Orchard Road

The day started with a more than adequate breakfast in the hotel and then we headed on foot in search of Orchard Road, the main shopping district in Singapore. Looking the directions up on the net showed it was actually just a straight walk from the hotel. I estimated the walk to be thirty minutes up the road. It was hot again, and the beautiful sun is out shining. The walk would have been a piece of cake had I not stupidly worn my sandals, blisters developed on both my feet. However we were on holiday and a simple thing like blisters wasn’t going to worry me.

We found the shopping district easily and had an enjoyable few hours poking around the malls. Our first purchases were made and fittingly for the grand kids, time to start the Christmas shopping apparently.

We had lunch and a drink in an Irish bar, just as we were starting we to eat we heard thunder roll in and the sky grew black. We decided to just carry on and finish our drinks and worry about the rain afterwards. The rain held off for us and didn’t really start to come down hard until we were close to the hotel. We took shelter in the nearest building, which happened to be another Irish Bar, and in an uncanny sense of timing the sky cleared and the sun came out just after finishing our drinks. We headed back to the hotel for a rest before heading out for dinner.

I had selected Boat Quay as our place to dine, you could see it from our hotel window, Google told me it’s about 15 minutes walk. Its an easy walk to Boat Quay and there is no doubt the location is beautiful, however the aggressive nature of the restaurant staff trying to entice you to their establishments is very over bearing. If you don’t like being actively pursued up the footpath, people standing in your way to prevent you passing their establishment, then this is a lovely place to eat.

We eat at the Forum Restaurant and I don’t recommend it to anyone. It cost us far more than it should have, the service was only visible when they were taking your order and trying to convince you to eat the most expensive food and then it completely disappeared. The food was mediocre and we purchased a lobster at great expense and were very disappointed at the preparation. It was tough and not well cooked at all. Given we think we picked it out of a tank it should have been superb but it wasn’t. Enough said and we walked back to our hotel a little disappointed.