Haloranch

This is our hotel.  It's well located, just on the edge of Chinatown which always has something going on and is a great place to walk around.  Also close to the river, which you can see in the foreground.  If you look closely, you'll see all the people eating at various restaurants under the big umbrellas.  We ate at one of those places.  The 'touts' (thanks to Alethea for explaining what the hell that meant) are lined up by each restaurant imploring you to eat at their venue.  One guy offered us 20% off the meal, so that's where we ate and the food, as it has been everywhere, was delicious.  The mug of beer, however, was $10. In other news, at the 7-11 where we bought a liter of water, I saw Yellow Tail wine for $30!  On sale, we buy it in Mesa for about $4.

We took the hop on/hop off bus today, which is a great way to see the city.  Got on in Chinatown, not far from our hotel, and got off at the fabulous Marina Bay Sands.  Wow.  What an amazing hotel.  They have a Sky Park which costs $28 to view, but it's worth it.  We could have had a Singapore Sling there for $25, but I thought that was too expensive.  If you've see our FB posting, you'll see that we actually paid $35 to have one at the Raffles hotel.  This was in the Cloud Forest at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.  Hanging terrariums. Looks like baby Audrey from the Little Shop of Horrors.  Hans tentatively approached it with his finger so I could show scale, but he didn't want to get too close. We walked through an arbour of stunning orchids from the Amazon.  Many were huge and colourful, but they also had tiny, tiny orchids which had magnifying glasses hanging in front of them so we could actually see the flower. ...

Arrived at Hotel 1887, a converted opera house which sounded charming online, at 2:30 a.m. after almost 30 hours of travel and 3 flights.   Discovered...our reservation through Booking.com had not gone through because booking.com said to the hotel that our credit card was invalid.  However, it worked okay when we finally got a room at the same hotel for $120 'with a balcony', however, the room was so tiny we literally could not stand side by side.  No place to open our suitcases except on the bed, which was king size and took up the entire floor space .  Some hooks on the back of the closet were available to hang our clothes.  Had we stayed there for the 5 nights as planned, it would have been hell.  The bathroom was a wet room.  That's okay, except I couldn't find the toilet paper during the night... After getting to bed around 3:30 a.m., I discovered the cover wasn't large enough for 2 people and the AC was on full blast and we hadn't found...

Re-activating this old blog just to keep a journal of our trip.  We leave Monday night, October 26 going Calgary - Heathrow (7.5 hours wait) then Delhi.  So, two legs of 9+ hours each.

  Grant was just too small for the life jacket. And his hat indicated he wasn't taking this seriously at all. We reminded him about Costa, but he didn't care.

Grant slept round the clock last night.   Right after dinner, he conked out and didn’t stir again ‘til this morning.   He even sleept through the time change which gave him an extra hour.   So this morning he was very keen to start exploring the ship.   The first place he headed was the Casino and he couldn’t be talked away from it, at least until he heard there was a grand piano nearby.    So he decided to entertain the crowd with a lively rendition of Boogie   Woogie Ragtime Blues. In other news, it's windy and rainy in Venice and has been for a few days.  As a result, there's flooding in St. Mark's Square and they have put up elevated walkways for the tourists.  So, since we've seen Venice before in nicer weather,  we decided to spend the day on the ship and just relax.

A tree appears to grow from the top of the temple This is the back of that tree.  Aren't the roots amazing? One of the  Bayon faces at the entry gate to the temples.