Singapore Flyer (bwj)

bwj here. D sez it's my turn to put the words in though i'm not her and it's her blog. well, here [as your friend and mine Huck Finn might say, and did say] is how we put in the time. after breakfast i went to the pool for a swim. i've been a sluggard the past month or more, not doing my usual mile in the RB pool. i asked a guy here at the pool [a highly irregular shaped pool, i must say, and with no lane lines] how long it was, and he sd in an accent that sounded faintly German to me, that it was 50 meters. well, it looks kinda long like that along its long axis [it might have 3 to 5 axes depending how you draw them]. so i got in and swam [if i counted right] 15 long laps which would be 1500 meters. not bad for a old guy, though i dont know how long it took, and i did take short breaks after every five laps. i stepped it off along that long axis after my swim and it took about 68 of my steps, so i guess it must be about 50 m.

then [after a shower and getting ready] about 11am i booked a cab, which is getting easier to do on the phone Jens left us to do that on, and we headed for the guard house to wait a couple minutes for it. cabs here come fast. told the driver Singapore Flyer, and he took us there, and we had a flight [got a tourist discount on the tickets; lucky i had my passport with me]. it's right at the edge of the Marina basin, and from its gondolas or cabins or whatyoucallem you can see halfway to maybe Indonesia on a clear day. which today was not quite. anyhow, spectacular views of the skyline and a chance to get a sense of the lay of the island, the roadstead, etc. the wheel looks much like a gigantic bicycle wheel, lots of spokes [cables that hold it together], and with these cylindrical glass and steel gondolas suspended between the rims. you step onto/into one through its entrance doors as it slowly rotates by, and you're off into the sky, slowly. think of yourself inside, oh, a giant juice can with a hard bench in the middle of a floor, and mostly glass in all directions around you, with of course rails to hold onto. double glass doors in each end [which open only to let you in to go up, and out when you come down. you go around once, for about 30 min, so i guess you're rotating about 12 degrees per minute. i wonder about the physics of the thing. i guess at any moment about the same mass is rotating down as is rotating up, so it doesnt take much impulse to drive it. the impulse comes from several sets of big tractor-looking tires [or tyres as they'd spell it here] driven by i guess electrical motors, which roll against the rims. way out in the roadstead [or whatever you should call it], we did see one vessel at a great distance that looked sort of like a large junk. it's in one of the pictures D took. just before you board, you get an electronic device and a headset that will give you an audio tour, and on board you can unfold a round "compass" map that is keyed to the audio to help you identify what you're seeing. i never did manage to spot the Merlion statue that spouts water out of its mouth into the Marina; but i did see the Greek Theater [didnt know what it was till we were on the ground], did identify the Supreme Court, St Andrew's Cathedral, and some other landmarks. we also saw some sort of parade along the promenade; turned out this was marchers headed to some sort of expo on a floating stage a ways to the north. some of these groups were goose-stepping with some precision; others, esp the ones with flags, seemed pretty raggedy.

back on the ground, we stopped for gelatos at a place that i think called itself Gelatissimo. good stuff. i got passionfruit sorbet and rock melon, and D got pineapple and carameled fig. you need to get something--or somewhere--cool in Singapore as often as you can. or at least i do. i liked the passionfruit sorbet, even the black seeds to crack between your teeth. a flavor we recall from Hawaii. we thought we could walk up into the core of the city on the promenade, but it was closed off due to the event we'd seen part of, so we walked up Raffles Ave instead, passing armored troop transports and tanks and vehicles like that [a lot of boyish boys in fatigues and black berets], passing to the east of the spiky domes of the theatres on the esplanade; down an escalator into a sort of escalator grand central under the streets, where teenagers were hanging out against the pillars and and on the hard tile floor [we should have taken a picture of this], and we found the right escalator up [it was like being in a cavern where you have to choose the right way out, in some adventure story] to get onto Queen Elizabeth Walk and head west along the Singapore River toward the Asian Cultures Museum or a river tour, whichever might strike us first. we'd planned to get here by way of the promenade.

before we got to the Museum, we ran into crowds on the walk, like a lot of Japanese kids on their senior trip, i thought, though i conclude they were mostly just locals, all looking out at boats on the river, yelling, taking pictures. what is going on here? turns out it's the Liverpool Football Club doing a river cruise, here to play the local club in a big match tomorrow night. it's crazy. these boats with a lot of burly and hunky guys in red shirts and all their fans charging back and forth along the promenade yelling and shooting pictures, some with telephoto lenses big as the guns on the tanks. i got so distracted by all this that i didnt even notice we'd passed the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles [you thought that was just a name in Middlemarch, right?], the guy who landed here in 1819 and started setting it all up in the way of the British Empire. we did see him when we got off the river cruise, in his frock coat, with his back to the river.

we decided to take a river cruise. and bought tickets and boarded at a little landing stage opposite the lower end of Boat Quay [lots of colorful shop houses along the south side of the river for a quarter mile or so]. old Chinese or Malay guy with a silvery buzz cut, talking Singlish of which i could only catch a word now & then, drives the boat; a young guy with him handing us aboard as he bumps the bow against the tires hung on the side of the landing. the ticket agent had told me we couldnt go down to the Merlion, but we couldnt even get past one of the bridges because there were Navy patrol boats there to turn us back. we'd seen, from the Flyer, some patrol boats in the Marina, with machine guns mounted on their foredecks; these under the bridge were much smaller, and no visible armaments [at least to me]. well, we went upriver past Clarke Quay, then back downriver, then back upriver to where we started. it would have been fun to have the old boatman do the tour in Singlish, but he played a recording keyed to the various sights of the north and south riverbanks; the music on this thing, i swear, sounded like somebody's brass band variations on Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land."

it's around 3pm by now and we're hot and thirsty and hungry, so we cross a bridge and walk the south bank of the river from the upper end of Boat Quay till we get to the bridge where we can cross to Clarke Quay on the north bank. there's a food festival on, and we're hoping to find something like a hawker stall; but the food fest apparently doesnt start till later in the day, and all along Clarke Quay we are accosted by restaurant waiters and waitresses with menus and offers of food and drink. i've been sweating hard for hours, and my shirt shows it; i'm an obvious mark for a beer, right? we cross again and walk downriver along Boat Quay in front of the shophouses [you can see pictures of these in any travel guide to Singapore]; more of same. then finally D glances up a street that heads south away from the river and sees a 7-11, and we head for that. just before it is an alley down which i see, projecting from the backs of buildings on both sides, a veritable swarm of air conditioners; so i have to get a picture of that. D gets a cold bottle of green jasmine tea [anything that tastes this good cant be evil, i say, and i'll let them use that in ads if they like], and i get a medium-size lime & sour apple Slurpee, which is just what i need though i've never heard of it before. we sip and slurp along down the quay wondering how to find a taxi, stop to take pictures of the whole skyline across the river, then head inland where it looks like taxis might roam. and we get lucky. i'm just asking a driver standing by his parked car where and how, and he points to an approaching cab which i turn to hail. this cabbie signifies he cant take us, but points to another approaching cab, which he and i both hail. it's from the same company, and we pile in and head back to Mount Sinai Lane. the cool air inside Singapore cabs is one of the best features of this city.