes pretentious) art to practice in the US.

Not many stalls were open at Maxwell Food Centre around 4PM, so we just did a little walk-through. I was hoping I could at least find a snack there since the kaya toast from the morning was not filling enough. Unfortunately, but not unexpected, there were no vegetarian options at any of the 50+ (or more?) food stalls there. Singapore is a difficult place to be vegetarian!

The mid-afternoon heat was desiccating and we were craving some delicious air conditioning. As we walked back to the hotel, we used the many malls along the way as cool-down stations. Both of us were stoked to find a huge, 40-to-50-foot indoor top-roping wall in the center of one of the malls. If only we had brought our climbing shoes!

We decided to grab dinner at the Din Tai Fung in Raffles City a few blocks from the hotel. I've been a dedicated fan of Din Tai Fung for decades, but I feel like it's been on a steep decline in service and food quality ever since the original owner passed on the business to his sons. The chain used to be famous for having strict quality control across all their branches and also accommodating of dietary restrictions.

At this Raffles City branch, however, my only option was spinach dumplings. Most weren't even sealed properly!! The filling was different from what I've had before as well; everything was ground so finely that it felt like I was gumming a flavorless paste. I also couldn't get any of my usual favorites: 小菜 (xiao3cai4 - a starter with glass noodles, chilies, finely-shredded beancurd, and seaweed)，油然麵 (you3ran3mian4 - a chili-oil noodle dish),and 蛋炒飯(dan4chao3fan4 - egg-fried rice) because apparently everything was "pre-made" with meat so they couldn't make it vegetarian. A disappointing day for food.

By the time we were back at the hotel, we had both been awake for close to 36 hours. It felt so good to take a proper shower, brush our teeth, and wash our faces after smelling of airport and city for so long. The moment my body hit the bed, I was out for the night.

Day 2: Singapore Zoo and Night Safari

Today was the day I was most excited about: the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari! I fell in love with the Singapore Zoo when I first visited ten years ago. I had never been to a zoo where you could be walking to the bathroom and see monkeys scurrying overhead.

A lot of zoos and "rescue" centers tend to be exploitative and destructive (*ahem* Tiger King), so I do my best to research the facility before I go. (The San Diego Zoo, for that reason, is one of the few zoos/conservation/animal research organizations that I'm willing to visit.) The Singapore Zoo has a pretty solid conservation track record and is one of the few zoos to provide free-ranging exhibits for most of their animals.

One of the otters had been staring at us for a few minutes before it scampered off suddenly. We thought it went off to do otter things (pun intended), but a couple minutes later, it came running back with its friends and the three of them just chittered together while they stared at us like this for the next several minutes. Made us wonder if we were the animals on exhibit.

Warning: a gratuitous number of photos of a really cute sloth.

Don't you want to pinch those cheeks? I do. But we don't touch wild animals, and need to remember to give them oodles of space. (These were all taken with a zoom lens.)

Hope you enjoyed that photo series of some of the animals we saw! I was 100% that kid in elementary school who read through all the Zoobooks and zoology section of the library, and would reread them every year to refresh my knowledge until the 4th grade.

The zoo isn't big, so we had pretty much finished walking through it in the early afternoon. Our tickets to the Night Safari weren't valid until opening at 6:30PM, so we decided to visit the River Wonders park next to the zoo as well, where you can see LeLe, where the first panda cub in Singapore was born!

I was also really excited to see manatees at the park. They were one of my favorite animals as a kid since they were vegetarian, lol. I actually still have a number of manatee plushies in my parents' house, as well as a rather large beanie babies collection.

One of the most surprising aspects of the park experience: actually good meal options. Laksa, curries that come with rice and roti or naan, mini-hot pots, fresh smoothies...etc. It was a relief to not have to eat junk food like hamburgers, fries, and pizza. There were also so many cuisines offered throughout the park: Indian, Chinese, Peranakan, and many halal options too. I got a spicy pot of vegetable stir-fry with rice that was good (albeit a bit too salty)!

My recommendation for doing the Night Safari is to get onto the tram early in your experience. The tram drives you through a majority of the exhibits and some that aren't accessible by foot. The line never gets shorter, so it's better to just do it in the beginning and you can get a better sense of what you'd like to see on foot. I couldn't get any pictures because it was too dark even with the camera cranked up to ISO32000. There were a ton of cuties, although some we missed out on because we couldn't find the exhibit, like the pangolins and giant flying squirrels.

Day 3: Marina Bay Sands and Orchard

We had a pretty slow morning on day three. Woke up, ate a Hainanese breakfast, walked around a bit, and headed to Yi Xin Vegetarian Food in Chinatown for lunch. I was stoked to be finally eating the kind of food I wanted to be eating: braised goods, stir-fried veggies, curry noodles, skewers, bak kut teh, and laksa! We kind of went a lil' crazy with ordering since I felt like I had been hungry since the moment we landed. The food was delicious, cheap, and quick. I think we spent $3-5/dish. It was fantastic. Highly recommend this place, even if you're not vegetarian. Good food is good food.

D had to work the rest of the day, so I had some free-form time in the afternoon. I did my physical therapy exercises and tried out a massage at one of the spas nearby. The massage was disappointing and regrettably not even cheap. I generally have had only positive experiences getting massages in Asia, but I felt like I was just getting gently poked for an hour at the cost of $130 USD. Ah well.

I was happy when D got off work so we could maximize the last hours of our last day in Singapore. We took the bus to the famous Marina Bay Sands hotel and did a speed-run of the Gardens by the Bay as the sun was setting. I really wish we had at least half of the afternoon to walk through it since it is enormous. There are so many cool attractions like the Cloud Forest, Flower Dome, and Supertrees that had already let in the last entries for the day by the time we arrived. As my aunt likes to say: leave a little bit of regret when you travel, so you'll have to visit again. We'll be back next time, Singapore.

Then there was a matter of what to do for our last dinner here. I wanted to check out Orchard Road and thought it was also a good opportunity for D to go big and get the chili crab at the famous JUMBO Seafood at the ION Orchard mall. I think he was a little aghast at the price and size of even the smallest chili crab dish, which serves ~2-3 people. We'd been taking the evening a little slow and did not realize how early restaurants closed in Singapore. By 9PM, most of the restaurants nearby were doing last call.

One of the places that still had an open kitchen was Yun Nans, which serves Yunnan cuisine. It was expensive for the portion sizes, but the food was pretty decent. We ordered this tasty chili/garlic fried tofu dish, some veggies, Yunnan corn cakes (think cornbread pressed into pancake form), and a dish of fresh, wild porcini with red chilies. The latter kind of had a goat cheese-like funk, which was not what I expected for a mushroom. D loved it since he loves funky, stinky foods like blue cheese. I honestly felt like gagging and tried really hard to like it since wild porcini is expensive and rare, but gave up after the second slice.

There was one more place for D to get chili crab, hopefully at a lower price and in a quantity one person could eat: Lau Pa Sat. Note: this was also the hawker center featured in Crazy Rich Asians! I had read a lot of reviews that it became too popular and touristy after the movie, but we still went since it's also known for having a lot of chili crab stalls. All of them were still really expensive though, like SGD30/dish!

Our flight to Bali the next day wasn't until the afternoon, so we stayed up a little later to check out some of the cocktail bars close to our hotel. We stopped at Tess Bar & Kitchen first, where the drinks were expensive and sounded way better on paper. I don't remember what we had, but they were way too sweet and left weird aftertastes in our mouths.

We tried out a second bar a block over: Nutmeg & Clove. This was a super cute spot doing last calls for drinks when we walked in. It seemed like the only people left were frequent patrons of the bar. The cocktail menu was really cute -- a "diary" of different drinks inspired by historical landmarks around Singapore and short snippets about the places. The drinks were good and we even got a couple rounds of free sake shots!

Day 4: Pinhole Coffee

We took the morning slow on our last morning since checkout wasn't until 12PM. We had breakfast at a local chain called Ya Kun Kaya Toast. I had only tried Hainanese-styled kaya up to this point and was excited to finally eat some Nonya kaya jam, which is what I prefer. Hainanese kaya is a toffee-colored jam made from caramelized sugar and a coconut-egg mixture; Nonya kaya also uses the same coconut-egg mixture, but is colored with pandan juice to make it a lovely, pastel green.

After breakfast, we were hankering for some coffee and stumbled upon this incredible little coffee shop called Pinhole Coffee Bar. The owner was super nice and spent a lot of time with us chatting about the Singaporean coffee scene. D got really into coffee during the pandemic and was particularly excited to find someone to talk about grinders and espresso machines with.

We did a coffee tasting, which included an espresso, a cappuccino, and a fantastic red tea (can't remember which kind) as a palate cleanser. I've never thought about or heard of using tea as a palate cleanser, but I feel like I need to do this from now on! The tea was so clean and mellow, which helped bring out the floral and citrus notes of the beans.

We both thought the coffee was so good that we just kept ordering more -- enough that the owner made us a pourover on the house. I wish I had taken notes on his brewing method; all I remember is that he used 2-3 different brewing temperatures: one temperature for blooming, a lower temperature for the first pour, and a higher temperature for the last pour. The pourover was probably the best I've had -- it tasted more like a complex and delicate tea than just hot bean water.

Hopped on caffeine, we hopped on the MRT to catch our flight to Bali. Stay tuned for that post!