So, this afternoon we split up and enjoyed the rare opportunity to hang out separately in twos…

Julian and Jillian went over to Marina Bay and went “skating” – indoors on a plastic rink. I’m sure you’ll get a glimpse of that at some point as there’s a video apparently. Jill says it felt like the way you glide / wobble on the edge of a rink on the rubber or plastic rynner while waiting to get on “real” ice.

Clara and I headed over to Sentosa, the island at the south edge of the city. We’d liked the look of it yesterday (we spent almost the whole day at the water park there), and were keen to check out the beaches. Sadly the weather wasn’t too cooperative so we didn’t have a whole lot of good opportunities for photography or splashing at the water’s edge or whathaveyou. We had a bit of luck on that it was raining only for our walk on the covered boardwalk and part of our walk to the monorail izstation, a total of about 30 minutes out of the 5 hours we spent there.
We grabbed some opportunities for snacks and photos en route to the beach area. Near the Beach monorail station, we tried our hands (and feet and balance! ) at riding a Segway. It was expensive and quick but a nice introduction nonetheless. It made me totally want to do a city sightseeing your somewhere, in good weather – maybe the next time we’re in Chicago if we don’t have a chance on TheBigTrip.

We then strolled over to the beach – one of three or four beaches at Sentosa, actually. Clara hit the exercise equipment ( similar to stuff we saw in Istanbul), a couple of slides and a playground before we crossed onto an island which is dubbed the southernmost point in continental Asia. There, Clara made good use of her time in the sand building all sorts of structures while I drafted a blog posts which unfortunately got deleted prior to saving. Oh we’ll, I’m sure it will be an even better post when I re write it (and I enjoyed recalling our long Legoland day… The subject of the post) so it wasn’t all for naught!

Finally we checked out the beachside 7Eleven (they’re everywhere here!), and strolled back to the monorail station. This time we went in opposite direction, travelling through the two other island stops and ending up on the city side of things (at VivoCity). We browsed there briefly and then waited in a long queue to get our tickets for the MRT ride back ‘home’ to Chinatown station.
On our way down Pagoda Street, I took a closer look at some of my potential souvenir items but decided in the end not to buy anything. Nothing seemed quite perfect and so I felt it better to save the cash for our planned outing to Wendy’s than to blow it on bags and stuff we don’t need. (I did some shopping yesterday which made me smile, sp that will be it for souvenirs for a while.)

Now we’ve met up at the hostel. The girls are having the first course of dinner in the lounge here courtesy of a grocery run earlier on the week and the microwave here while I write this post. We’ll hit up Wendy’s next and then will plot up again– Julian to do some high rise sightseeing and the female contingent to start on the packing. We have a very early wake up call tomorrow so it’s an early night for sure!