The Singapore Flyer

We caught up with another dear old friend yesterday. She had some spare tickets for the Singapore Flyer (biggest obervation wheel in the world, topping the London Eye by a whopping 30m) and it would have been a shame for them to go to waste so.......

But before that, lunch beckoned. We had ours at a Chinese place located at the Flyer's base, which also housed a food court modeled along the old kopi tiam style (obviously designed more for tourists since that type of eating house has all but disappeared locally). It's interesting to see that many Singapore restaurants with designs of grandeur have their wine stock on display at the entrance. Nonetheless, the place had quite decent food. 

One particular dish which I had not seen (or tasted) for many years was mini cuttlefish fried till crunchy in sweet thick black sauce. This dish was once commonly available at seafront food hawkers at Bedok in days of old. Love it. They also do a pretty good fish head curry. Strange dish of the day was coffee pork ribs - so we had to try it. It had that slight bitter after taste reminiscent of coffee but I'm not entirely convinced of the combination. 

After lunch the queue for the flyer was still long, but not too bad. With a local population of 5+ million, queueing is a way of life, especially on public holidays. 

The entrance was set up like an aircraft departure area, with real X-ray scanners as well. You can't be too careful with such a visible landmark. After a bit of an internal queue (with bits of history and stats of the flyer for passengers to help stop boredom from setting in), we got onto one of the capsules. Oh, and along the way there is the obligatory green screen photo op where your photo is taken and superimposed on various flyer backgrounds for later purchase if you want to. In our case, the genius behind the camera hadn't noticed that our friend was wearing green slacks and no 2 child had green hair. As a result our guffaws could be heard clear across the Johor Strait as we saw the results at the end of the ride, with one legless friend and one headless child. 

Air conditioned, each car (capsule?) can hold up to 28 people (although thankfully, there were only about 20 in ours) and is very stable. The views over the CBD were fantastic, and to a lesser extent the east coast. Looking down, there is a track which is the part of the Singapore leg of the F1 race series. The ride takes about 45 minutes, and for the adventurous, some cars are outfitted with tables and white linen for that in air dining experience that you can't get on a plane. 

This must be the world's largest snow globe, apparently normally open for entry (you can just about see the huge zippered opening) but not today due to 'inclement weather'. It was a nice day (ie not raining).

An excellent opportunity for some interesting aerial shots, the lotus flower shaped building below is the ArtScience Museum.

But sadly, all good experiences must end, or at least be replaced by new ones. We bade our friend goodbye, and hope to have her visit us sometime.