flying/singapore

aaah
i left home ridiculously early sunday morning, took about a half hour flight up to chicago (from champaign), then i met up with Laura.
together, we flew nearly 13 hours to Japan, stayed there for about an hour and a half, and then took off again for a nearly 8 hour flight to Singapore. the last flight seemed to be the most comfortable.. i don't know if it was because we were terribly tired or because we had 3 seats to the 2 of us, but we could sleep better on that flight than on the flight to japan.

so, we finally got to Singapore this morning around 1:30ish.
then we went to the hostel and basically just collapsed.
we're sharing a queen size bed in a room with 5 other beds (one on top of ours)
the rest of the boarders in the room are guys. i'm not sure how many rooms are actually here.. i know there are more upstairs and at least 3 more down here.
lights out at 10, no computers after 12, breakfast from 6-10 am.
we get breakfast free, and we can get laundry done for $6 a load.. (not something i need to have done..) wifi is free. Singapore is definitely not cheap.

anyway, when we got up today, we decided we were going to go to try to get some passes so we didn't spend a fortune trying to get around.
we took the train (which i can see out the window right now) a couple stops to where we thought we could get passes.

i think that's my favorite thing so far. how the train talks, especially when it tells people to exit.
"please alight"!

we spent part of the day walking around shops (seeing everything from hand-carved jade amulets to ipods to dried squid)
then, after we found a pretty good deal for traveling around via bus and train, we went to the botanical gardens, where we spent a good bit of time taking pictures and getting rained on.

i thought the statues we saw there were really interesting. they were all like snapshots of people in motion.
there were a couple turtles that almost crawled out of the water when we leaned over to take pictures of them, and we saw swans in.. "swan lake"..
we didn't go to the national orchid garden, though i'm sure that would've been amazing as well.
by the time we got back to the entrance, our feet were pretty dead--we'd been walking around since 10 am, and i think it was around 3 pm.

we took the bus another stop to go shopping. all of the mallish areas seem to have food courts/groceries under everything else (like in the basements), and that's where we found the grocery store where we bought food that will hopefully last us the rest of the week.
then we stopped and got coffee before coming back here for the rest of the evening.

i think the most amazing thing about singapore thus far is how clean and organized everything is.
there is no litter anywhere. there are quite a few garbage/recycling bins just about everywhere you go.

all of the grounds pretty much seem well kept--it's like everything is on display or something.
traffic seems almost too orderly. i mean, i feel like in every other city i've been in, if you cross a street, regardless of the crossing signals, cars will try their best to hit you. here, if you cross when you have "the green man" (there's a button that says to press for "the green man"), then there is pretty much no way you will get hit.. unless you cross the wrong way or something..

wednesday is little india, china town, and whatever else we can fit in.

i have pictures from walking around and quite a few from the botanical gardens..
here you go!