On to Singapore

We spent the last few days of our vacation in Singapore, a fabulous, if not tiny, country. We had a wonderful time!
We spent a day wandering about different parts of the city. Orchid Road is a large shopping area with thousands of shops – including a couple of great book stores – in English! Needless to say, we spent quite a bit of time there. Then we wandered about the downtown section of the city – location of the famous “Singapore Lion”. The name Singapore came from a prince, long ago, who, upon landing on the island, saw an animal he thought was a lion (never has been a lion on Singapore). Anyway…he called the land “Singa Pura” which means Lion City and it stuck.
We went to the National Museum of Singapore (to escape the rain for a while). It was absolutely a fantastic place to visit. They had a lot about the history of Singapore, its discovery, early years, how it evolved, but the most spectacular part about it was HOW it was presented. They had two parallel histories presented at the same time, one track from the perspective of industry, the state, the “official” tract and then the personal tract, stories about the people alive at the time, how things affected them, how they lived. It was fascinating and very well done.