Gardens By The Bay & Lucky Plaza

Saturday, 27 January

Bren and I went to Gardens by the Bay today.  We explored all the outdoor gardens and areas today, and are going to wait for our friends to visit to go into the indoor gardens (Flower Dome and Cloud Forest) since those require tickets.  The grounds and park areas around the "Supertree Grove" and the "Dragonfly Lake" and "Kingfisher Lake" were beautiful.  It was nice to have a full, sunny day out exploring.

The flowers around this area were beautiful as well:

The Supertree Groves and lakes around the area were equally as neat to walk around and explore:

There was Spanish moss!--which I hadn't seen anywhere else yet.  Reminded me of Savannah.

This is the Auto Rider--which is a fully-operational, air-conditioned self-driving vehicle that can be used to travel around the park if you are elderly or just too hot out in the Singapore heat.  We didn't ride in it, but it was cool to see functioning:

These are the beautiful Dahlia's blooming inside the Flower Dome window:

Last week we signed up for Mo Bike, which is one of the bike sharing programs in Singapore.  For $5 SGD we got 180 days free.  You just scan the QR code and it unlocks a bike.  Everyone rides bikes on the sidewalks here too, so you get to be completely away from traffic.  We rode bikes to the downtown area and walked around for a while before deciding to go to some of the only thrift stores that exist in Singapore.

The thrift stores were all on the top floor of this building called "Lucky Plaza" which was old school compared to other enormous, fancy shopping malls in Singapore.  It was a little more scrappy and more our shopping style.

We found some great deals in the thrift store, Lucky Plaza Bazaar, including a traditional Chinese outfit I'm planning to wear to the AST Chinese New Year celebration in a few weeks.

There were also some old stores that seemed like they'd been closed since the mid-1980s.  Like this eye glass store (right picture) when still had a reference to "West Germany" in the advertisement.  

On the way home, there were Pongal festivities happening in Ang Mo Kio and we saw another decorated cow.

Such a fun day exploring!  Can't wait to see the light show at Garden's By The Bay in a few weeks when Kara and Eddie visit.