One of our favorite places to dine is an outdoor place on the southeast corner of Singapore. It’s right on the water, so it gives great views of ships and ferries and the sunset, and it’s also just before the start of the runways at Changi Airport. That means fantastic views of planes coming in for a landing — oftentimes literally right overhead.
It’s a great place to just chill and enjoy the breeze…
But the best moment comes every few minutes, when a distant light in the sky gets bigger and louder as it nears….
Of course you have to wave at the pilot:
Last time we visited, we even found a coconut that had fallen off a palm tree. Brought it home, cracked it open, enjoyed the insides. Not bad at all.
One of Nyan’s favorite classmates is Kyra, who lives next door along with her younger sister Chrysa, who attends the same preschool. One Sunday afternoon and evening in October, the three kids, along with all four parents, headed down to Gardens by the Bay for some play.
Gardens by the Bay itself was as gorgeous as ever, by day and by night:
The kids had a blast together. Here’s Nyan with Kyra:
And here he is being Big Brother to Chrysa:
We didn’t end up in the domes that are home to the botanic gardens on this trip. We did manage to find a cool playground:
The main event, though, was the Gardens’ excellent waterplay area. We’ve been here numerous times before, and it never fails to impress.
The kids were out of control, in the very best possible way:
Last in our series about the multi-day festivities surrounding our boy’s fifth birthday.
Our marquee event on the day after his actual birthday was a school field trip to Snow City, an indoor attraction in Singapore that features manufactured snow, ice slides, and a huge sledding hill. The field trip was originally going to be on his birthday proper, but it got bumped by a day, extending the birthday celebrations by an extra 24 hours.
And it was a lot of fun! Really cold of course — the place provides coats and boots, and we brought our own gloves and hats (got to bust the beloved monkey hat he used to wear in London!). Nyan had fun running around and playing with his friends; he wasn’t crazy about the sledding hill; Daddy sat on an inner tube while Nyan rode on his lap, and the thing actually went really fast and bounced a bit (enough that his helmet flew off at one point). But he was a brave trooper and tried, at least.
The place also had an educational component of sorts: staffers did a demonstration of how to make ice cream from liquid nitrogen. Plus a little demo of blowing liquid nitrogen smoke rings.
After all that snow and ice, we were all more than ready to get out into the more than 90 degree F sunshine outside. After a quick lunch, Nyan and some classmates played around on the little playground, which included a trampoline and a water screw.
Busy day! Everyone took a little nap when they got back to the school around mid-afternoon. And as you can see and hear from this video that Daddy shot at pick-up time, around 5:30pm, all the kids had plenty of energy left over:
We leave you with a few random shots of before and after the field trip – goofing with Adrianna, riding the bus.
And with that, the five days of birthday celebrations came to a close. Next year, will we do six days for six years? Eh, hopefully not — we loved celebrating with our boy and reminding him how special he is, but wow it was exhausting for Mommy and Daddy! We’re thinking that for Birthday No. 6, we’ll try to pack it all into just one day.
We like to sniff out lesser-known little corners of Singapore, and we found a couple of gems recently: The Boat Museum and the Air Force Museum.
The Air Force Museum is exactly that – a museum devoted to the Singaporean Air Force. It’s on the edge of a nearby airbase, and it’s got a nice indoor display of the history of the force, and a large space downstairs with actual jets, helicopters, missile launchers and more. There’s even a flight simulator, though that wasn’t working the day we went.
Did our boy like it? Silly question.
We also came across the Boat Museum — more properly known as the Singapore Maritime Gallery — tucked away in a little corner of downtown, on the water, of course. It’s put together by the local container shipping industry, so it’s got a real pro-shipping vibe, but that’s fine. There’s displays of the history of shipping in Singapore (shipping having been what really put this tiny island on the map, way back when), models of boats and ships and oil rigs, and views of the nearby ferry terminal and all the boats at anchor outside of Singapore Harbor.
Perhaps best of all: there’s a boat simluator — it lets you pretend to be at the helm of one of several types of boats, and you try to steer it through storms, marine traffic, waves and more. Pretty cool!
We liked both places very much, and agreed that although they’re out of the way and not the easiest to get to, they definitely deserve being visited again. So when Grandma and Grandpa visited recently, Nyan made sure to take them to the Air Force Museum!
The flight simulator was working this time, so Nyan and Grandpa got to play:
Here’s to Singapore’s excellent lesser-known museums!
Just off the north shore of Singapore is a small, sparsely populated island called Pulau Ubin. It’s mostly forests and hills, with some nature preserves, some ponds, and a small village with a few restaurants and bike rental shops. It’s a quick boat ride from the mainland to get there, where you rent a bike and pedal through the wilderness. It’s relaxed and lovely, and we went there some time ago (okay, it was August, and it’s now February as we write this. Oops.)
Here we share some pictures from our fun family day out.
On the boat:
View from the boat:
Pulau Ubin itself:
Mommy’s bike:
Finally, Nyan checks out the scenery – and the fishing lines – at one of the ponds on the island:
A few months ago, Nyan spent a couple of Sunday afternoons with his pals at Jurong Bird Park. It’s basically a zoo that’s all about birds. It’s run by the same people who run the Singapore Zoo, and it’s pretty much just as high-quality as the zoo. Lots and lots to see and do.
Here’s Nyan, Kyle and Ava (Kyle’s cousin), holding hands on their way in to the park.
Random photos of the kids at the park:
One of the features is a bird show at an amphitheater, featuring birds flying through hoops, and a parrot singing Happy Birthday, and more.
And check out this random bird at our lunch site. That’s the bird whistling and saying Hi in a female voice. Pretty cool.
It’s a beautiful park, set in the hills and dense jungle of western Singapore, and there’s even a waterfall inside one of the exhibits, which is huge and fenced-in so all the birds can fly around but not fly away.
Here are the kids, running through the jungle away from the ‘monster’ (who we’re pretty sure was the videographer, a.k.a. Daddy. Hmm):
What’s a bird park without penguins? Here are Nyan and Kyle checking them out, and Daddy trying to keep them from stepping where they weren’t supposed to and falling off the ledge. The bit at the end of this video, where things go a little haywire, is when Kyle suddenly jumped into Daddy’s arms. Then Nyan quickly followed suit.
Besides birds and penguins and monsters, Jurong Bird Park has snacks…
…and coin-operated toys…
And maybe best of all: it has a pretty huge water play area, complete with slides, fountains, and a full playground.
Nyan is not too convinced about the water slide at first, but once he makes it down, he sure is proud of himself:
And finally, we saved arguably the best for last. Jurong Bird Park also has a few turtles, for whatever reason, just slowly strolling along inside one of the exhibits. Our hero decided to try to pet one. Brave little guy!
The bird park was definitely a fun couple of afternoons, and definitely highly recommended. We’ll be back.
The Lunar New Year, or Chinese New Year (or CNY), is a big deal out here in Asia and in Singapore — two public holidays, huge parties and family get-togethers, much symbolism. And, in Singapore at least, a big festival down at Marina Bay. There were carnival rides, carnival food, giant inflatable peacocks, acrobats — standard festival fare, really.
It was a beautiful evening:
And a lot of people came out for the colors, the fresh air, the inflatable peacocks.
Phwa-Phwa (Mommy’s Mommy) was in town so she joined us.
We ate a fair amount of rather lousy food (carnival food, what do you expect), including a lime-green popsicle for the young man.
Did we mention there were carnival rides?
There were carnival rides. Including this sort of kiddie roller coaster (okay, that’s maybe stretching it a bit) featuring lots of cars and trucks going up and down a twisty track. Nyan loved it.
There was also a train. Nyan got to sit in the front, along with several other random boys. They all happened to be wearing orange t-shirts, purely by coincidence.
Yes, Nyan had a blast. He absolutely loved it. Happy belated Chinese New Year, everybody!
We’re going back in time a bit for this one: July 2014, when young Nyan Thomas was not yet three years old, and was still new to Singapore. One Saturday afternoon, he took Mommy and Daddy to the Singapore Flyer, a huge Ferris wheel down by the shore. It’s 541 feet tall, and was for a time the largest Ferris wheel in the world, until a couple years ago when Las Vegas opened one that’s 9 feet higher.
It’s obviously a tourist attraction, but not a terribly popular one: it was in bankruptcy when we visited, and has since been bought out by someone. We could see why: a nice bright Saturday afternoon and we had the place mostly to ourselves. It was a bit pricey, yes, but beyond that, we can’t really figure out why it’s not more popular. It’s certainly scenic:
(Photo taken from the Internet; the rest of the photos in this post are by Daddy)
And some great views from up there:
Also great for family selfies:
And back down at ground level, they had cardboard airline pilot cut-outs for Nyan to stick his face in:
All in all, it was a fine way to spend an hour or so. Would we recommend it to visitors? Sure we would. Would we return ourselves? Eh, maybe. Wouldn’t go out of our way to go there, but wouldn’t refuse outright. (And let’s not forget that it’s a great landmark that Nyan loves to point out when we take the bus from our apartment in to the city — we go right over that bridge you can see in the middle background in the first picture, above.) We don’t mean to sound too lukewarm on the Singapore Flyer, though I guess we do sound lukewarm. Well, call a spade a spade: it’s tall, it’s a little pricey, it’s got great views, it’s just fine. Nothing more, nothing less.
A few weeks back, as part of the local Chinese New Year celebrations, they threw a big carnival-type thing downtown. Lots of kiddie rides, bouncy castles, food stalls, ice creams and other sweet treats, standard stuff. Among the kiddie rides was bumper cars, which Nyan, for some reason, became insistent that we go on. We figured why not, so Daddy and Nyan climbed into a bumper car.
How’d it go? Good! Here they are getting ready to rumble:
And live action:
Here are some still shots:
A good way to introduce the lad to carnival culture, we guess…
We’ve been a bit quiet on these here blog pages of late. Apologies for that. To make up for it, here are a few photos from one of Mommy and Daddy’s favorite places in all of Singapore – Gardens by the Bay! It’s an absolutely gorgeous botanic gardens sort of place, with great views of the Singapore skyline and fancy light shows every evening. You saw pictures in a recent post showing the gardens decked out in Christmas lights with fake snow blowing all over the place. Here are some shots from a few weeks before that, when Grandma and Grandpa were in town.
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