Singapore, 2007

To me, Singapore is a nice place to shopping and eat, a tough place to live because of high price on rent and real state value. A typical large modern city in this world, i.e. Hong kong, Tokyo, New York, and London. Everything is expensive there, except food with some exceptions(I'll explain it later). There are multiple world class shopping malls on Orchard street, with numerous expensive brands such as Gucci, LV, and Armani. They have world class subway system, which covers almost entire city, is very clean. Taxis are all over the streets. Expensive and even exotic cars are often seen on the street.

We stayed right on the Orchard street, in a hostel owned by an Indonesian lady. We only paid $50 a night, stayed on 20th floor and clean bed. Only downside was the shared bathroom. It's tough to share bathroom with strangers when you have a huge bathroom by yourself at home. Everything in the mall are either the same price or more expensive than here.

Food is about only thing cheap over there. We can eat bowl of noodle at food court inside a very nice mall for $2-$4. Since they are cooked by real Asian people, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Thai, plus the stiff competition, food has to be good and cheap in order for them to survive. We went to Newton square's famous food court for some seafood. As soon as you walk in front of food stores, people started to come up to you, talks to you in Chinese or English, trying to get you to eat at their store. Took us 20 minutes to find a place, because the dude speaks perfect Chinese, and the menu looks a little better than others. We ordered black pepper crab, stingray, and tiger prawns. They only have prawns there, as we call shrimps here. Tiger prawn was $18 for 100 gram. I thought i wasn't too bad, so we had 4 of them. It turns out, the final price for the prawns were almost $80 US. I felt I was cheated on the price because the Chinese speaking dude strongly recommended it, and only told us the price per 100 gram. At least, the taste was excellent. If I told you that i spent $100 at some food stand at a night market, you probably think I'm lying.

Everything else was great. We went to the ocean park, a famous night club, and bar street, had a lot of fun.