Thursday the 24th, Part II: Dinner with UNC Alums & Walk Around the Riverfront

After the HDB visit, we all went to a Thai restaurant in downtown to have a paid-for-by-the-program dinner with some UNC Alums living in Singapore. I actually wasn't wowed by the food, but I did get Thai Iced Tea, one of my favorite drinks even in the U.S. (there's a great Thai café in Greensboro that has AWESOME Thai Milk Tea).

I also got durian for dessert - I don't remember if I've talked much about durian, but it's pretty infamous amongst our group. It is a big, spiky fruit that is expensive and horribly pungent. There are many places - the MRT stations, certain hotels - that have explicit "No Durian" signs. The smell can apparently get into fabric and never come out, and it's really not a pleasant smell.

Despite all these drawbacks, it is a delicacy among most Asian countries. We all joked that it is a fruit that has done everything to scare people away - it's big and spiky, it smells terrible - and yet people still eat it!

So, of course, I had to try some. The dessert was actually quite good, but the texture was rather odd. I'm glad I tried it, though. I rather enjoyed the taste, but the smell lingered in my mouth for a bit too long afterwards.

After dinner, Hui Qian led a group of us around the downtown area to see some of the important Singaporean landmarks - the Raffles Hotel, the World War II Monument, the Esplanade Theatre, the Merlion, the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort, the Business District at night. It was a slow, easy, chill evening, very romantic and atmospheric. It was the first time I'd walked around downtown at night, and it was really neat to be in a big city at night time.

^^ The Raffles Hotel, an iconic building in Singapore.

^^ Group photo in front of the World War II monument. Since you can't really see the monument, here's a picture of it, thanks to Google.

Walking through the Esplanade, the premier arts theatre in Singapore (which happens to be delightfully shaped like a durian!), we decided to stop and take funny pictures with these weird paper maché statues in the lobby.

Here's the iconic Esplanade theatre viewed from the riverfront. The third image, again thanks to Google, is of an actual durian. See the resemblance?

Pictures taken by the riverfront with the business district in the background.

The just-opened but already-iconic Marina Bay Sands Integrated Gambling Resort/Hotel/Skypark (you've already seen pictures of this in some of my earlier posts).

The hyper-iconic Merlion, a fusion of a lion and a fish artificially created by the government to be a symbol of Singapore. Even if it was only created specifically for tourism, and has absolutely no cultural or historical significance, it's a pretty neat thing.