'Twas the week before Christmas and the temperature is still in the high thirties. Christmas decorations abound, hotels have huge Christmas trees outside and yet to us it all seems a bit strange.
We had a quiet morning as the tour manager had a made an appointment to have her nails done before Christmas. The shop which was brave enough to take this on is about two hundred yards away from David's flat and so off she went at ten thirty. I stayed behind and caught up with the blog and lo and behold an hour later she returned, extremely pleased with the job that had been done. I have to say they did look very nice.
As this had taken up most of the morning we remained in the flat for an early lunch before heading off down to th river to go on a river boat cruise around the city. It was extremely hot, and we waited in the shade for about twenty minutes for the boat to arrive. What was clear is that you get an extremely different perspective from a boat, and we were glad we had had the chance to walk around Singapore and knew some of the buildings we were seeing from the water. For some reason, which still remains unclear to us, unless it is part of an art installation, the harbour is full of white balls about eighteen inches across, just floating there and in the daylight clearly doing very little. The tour took about forty five minutes and provided us with several photo opportunities, so all in all we thought it was worthwhile.
The heat here is enervating always around the thirty degree mark but with high humidity, a mile walked here is probably worth about two miles walked at home. For this reason drinking a lot of water is essential and we always carry two bottles.
On our return to Clarke Quay we sat by the river and had a couple of beers before we headed home to cook some dinner. As David was out, having dinner with a friend, we ate by ourselves and watched a film on television before heading to bed. A rather English end to the day.