Singapore!

Last weekend I was travelling to Singapore. The reason was, that I had to renew my visa. And to renew working visas, you know have to go out of Vietnam and to renew it in an consulate or embassy of Vietnam. Therefore I chose Singapore, as I always wanted to see it and taking the chance to vist my cousin and her family there as well.
Singapore is an amazing city, but with not much history though. It's clean, it's safe, it's organised. And it's even hotter and more humid than Ho Chi Minh City. My hotel was located on Orchard Road, basically, the shopping heart of Singapore:

It is quite busy and you find everything you want, especially luxury brands.

Something nice is Gardens by the bay, located behind the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. Really nice huge park:

I really enjoyed the walk in the park :)!

Of course one of the landmarks nowadays is the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. It is massive! But I felt it is more like a luxury tourist attraction than a serious hotel. There is a casino and a huge shopping mall with only luxury brands. Nevertheless it is an amazing building, a must see in Singapore! Been there during day and night time.

The Hotel has an observation deck, which is an public area seperated from the private area which is only for hotel guests. The view from there is stunning:

But you have a beautiful view on the skyline from the ground level both during day and night time:

For getting around in Singapore I mainly used the SMRT (Metro). Perfect service. Extremely clean, extremely reliable, and a station basically everywhere you need it. Excellent!

It was a very nice trip, for sure not the last one. However, Singapore is a bit boring after a while. There are many more things to do, no question. But in my opinion it is lacking a certain charme, which other asian cities have, since everything is so clean and in order and everything works, and there is no real historic center.

Internet down... again...

Well, Vietnam is only connected to the Internet via a few small land lines and one overseas cable. Most of the internet traffic goes through the overseas cable. It's now already the 4th time this year, that the cable is broken. That means that the internet speed is extremely slow. The big internet providers in Vietnam are planning to install another overseas cable, but this could take at least one year, until this is in place. It's a bit challenging, to wait for mails, skype is basically not usable and forget about video streaming.
Interesting to see how depend we are nowadys on reliable internet connections
Last week I've been out during an evening to take a few shots of HCMC. Want to continue and to see a bit far off places of the city as well.

Opera

Ben Thanh Market

Night Market @ Ben Thanh

Skybar view

The heart of HCMC

Nguyen Hue