We started the day with a the Sun City Mall where we had breakfast at the fantastic Toast Box, a popular chain serving retro toast based snacks! Laura when for peanut butter and I had French Toast, both lovingly sliced into perfectly equal peices and served with a boiled egg and a great cup of tea.
We took the SMRT to the Orchard stop to take a look at the famed Orchard Road shopping strip. Neither of us being shoppers, we had a hurried look around the Ngee Ann City Mall, and were most taken by the amazing food hall, where we had a tasty chocolate brownie – although given the other options I wish we had chosen better!
Back on the SMRT, we headed over to Chinatown. Like every other Chinatown we have visited, this consists of tightly packed restaurants on cluttered streets with a distinctive odour… Not very pleasant really and I don’t think we’ll be bothering with any other Chinatowns until we go to China itself!
We then took a walk around the far more snythetic and sanitized area of Clarke Quay where we decided to amuse ourselves with a drink in Hooters before looking for food. We decided to find a ‘hawkers centre’ – a type of food market that seems to be popular in Singapore. We went to the Lau Pa Sat centre which was packed with dozens of stalls selling all manner of bizarre Asian food. We decided to embrace the strange and Laura had a bowl of Singapore Laksa and I had a sweet potato milkshake.
Both of these were poor choices. The spicy soup of Laksa was the hottest thing I have ever eaten, the firey sting of the thick, red, broth only broken by rubbery, unidentified meats or vegetables. And to wash it down, the sweet potato milkshake was pretty much as you would imagine. Sweet potato mixed with milk. Yikes.
We left almost all of the soup and decided to return to the sweet potato stall to get some sweet potato chips – which were, thankfully, very tasty!
We headed back to the hotel for a rest before going back into town and the Chjimes complex for dinner. This is an old monastry and church converted into shops and restaurants – “Mmmmmm, sacrilicious!”. A beautiful spot, but with mostly unimpressive menus, we eventually grabbed a pizza and fantastic chicken wings at a place on a lowered courtyard in the centre of the complex. Good food, but very expensive – I’m sure we could do better in Singapore!
