Day 74 - By the pool, at the mall, in the night garden

Thursday 15th March
After a lie in we took some time to enjoy one of the pools and the hot tub belonging to our apartment blocks. There's a lot of pools and fountains, some of the pools have fish, I presume you're not supposed to swim in those though.

We needed lunch and to get travel cards so we headed off to Newton SMRT. The 7-11 has a sit down cafe, so we grabbed a bite to eat and then headed to the bigger shopping area of Orchard.
Orchard Station furnished us with our SMRT smart cards. Leaving the station we entered an underground laberynthian shopping mall.

We wandered around soaking it all in before exiting via a department store tower block onto Orchard road.

Grabbing an ice cream from a kerbside 7-11 we took a walk around at street level.
The scale of the shopping malls here is intimidating to say the least.
We took a walk into a tower block where the first four floors were restaurants, bars and cafés. 

Link to panorama

We re- entered the SMRT via another underground mall, and headed to Khatib to pick up the bus to Singapore Zoo.

Once we were at the zoo we had to work out what to do to get into the park as we had bought online vouchers. Fortunately there was a nice person at the information desk to direct us where to convert our voucher into tickets.
Once we had our tickets and a park map that had the schedule for the shows we looked over the small shops around the entrance, and went in search of our evening meal.

We decided that we'd eat later but have a drink now; we'd just finished our drinks when we spotted a flash of fire and heard music. This was the first show starting 15 minutes early.

some of the show

After the show we headed to the next show which would let us see some of the animals up close with their keepers. We were lucky to get seats right in the front.

The best bit was when the otters picked up and sorted rubbish in to recycling buckets, but it was also pretty funny when the big eared desert fox wouldn't go off stage and kept running back on.
The next part is a  tram which took us round the park with a pre recorded talk about the animals and their habitats. The tram ride takes you through some bits you can't walk past like the elephants. It was excellent.

When we got off the tram ride we figured we better get a pass out and go get something to eat.

After the tram ride there are 4 walks which should have taken 20 minutes a piece; we should have been leaving the zoo around 2210, instead we left at 2330. It's pretty engrossing .

The light levels are like bright moonlight, many of the pictures seem monochromatic because there was so little light for the camera to work with.

Leaving the zoo we probably caught the last bus, we knew we needed to change buses too, but the connecting bus never showed up, we missed the next connecting bus because we were still working out which next bus we needed, after that our maps app kept showing us buses passing us but there were no buses. Eventually we called Über up and got a ride back to the apartment.
We turned in around 0045, so not too bad considering we were late out of the zoo and we were navigating a new city late at night.