High rise Singapore came as a big contrast to everywhere we’ve been to so far. The place is so clean, so modern, so efficient and very multicultural. In fact it felt like Europe, albeit cleaner. Part of the reason for this are the strict rules enforced all over the state. Fines exist for eating or drinking on the metro, jaywalking and, get this, chewing gum. The result is the cleanest city in the world. A pleasant place to spend some time although I think I would go crazy day in day out waiting so long at traffic lights to cross an empty roads.

The downside of staying in this cosmopolitan city state is finding cheap accommodation. We’d received a recommendation to stay at the New 7th Story Hotel but the supposedly cheap rooms came to £20 a night (our entire daily budget). I set off searching for others and was shown a tiny windowless AC room with barely enough room to walk around the bed for £16. Passable for one night but not for four. I kept on searching in the stifling heat while Espe waited with the bags. After several more disappointments I was ready to accept a tiny room with window for £11 when I found a small guesthouse hidden away on Bencoolen street. For £9 a night we had a huge room (twice the size of all the others I’d seen with sofa, fridge, desk and large bed. An ideal base for our four days here. Although more expensive than we were used to (especially considering all rooms are with shared bathroom), with the fridge and later acquired toaster we were able to save on breakfast, dinner and drinks. The was one of the first rooms we’ve been able to get really comfortable in and call a home…

For the first night we hit the bars and restaurants in the downtown business area. Seeing all the expats about left me reminiscing about life in Madrid and visits to Krakow (shame we missed Stephen who was living here until about 1 week before we arrived). After an average dinner, expensive yet tasty beer we went to Harry’s Quayside Bar for an evening of live latin jazz. Nice.

Money is so evident here. The badly modified Protons of Malaysia have been swapped for tastily Jap’ style modded Imprezas and Lancer Evos with a splattering of Porches, a Lotus Exige and an absolutely gorgeous orange Lamborghini Gallardo that I saw on a couple of occasions (in actual fact, as is often the case with such beasts, I heard it well before I saw it).

There are shopping centres are everywhere in Singapore. I’ve never seen so many, so large complexes. Whatever you want to buy you can find it here, and probably a lot cheaper than elsewhere. To give you an example, with the savings I would have made had I bought my Canon EOS 30D here instead of in London I could have bought a laptop!

So, we went shopping (“When in Rome…”). Not just aimless shopping however, we knew full well what we wanted. After four days spent wandering between the different malls and researching online, Espe is know the proud owner of a digital camera, a small Acer laptop (blog posts should become more frequent now…) and I own a red filter for my underwater camera case and a strobe.

Strobe is the tech term for a large flash gun used for underwater photography. Generally speaking, underwater the a camera’s built in flash is inadequate as it is not powerful enough to illuminate anything more than macro shots and generates back scatter (particles illuminated that are between the lens and subject). When buying my strobe price, weight and size were all a big factor. With the guidance of Dave Read and digitaldiver.net I settled on the Sunpack Gflash. A small lightweight simple entry range strobe. This will do for starters and if I pursue this further I can use it as a slave strobe in the future. Smaller and lighter than the others I looked at, best of all it was less than half the price. Time will tell how well it works.

The only negative about our time in Singapore is that we didn’t get to see any of the sights. I guess they will just have to wait until next time.