The Zoo

Singapore knows how to do up it's tourist sites. For my week-end birthday adventures, I went to the zoo on Saturday and golfing ( where else?) on Sunday. Getting into and out of the zoo was a breeze in terms of flow of traffic, taxi stands and entrance booths. The walkways, river rafting and trams were clearly marked and it was amazing how they could carve this zoo out of the jungle. When you walked down the butterfly path or the "Australian outback" you just assumed you were there and were not connected to other areas of the zoo or for that matter,that you in a zoo altogether.

When I consider the zoo, bird park, night safari, China town, little India, river walks, from the tourist point of view, Singapore is a great little adventure. Things are easy to get to, you can imagine you are in the jungle one day and on 5th Avenue the next as you venture down

Orchard Boulevard, covered with Christmas lights and sleigh bells ringing coming from the stores.

I had quite a nice week-end. We had a staff party Friday night which was great. Christmas presents, lots of good western food like turkey and cranberry sauce and of course, lots to drink. It is amazing how much people can actually drink! In consideration of me...they had a case of ginger beer ( which was delicious). I wonder if we have such a thing in Canada?

Saturday the zoo and Sunday golf. As David remarked, do I ever get out of my golf shirt, shorts and sandals? The weather here, along the equator is supposedly hot ( 32 degrees) with lots of rain. I just went out for supper and actually felt cold. God knows what I am going to feel like a week from today when I am back in Toronto. Hopefully I will see you all soon.

Last night I kept trying to book my tickets home through the Internet and spent three hours getting knocked off, finding new sites, getting bounced again and so on. Surprisingly, every time I went back to some

old sites prices the itineraries changed, as people bought their ticket I supposes. Quite an interesting phenomenon. I ended up paying about $500 less then I was willing to pay the first go round. I guess there are some advantages of getting bumped off...the first time because I did not know my postal code, the second time because it would not accept my Singapore phone number and the third time, just because. I ended up talking with someone in Manila and doing it over the phone. That almost didn't work for the same reasons.

See you soon.