Saturday morning we woke up to another rainy day. However, in the morning it wasn’t too heavy. After breakfast we decided to head back to the Marina Bay area and the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. The options for a rainy day were either museums or shopping. Neither had much appeal so we just decided to go back to the hotel and see how the wealthy lived and vacationed.
It wasn’t actually raining when we walked to the transit station. When we got on the train, I were surprised how busy the MRT was on a Saturday. It seemed most of the people got off at the same stop we did to check out the shopping there.
Yes, the first thing we encountered were shops of luxury brands. We were in a mall called the Shoppes at Marina Bay. Every expensive name brand one can think of seemed to be in this mall. We walked down one hallway of shops and then headed over to the connected Marina Bay Sands Hotel. We wandered around the lobby to see what was going on there.
It’s possible to go to the top of the hotel and see the view from there. However, today was not a good day for that, and it wasn’t even possible. The observation tower was closed for some maintenance work for about a week. Just our luck.
There are three towers in the hotel and a number of places to eat both in the lobby area and on some of the upper floors. Staying in the hotel is expensive. I was somewhat amused to see an area for VIP check in. It seemed to me if you could afford to stay in the hotel, you were a VIP. However, that apparently is not true. I wonder what constitutes a VIP so they receive this special attention.
We wandered back to the Shoppes at Marina Bay but not because we planned to do any shopping. The mall was huge and covered three or four different floors. It was actually a nice place to walk out of the rains so at least we were getting some exercise in.
We discovered a food court area which had a number of restaurants. However, most of them were serving Asian style foods which we don’t generally eat. Thankfully a Starbucks was there as well. What would we do without Starbucks?!
The restaurants formed a half circle, and in the center was a large circle for kids. It reminded me of the Crystal Mountain area in the Cloud Forest we saw yesterday. Kids would jump on the floor, and the colors would change with them. A number of families were enjoying the experience, and it was fun to watch for a while.
We later continued walking around the mall. There were a number of different parts to the whole complex. At the intersection of some of the corridors, one could see nice restaurants with the diners eating out in the open. One of the intersections had an interesting upside down fountain. There was a very large clear glass bowl in the ceiling where we could see water sloshing around, and then it would fall into the pool below from a center hole creating a waterfall.
Pools were common throughout the Shoppes at Marina Bay. Some were connected to a stream of water that traveled all the way down one of the corridors. Visitors could hire boats to take them down the water corridor and around the pool and back. It wasn’t much of a ride, but people were taking it.
The complex also has a large casino. We went into the reception area, but it seemed very regulated. There were different lines for citizens and foreigners to enter the casino. Since we had no intention of gambling, we just looked around and left.
About this time I began to have some serious issues with my left knee. During the last week it had been bothering me some, but not too badly. However, when I was going down some stairs, my knee buckled, and the pain increased. It became more difficult to walk. This was not good as walking is one of the staple parts of any of our vacations. I was hobbling around the rest of the day. It would definitely limit our activities on our last few days. (I was diagnosed with tendonitis in my knee when I got home.)
The complex also has a very large convention center. It is spread over two or three levels. There seemed to be a number of events taking place while we were there. We did go up into the convention center as I needed to sit down, and there are no places to sit in the shopping areas. We found the same thing to be true in Hong Kong when we visited there in 2018.
Even though it started raining hard, we did go out to take some photos of the skyline of the city. At times a foggy haze covered the tops of the tall downtown buildings. Coming back in we encountered an interesting umbrella drying spot. We may need that here in the Northwest although we didn’t find it very effective.
When we were walking in the mall, we saw two places with long lines for lunch. Both were inexpensive bakeries. I was surprised at how long the line was to pay at one of them. It was a self-serve type of place, but then customers lined up to pay. Later we decided that we would get food there since it was inexpensive. Most of the restaurants were quite pricey to go along with the expensive shops. When we went back to choose some food, the line had disappeared. However, the bakery offered no tables or even chairs to eat at. I had to hobble a ways down the mall back to the food court area to find a place to sit and eat.
After eating some food we left the Shoppes at Marina Bay and headed back to our hotel. It was sprinkling walking to the hotel from the MRT, but it wasn’t pouring so we didn’t get soaking wet. I saw on the weather app that Singapore had four inches of rain in the last 24 hours. That’s a lot of rain.
We had one more full day in Singapore, and it was a Sunday. It turned out to be an interesting day for us so check back next week and see what the country of Myanmar has to do with Singapore.
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