Visiting Singapore: Highlights and Recommendations
Hi there, in this article I want to share with you my experiences during our stay in Singapore and to give you some tips if you are considering this destination. I was searching for a good and thoughtful guide, to gain a better understanding of what to expect and how to better spend our one week stay there, but didn’t find one.. hence this article 😎 Below you will find our impressions during our stay, trip plans, costs, and some interesting stories.
🐲 Trip Overview
This highly developed city has a lot to share for its short sovereign history, with its well-developed infrastructure, tech advances and well established social rules. My impression was that living in Singapore goes like this: rules should be followed and if you contribute to the community, you will have a good social standard and a prosperous life.
I had the pleasure to visit a variety of places like Gardens by the Bay, Jungle-like parks, National Museum, Zoo, many Hawker food markets, also the Chinatown, Little India AND The Google Asia-Pacific HQ 🤩
My one week stay in Singapore cost me ~1000 euro with the Airplane tickets, food, gifts, and attraction tickets, this is without the hotel/airbnb (which is the most expensive part usually). 90% of the places accept debit/credit card payments, as well as the Subway (MRT) this is why you might consider exchanging a small amount of cash (200S$ in my case).
One week stay is enough to visit many interesting places and feel the atmosphere of this great city.
✨ Quick tourist tips
If you want to have Internet access all the time you should definitely consider renting a pocket wifi device from Changi recommends, the cost is 6 euro per day. They have a few quite convenient locations at Changi airport. If you are using Google Phone or iPhone then you can use eSim as well, just check out the Airalo service ;)
We’ve used Grab to move around, it’s the Uber equivalent for South-east Asia. The mobile application is great and easy to use, and the brand covers also other services, like Grab bike, Grab Pay, Grab Delivery, etc.
Try Hawker food, you can find these affordable market places almost everywhere in Singapore — Check out Lau Pa Sat Food Court. A hawker center or cooked food center is an open-air complex in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore housing many stalls that sell a variety of inexpensive food. I recommend you to try the following meals: Carrot Cake, Ah Meng Nasi Lemak, Fried Kway Teow, Chicken Satay and everything with noodles or rice 🥗🍜🍗
VisitSingapore, TripAdvisor and Google Maps were my local guides and reliable sources of information almost everywhere :)
The rest of the article will follow our day to day timeline, how we’ve decided to spend our stay in Singapore and most of the experiences that we had :)
🚉Let’s begin
Our first day was very chill (As they say in Plovdiv, it was “айляк”), I haven’t slept a lot on the plane so we’ve decided to go easy with the activities. The flight to Singapore took us 15 hours in total, from Sofia airport to Doha (5 hours) and another ~7 hours to Singapore, with 2 hours stay at Doha airport. Yep, your guess is correct, Qatar Airways :)
Our friends from Singapore showed us around the Bishan neighborhood and shared a lot of interesting facts about Singapore and tips on how to better spend our time there. My first impressions were how settled and methodical our surrounding was, the Collect books places (Leave or get a book that you like), the Information boards for different social campaigns, the self-driving MRT and how clean and perfect everything was, from streets, buildings, parks and rain/sun shelters (yep, most of the sidewalks had umbrella-like shelter from the sun or rain).
Unfortunately by the time we arrived, we just missed the Diwali lights festival, which sounded quite interesting and my FOMO has been triggered a little bit, but hey if your trip plans are around the 27th of October, you may catch it next year, and share some thoughts about it later ;)
🌏 The social campaigns that I mentioned were for things like — How to improve your English to be more formal and appropriate or How to show respect to each other in the MRT and be polite. Also, there were these Crime alert posters for stats of captured criminals and thefts reduce.
Maybe you are thinking, okay, is there anything that made you a bad impression at the beginning? Actually, there was.. this one little thing .. that all closed spaces (malls, restaurants, MRT, etc.) had their air conditioners set to -50C, which was kind of unpleasant when you were entering the MRT coming from +30C outside temperature. But hey, if you have a switcher or another light coat with you, everything would be fine ;)
The cherry on the top of the cake this day was the Garden Rhapsody that we visited in the evening — a signature light and sound show of the Gardens by the Bay. I will say no more, just check when the next show is and go for it :)
After the Rhapsody we were invited to authentic Indian dinner by our hosts :) in one of the best restaurants in Little India — Khansama Tandoori. You should definitely find time to visit it, I believe it will give you a little taste of India, if you are up to such experience of course :)
💚🍏🌴 Our second day went exploring Gardens by the Bay. If I can describe this day with one word it would be — magnificent. Gardens By The Bay are created in 2012 as part of Singapore’s government strategy of making Singapore into a “City In A Garden” and to increase the quality of life with trees, plants, and flowers. Gardens By The Bay area is actually an enormous futuristic botanical garden with places like The Floral Fantasy, Flower Dome, Cloud forest and the Supertree SkyWalk. As you can guess, we did all of them :) and it was one of the best days that we had in Singapore!
✨Kind reminder, bring a coat or switcher with you, in each one of these attractions is cold as f*ck 🥶🧊❄
I don’t want to share more details about everything that we saw exploring Gardens by the Bay, as I believe this is one of a kind experience and I don’t want to spoil it for you. So I will just mark this day with the following words — Magnificent, Green World, Cloud Forest, Informative, Nature-Friendly and Self-sustainable.
🎧🏛🌃 We’ve started our next day with a Treetop Sky-walk, I hope you remember the Garden Rhapsody from our first night in Singapore, well this time we were on top of the trees not beneath them.
Our next stop was the Art and Science Museum where we bought tickets for both Future World: Where Art Meets Science and Disney: Magic of Animation. Both attractions were great, although if I need to choose which one was better, that would definitely be Disney: Magic of Animations! The warm feeling that reminded me of my childhood with movies like Lion King, 101 Dalmatians, Mickey Mouse, Beauty, and The Beast and some of the newer ones like Zootopia and Moana. In general, it was great, not only because of the sweet emotions reminder but also because you can see how the storyboards were being created back in the days and how the animations evolved during the years with the “xerography technique” for animation inking in which a photographic process was used to transfer lines and drawings directly onto the animation cells and as a result the original lines drawn by animators came to life directly on the screen, wow.. 🎨🖌🖼 Where Art Meets Science is also interesting, especially for kids, with activities and games that can develop your creativity and insights.
🌏You will hear and see a lot of helicopters and military airplanes in the sky during your stay. The Singaporean military, one of the most technologically advanced in Southeast Asia consists of army, navy, and air force. It is seen as the guarantor of the country’s independence, translating into Singapore culture, involving all citizens in the country’s defense.
Back to my story, I’ve spent my evening visiting Haji Line, the party street that never sleeps, full of tourists, live music and cozy bars. The atmosphere was great there, you should definitely visit this place with your friends and loved ones for a couple of drinks or just listening to some live music :)
⭕🔍🕶 Google day!
Our next stop was Google’s Asia-pacific headquarters. The large screens and the open spaces that you will see in the pictures below are designed to encourage accidental encounters between staff (along with cafes and stylish seats). Google’s corporate colors are everywhere around the design of the building. The blue, red and yellow glass panels and walls reveal meeting rooms inside, and if you look around you will get this organic sense of openness and transparency. The top floor also opens out to natural sunlight, not only opening up but also brightening the space.
Walking around you can find spots like Creativity room, Open library or a desk with Lego all of which helps you to rest, de-stress or just “center” your thoughts. Also, there are plenty of enclosed seats for Googlers who need a quiet spot to focus on their work. Of course, breakfast and lunch are provided free of charge to Googlers, with a lot of healthy options as well.
With fun activities hidden in many places of the Google office, I doubt that anyone would regret working here. If you’re highly creative and you love to interact and exchange ideas with other people, then Google is undoubtedly the place for you. With an office like this, the only question you might ask is why you would ever want to leave :)
🙏Thank you, Masha, for the amazing tour and the opportunity to have a closer look at this creative and amazing place!
🌏There were some other interesting things that I’ve noticed during my stay — normal “perks” like, fitness in the office, massage and relax studio, burger bar, taco Thursday, hidden rooms, plenty of social activities, hot-desking concept, emotional state leave and a system that recommends you the closest available meeting room based on the attendees, availability and location.
🌴I can write a lot more about my Google office experience, although one article won’t be enough, so I am going to continue with our journey and tell you about my next stop for the day — the Singapore Botanic Garden.
Should you visit this place? Definitely yes! This amazing park is divided into areas based on its plants, flowers, and trees e.g. Tropical garden, Evolution garden, Rain forest, Orchid garden and etc. You should get a map and plan at least half a day for the Botanic Garden.
🌏I had the pleasure to spend time with a group of people who were searching for a rare bird, that comes only in November and they were waiting for it near the Tropical garden. As I remember the birds were called Blue kingfisher but I haven’t had the luck to see it.
I’ve spent more than 4 hours walking around the gardens and resting among this beautiful nature. Have a look at the pictures below and tell me, have you seen a place that green? I don’t want to mislead you, there are other colors thanks to the diversity of flowers and one other place located right in the middle of the park — The Orchid Garden! Yep, as you can guess, I will tell you to pay the extra 6$S and just enjoy a rainbow of colors. I will say no more, you should discover the rest on your own 🌸💐🌹
I also had the pleasure to feel all kinds of aromas, from sweet to sour and admire a rich color palette of flowers and plants, thanks to the diversified vegetation.
Getting to the Botanic Garden was easy, the MRT exit is actually the entrance of the garden, just follow the signs on your way out of the MRT :)
🐲On my way back home I decided to have a quick stop in Chinatown, just to feel part of the atmosphere of this neighborhood before dawn and find the famous, sinful, delicious, dried barbecued pork meat called Bak Kwa (from Bee Cheng Hiang store). Give it a try, I bet you will like it! :)
If you haven’t had dinner yet, go ahead to the loudest and most crowded street that you see/hear. This would be the food street, from where you can choose from a variety of restaurants and have dinner. If you want to do some sightseeing instead, my suggestion is to choose one of the activities from this list and dive in :)
🌲🌴🚵♂️ Day 5 — The end of our journey was close, although I felt like there was a lot more to be seen and enjoyed. This is why I’ve decided to spend my last day doing some hiking and getting to know the jungle-like park called MacRitchie Nature Reserve and visit the Singapore Zoo later the same day.
🌏Have you heard of the Pcn park connector network? Long story short, this is a real natural connection between all main green areas in Singapore (which are a lot!). It takes visitors through a variety of parks and nature areas AND also, by 2021, another 60 km of paths between Gardens by the Bay and Rower’s Bay are planned to be completed and when finished all green areas will be connected, making a loop of 120 km 🤪
Back to the MacRitchie Nature Trail, I strongly recommend going for the Tree Top Trail from the entrance of the MacRitchie park. It was around 6 kilometers long and took me less than 2 hours (with all the pictures, playing with monkeys and some small rests along the way).
If you want a peaceful moment among trees, feeling only the light wind and hearing the animals around you, this is the place to be. At the end of the path, there is this suspension bridge on top of the trees that gives you a better view of the surroundings and leads you to another path to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, but I won’t say more, I want you to be able to explore and find your own path!
🌏You can easily get to the MacRitchie Nature Reserve by using the MRT (red line) and after a 12 minutes walk, you will reach the entrance. As for the way back, if you are close to the Golf club, I recommend calling a Grab. The Golf club was 15 minutes far from the Tree Top View — walking time.
🌏There is this regulation: 32% of the city area to be dedicated to parks and gardens (Green area). The land space is so important, that there is an approved plan for the Singaporean Prison to be moved to a man-made island.
I went back home to have a rest and to assimilate everything so far (I strongly recommend to find time for a break during the day, this will help you to enjoy everything that is happening and strengthen your durability for the upcoming activities — which in my case was the River Safari and Night Safari from the Singapore Zoo 🐵🐘🐯
Singapore Zoo features a lot of “zones”, each taking you through some of the most distinctive global wildlife habitats in the world. You can choose among plenty of activities and tours, and this is why I recommend you to plan a whole day for this great place! I blame myself for not doing proper research before I went there and experiencing only a few things from the Zoo.
💵 Plan your day and get a better price with a combined ticket. For up to 4 zones you can get a really good discount. Check TripAdvisor, the Zoo website or VisitSingapore for current promotions as well (Zoo pro tips)
The River Safari was quite interesting, but please keep in mind that all zones except the Night Safari, are closing in the period from 1700 to 1800 o’clock (and they ask everyone to leave). The actual River Safari (boat experience) ends at 17:15, so you should be there before that in order to catch the last boat.
What I liked the most during my stay was how interactive and informative it was everything around me. Signs, video screens, information boards, you can learn a lot.
Have you been to a Night Safari? Well, I wasn’t, and I didn’t know what to expect, so I won’t say much, cuz I don’t want to spoil it for you. What can I recommend is the following, catch the first tram group from 1915 o’clock. After the tram, you should definitely find time for a night walk, I’ve never been in such a quiet place, surrounded by animals with all the lights, sounds and plant smells, it was .. peaceful.
🍔🍜🥙 If you haven’t had dinner yet, the Night Safari food court opens at 1830 or if you don’t want to wait just walk around the complex and you will find plenty of restaurants and fast-food courts (Thai, Indian and European).
⏭⌚🏞 What I have missed and you may consider visiting?
- Sentosa Island, a small island off the south coast of Singapore with amusement park great for children
- Cycling — Pualu Ubin island and East Coast Park are considered the best places for bike riding.
- Activities like — Singapore free tour, All you can eat Japanese brunch, watch a Bollywood movie.
- Visiting Asian civilization museum
This is a “brief” 😅 description of all the attractions that I’ve visited during our stay in Singapore. Which one did you like or which you didn't? If you have a favorite sight in Singapore that I didn’t mentioned, go ahead and leave a comment, I will be glad to hear of your experiences as well!
I want to say a big THANK YOU to our kind host Masha and Nemanja, thanks to you our trip was so memorable🙏
