Today we slept in a little later than ‘normal’, or, at least I did. We heard a huge bang at 9am and bolted awake, looking at each other, like ‘did I really just hear that?’ we waited to hear if a scream or crying would follow, but it didn’t.
After everyone got showered and organised, we loaded up the little bus and headed over to the Vivo centre to have lunch on the rooftop in a little Swiss restaurant (I know, right? what’s a Swiss restaurant when it’s at home?!) but it was lovely!
It’s got a variety of little food stations inside, you’re given a card upon entry and when you chose a station to eat at, you give your card to the server at that station and he/she adds what you order to your card – and you pay on exiting the restaurant, by handing your card to the check out cashier. It’s not a particularly intuitive place, if we hadn’t had Amee there to tell us how it worked, we might have gone hungry (ok, I doubt that!) LOL!!
Portions were pretty small, but we shared three dishes between us, we started with a chicken pasta gratin (which was delicious!!!), we moved on to a side-plate sized chicken and onion pizza (which turned out to have no pizza sauce on it, just slices of tomato – yuck!!), then we tried the Swiss Rosti, a popular dish in the restaurant (there was always four or five of them cooking at any given time). It’s a huge hash brown type dish that comes with a sausage (our sausage was dry but as a whole, the dish worked.)
Col had been eying the Crepe station since we walked in, so I talked him in to getting himself a crepe. He chose the ‘Crepe of the week’ chocolate and banana – which of course I had to make sure wasn’t poisoned – and, as it turns out, it wasn’t, it was delicious!!
From there, we moved on to Chinatown via the MRT underground – I dunno if I’ve mentioned this before, but the MRT systems in Singapore are pretty efficient and run so frequently that you’re only ever waiting an absolute maximum of 7 minutes to get a train.
From the minute we got out of the MRT, I knew I’d love it there!!
That was until we walked in to the first shop, and I saw, right in front of me, the bag I’d bought in Little India, two days prior, for half the price. It was PAINFUL! Both Amee and I were furious!
We walked a lot, I bought a few souvenirs (mostly, of course, for myself!) and we enjoyed looking at all of the stalls lining the streets. The stall owners weren’t nearly as ‘pushy’ or aggressive as those in Little India and the entire experience, was much more pleasant. It was bigger, better, more colourful, more welcoming, vibrant and buzzing – even as we were leaving, the place was still hiving!!
For dinner, Colin S. joined us, we went to a place called Chinatown Seafood – the name *almost* put us off, but we read the menu and I settled on some sweet and sour pork – yes, you read correctly, one whole day where I didn’t eat a single bite of curry – what the heck was wrong with me?!?!?!
The meal was OK, pretty good, but I’d had better over the course of the trip. The rice came out when we’d pretty much almost finished, which was disappointing, but anyways!
Chinatown was pretty at night, all of the Chinese lanterns lit up and people to-ing and fro-ing, it’s definitely somewhere I’d recommend a visit to, if you’re in the area – I even managed to drag Col back! whoot!