The cleanest place on earth

Beautiful Singapore, probably the cleanest place I have ever been. After just being in Bangkok, this place was quite cleaner than just having a quick wash. The place had a thorough scrub, wax and polish. The problem was that for as clean and as nice of a place this was, they washed away anything interesting from the city. This meant that my extended five days was literally spent killing time.

Since the national pastime in Singapore is shopping, there are shopping centers everywhere. People parade from one mall to the next because that is how you get around in the city, by either train, cab, or walking through the malls. I'm not much of a shopper myself and I don't have much money to spend so I was a little bored there. Unfortunately, boring places make for boring blogs.

The only two interesting places were Little India and China Town. Little India was a small area packed with Indian restaurants and shops. Not really my thing, but at least there was some culture and identity here. China Town was the highlight of the city. It has a large outdoor market that was bustling with shops and stalls selling everything from fruit to jewelry to smoked animals hanging from the walls of the stalls. I spent a bit of time here killing time and again eating my fill of Asian food.

The most interesting place in Singapore has to be the botanical gardens. Now I'm not a horticulturalist, but this place was cool. They had so many exotic looking plants all over the place. It felt like I was walking through an ancient (incredibly clean) forest. The highlight was the orchid garden. Now I personally am not a huge fan of orchids for a very good reason. Growing up, my neighbor had a swimming pool which we got to paint every few years. The first pool scape was an incredible underwater sandcastle scene complete with castle, fish and naked mermaid. Unfortunately this masterpiece of art was painted over due to my my neighbors decision to paint a Georgia Okeeffe in this concrete hole. The next few years I would spend my summers swimming in this giant concrete vagina, damn orchid painting. So I might not have had the greatest expectations going into the orchid gardens but I was soon surprised how cool these flowers were, and yes, they do look like a vagina. There were over two thousand varieties in the garden, which included the famous persons flowers. When they develop a new variety of orchid they name it after a famous person, Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth, and there was even a Ricky Martin. I decided that if Ricky Martin could get an orchid named after him that I would aspire to have one of these flowers that I used to hate so much named after me some day. The gardens were great and a good ending to quite a boring leg of my trip. I wasn't too upset to be moving on.