SNEAKING INTO SINGAPORE'S SECRET INFINITY POOL

SINGAPORE. It’s like they took New York City, cleaned it up, added some culture and stuck it on an island in the middle of Southeast Asia. Singapore surprised me. For whatever reason, perhaps because Bali was my first impression of this region, I had this predisposition that Southeast Asia was all quite underdeveloped, dirty, and not exactly economically thriving. But Singapore proved me SO wrong. The entire city is built around business, tourism and culture. The combination of the three make it a quite breathtaking place. The architecture alone will make you wonder what planet you landed on and the amount of high end shopping, restaurants, hotels and more makes you feel like a queen. Whoever is overseeing the cities cleanliness is doing a dang good job because good luck finding so much as a piece of trash on the streets. You’ve probably heard the rumor that you’re not allowed to chew gum or spit in public, and it’s true. And once you see the city, you’ll know exactly why and begin to wonder why those rules aren’t incorporated in your own city. Aside from the cleanliness, the whole city looks brand new. Each sky scraper, apartment building, hotel, they’re all intricately designed to create a spectacular skyline. We spent a total of five days in Singapore, and stumbled across something new and inspiring each day. I could have easily spent my five days simply wandering around the city and getting lost inside of hawkers and the gigantic shopping malls. But, I was with a boy, and you know boys, they’re not great at the whole just walking around/window shopping thing! So, we ended up planning out our days to make sure we were able to see all that we came for.

One of the most popular features of Singapore is probably the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, with its spectacular roof top, infinity pool. Before leaving on our trip, Eric and I researched how we could access the pool without being a hotel guest. We had derived a whole plan as to how we were going to get past security and get into that pool for at least one picture, but once we got there we realized that it was more heavily guarded than the freaking Pentagon. You could access the restaurants and cafes which had a view of the pool, but you couldn’t access the actual pool deck without a room key. We had the genius idea of finding robes from a maid’s cart and then pretending that we had forgotten our room key in the bathroom within the pool area in hopes that they’d assume we had just been inside since we were wearing our robes. We took the elevator up to a random floor to try and find some robes but were immediately met by two security guards who must have been watching us and knew what we were up to. After much contemplation, we decided to accept our defeat and drink our sorrows away with Singapore Slings at the hotels skyline café, where we did have a pretty nice view of the pool. It was a bummer, but at least we tried! And if you have any secret tips to sneaking into the Marina Bay Sands infinity pool, please comment below because I’d love to know for next time ;)

There’s no shortage of roof top pools all around the city since most of its structures are built straight up, even the malls. We were able to find one hotel that offered a day pass for their infinity pool, so we ended up taking advantage of that. We paid about $20 and were able to get some incredible pictures with Singapore’s skyline as our background. Unfortunately, we were there during their raining season so many of our pictures are a bit gloomy due to the constant cloud coverage and rain. We didn’t let the weather stop us from adventuring around and did get lucky with some sun a couple of days we were there.

We got lucky with some sun the day we visited the Gardens by the Bay, which is a nature park that spans across the Central Region of Singapore, adjacent to the Marina Reservoir. We strolled through the park until we came across the Flower Dome and Cloud forest, two large domes inside of the park that encased incredible man-made gardens. The Flower Dome felt tropical, with incredibly vibrant colors, fun, creative garden designs and breathtaking photo-op spots. The Cloud Forest felt more like being in the mountains or in a rainforest, with a giant waterfall and gardens representing different parts of the world. Seeing all of this growing indoors was incredible and it was unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Between all the amazing sights Singapore has to offer, don’t worry, we didn’t forget to eat! We actually had heard of these things called Hawkers which are large food courts with different vendors offering various types of cuisine, and we knew we needed to find one! We ended up going back to the largest Hawker in the city about four times because it was so good and so cheap. All though Singapore is quite luxurious and can be expensive, there are also affordable options if you’re willing to eat more like the locals. We absolutely loved chicken-rice, a Singaporean dish that featured roasted chicken, rice and broth with some sweet and sour sauce. We ate it at least twice a day, for about $4-5 a plate, can’t beat that!

I fortunately have family friends who live near the main downtown area of Singapore who were nice enough to let us use their home while they were away visiting family. So, we got to stay in a beautiful house, just outside of downtown where we had access to a kitchen, which also helped save us mullah. We found the transportation system in Singapore to be really easy to navigate and were able to get everywhere we needed to go with public transportation. Most of the main attractions are also in walking distance from one another. It’s definitely a large city, but if you have your walking shoes on, and it’s not too hot out or pouring down rain, you should be fine to navigate the city on foot. We spent a lot of our time walking from place to place, which I love because it opens the opportunity to stumble across places you otherwise wouldn’t know were there.

Our Singapore experience was all-in-all amazing. Despite some rain, our first stop of our world trip was quite a success. We got a good taste of Singapore so we know exactly what we want to do and where we want to stay when we come back in the future (cough, cough Marina Bay Sands).