Singapore and why 8 days are not enough (Part1)

As mentioned, we landed and headed straight to Ravi's place. That Friday night (as per our itinerary) we were to go to Clarke Quay (pronounced as kee) - don't ask me why. Wait, I think it is best if I shared our itinerary with you guys - below is a snapshot of the plan. The finalized plan was an amalgamation of both places to visit columns ...

You can click on the image to see an expanded view of The Plan (yes, it deserves being a proper noun given the amount of time, sweat, blood, tears and effort that went into making it).

As per The Plan we were to spend the evening at Clarke Quay. First off, my cousin lives in Toa Payoh  (circled in black in the MRT map here) and is a 2 minute walk from it. We walked down to the place and purchased our metro cards. Boarded the North-South (red colour) line to go to Dhoby Ghaut (hee hee, even I was amused - reminded me of Bombay), which is an intersection point to change lines; and go by the purple line (North-East) to Clarke Quay.  (map attached on the side to give you an idea of the planning the city has and how everything is connected by metro - even though you can walk the distances :P)

Clarke Quay is gorgeous; I have no other word to describe the place. It is beautifully lit at night and is bustling with people who are busy partying or getting smashed out of their brains. The Friday we went was the Halloween weekend, and we saw several Harley Quinns, Marilyn Monroes, Batmans, Iron Mans etc :) Unfortunately I do not have any pics with them, but the mood was extremely lively and there was this electric buzz in the air.

Apologies for the poor picture quality, I had shaky hands while the camera as I was busy ogling at the way the place is lit up and the number of places there are to hang out.

Clarke Quay ceiling is extremely pretty !!! It is a huge place filled with places to eat / shop / drink and it has this fancy sort of cover to help people not get wet during the rains that come up at any point of time ! :) We walked through the place trying to figure out a place to have dinner. As luck would have it, I had an upset stomach (I NEVER fall sick, and of all the times something could go wrong, it was at Singapore - AAARGH !!). Anyway, I didn't let that get in the way of having fun, and we hopped through a few places. We didn't do dinner per se at any place, more like ate munchies at multiple places.

We had awesome ice-cream from Clmado (Spanish ice-cream) and it was scrumplicious ! The person serving us did those fancy tricks where he held the cone on a rod of sorts, dropped it, turned it around, faked giving us icr-cream etc) and we actually had to use our terribly poor reflexes to catch (rather, snatch) our cones :D

I took the cookies and cream flavour (safest bet as I do not think you can try out flavours there), while Sudhir had mango and Ravi took the chocolate (if I remember correctly).

After having ice-cream and watching the young crowd dance on the roads to loud music (in their Halloween costumes), we went to this place called Octapas - a Spanish outlet. There we had tapas for the first time, and let me tell you - they are perfect to have as munchies during dinner or while having drinks :) ... We took an olive dish which was soaked in vinegar and had pickles in it :) Super tasty, I tell you. Need to find a place in India that serves such a dish.

We hung around at the place till I think around 12AM (by which time we were dead tired) post which we walked back across a bridge (full of people chilling out) to the cab boarding point.
At the cab pick up point people politely waited their turn even though there was no "official" queue of any sort!! I was like, super impressed with this - wish it happened back home too ...

Thus ended Day 1 ....