Some views around Singapore

Yesterday it rained right before dawn, and continued to drizzle a through the morning, so we took advantage of the uncharacteristic cool to walk for several hours in the Singapore botanic gardens, which are only a few blocks from Khir's house.

All of Singapore we've seen so far looks kind of like a fancy botanic garden to me; there are well-kept trees, plants and flowers everywhere. Singapore is a very well groomed city. Khir told us that much of this was part of a beautification program by the government many years back to make the city distinctive on the world stage; they wanted to become the "garden" city. There are parts of Singapore that don't fit the new, expensive, sparkling clean city stereotype as well, but we haven't been to those yet. (Though we will soon. Singapore is a very small country; you can drive all the way across it in about an hour).

Here are two shots that are pretty characteristic of the downtown area where Khir lives. There are many trees lining the streets, and many of the flower adorned pedestrian overpasses.






In the botanic gardens themselves, we traversed raised walkways through a large jungle section with many varieties of jungle trees we'd seen only in pictures. We walked through a special "ginger garden" exhibit with members of the ginger order (which apparently include 40 species of banana tree!). We saw a garden of many kinds of medicinal herb, another of fruit trees where we found a durian tree with small unripe fruits, and several lakes.







We also saw several temples, including a Chinese Buddhist temple, an Indian Hindu temple, and the Sultan Mosque where Khir received his early Islamic education.

Here's a shot from Chinatown. "But wait!", you say, "for a country that's 80% Chinese, isn't that like asking where's the China Town in Beijing? It's all china town, right?" This was the historic china town where the Chinese lived before they were the ethnic majority.



Now it's mostly trinket shops (like many China towns I know), but still with a few interesting craftspeople plying their own trade. This man, for example, was making wooden clogs.



And there were still several very beautiful buildings.



This is a shot of the outside of the Indian temple, whose interior was extremely intricate and amazing, but also unphotographed by us.



And finally, the Sultan Mosque, with Khir acting as tour guide for us and an Italian couple that we kind of picked up along the way.