Singapore

Singapore By now I'm at home in Singapore, I've been here at least a dozen times.

With Roberto, we arrived with a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 and, since we're in transit towards Malaysia but the flight is the next day, the airline puts us for a few dollars in a 5-star hotel, the Stanford Swiss Hotel, which is a skyscraper of some fifty floors, if not more. Roberto suffers from vertigo and when we're at the reception he asks me to get us a room on the ground floor or at least on the lower floors, and to play a little trick on him, since he doesn't speak English, I asked the receptionist for a room on the highest floor possible. The lift goes at 40 km an hour; it takes three floors to pick up speed and three to slow down. Roberto got a shock. As soon as he entered the room he didn't look down and chose the bed next to the wall.

Usually skyscrapers have sealed windows you can't open; this one even has a terrace; my goodness what a thrill looking down, my parachuting instincts tempted me to jump, too bad I didn't have the umbrella. We visit the city and do some shopping. The humid heat is oppressive and the pool of our hotel, on the sixth floor, cools us down a bit. The next day we go for some shopping; here it's a paradise for buying things like in Hong Kong and Dubai, there are dozens of huge shopping malls.

Here there's also Sentosa Island, a little island connected by a bridge and also by a cable car, where you can spend a pleasant day among greenery, parrots and various attractions like Gardaland.

Nearby, the Star Lines cruise ships also depart, doing one-week circuits in Asia. Very famous too is the night zoo; you reach it by bus in the evening, then they do the animal show on a stage where you see gigantic snakes, panthers, monkeys, then everyone gets on a kind of little train with rubber wheels and passes in front of the various sections where there are both daytime animals such as giraffes, gazelles, zebras and nocturnal ones, genets, owls, black panthers, giant anteaters, etc. Very interesting.

We set off for Changi airport where, after checking in, we pass to the area past customs, and from here you can see all the planes in a shop window, both of Singapore Airlines, which holds an entire terminal for its planes, and of all the other airlines.

bye