(part three) winding down in singapore

We got to the city/country of Singapore late in the evening with intentions of staying in Little India, the same district where we were on the first night of the trip. After a bit of looking we settled on the same place as three weeks ago when we had the stopover. Little India is always bumpin' so we found a 24 food stall and got one of the countless fried rice plates that we ate while traveling. We headed back to the hostel dorm room to find our roommate who was, by all visual clues, living at the hostel and seeming a bit disturbed that we were intruding on his space. This would be one of the last nights spent crammed in a small room with five other people so I didn't care. But, Little India is a really cool place to stay and the markets were so full of interesting people and constant action.



The next day we checked out some things on Orchard Road and I think we were both surprised by how modern Singapore is. This part of town seemed much like a western city and it's also immaculately clean and seemingly very safe. We made our way to the botanical gardens from here and were really impressed with the diversity of all the plant life. From what I know now the garden alone seems to draw a lot of visitors to the city.







We had two days in Singapore and both were spent exactly the same- eating Japanese food for lunch, going to the botanical gardens for a few hours, spending time reading a goldmine of English books at Borders (this was amazing), and then hanging out in Little India. Singapore is a really cool city that seems easy to get around and very livable. A few days here was not enough and I hope I find myself back sometime in the future.

After an overnight flight back to Osaka we were, once again, back in Kansai Airport. The most pressing issue for me while we waited two hours for the first bus to Naruto was the need to put on anything other that the clothes that I had been wearing for pretty much three weeks straight. Getting back to my apartment felt nice and, actually, so did the cold weather. It seemed like we were gone for a long time but for me it never takes very long to snap back into the life-in-Japan mindset, though I still, as I always do, immediately began to plot where I will be going and what I want to be seeing next.