National Day

The National Day of Singapore is celebrated every year on the 9th of August, in commemoration of Singapore's independence from Malaysia in 1965.  Much like the 4th of July there are plenty of fireworks, parades, and crowds!  Nate and I braved the massive crowds and headed to the heart of the action in the Marina Bay Area.  The main show that is held on the floating stadium required tickets so we just went out with the hope of catching the fireworks and parade.  The MRT was flooded with people all heading to the Marina Bay.  Unlike in the US where most of the people would be jumping barriers and climbing over people, the crowds remain very organized and there were quite a few police in the MRT to keep everything running smoothly.  We were able to make our way to the Marina Bay Sands without too much trouble.  We decided to hit one of our new fav restaurants Din Tai Fung for some deliciousness.  Thankfully the wait was only an hour.. no too terrible considering the crowds.

 

We were quite hungry when we picked out what we wanted and our eyes were def bigger then our stomachs as we ordered Shrimp/Pork xiao lin bao, pork xiao lin bao, shrimp wanton soup thing, and then pork fried rice.  The restaurant brought the items out as they were ready and we had finished everything except the pork xiao lin boa and I assumed that they must have forgot about our order as quite some time had passed so we asked our waitress to just cancel the order.  Right after we talked to the waitress they come over with the steamer basket of the pork.  We tried to explain that we got them removed from our bill, which the worker did not understand so we figured we would just have them add it again.  This just caused complete confusion as they for some reason opted to add the pork to the table right next to us and hand them our check. The lady at the table next to us didn't question why she just received a second bill and held it on their table till we finally a waitress came over and spotted that they had two bills on their table.  We tried to explain to them what happened and since the checks are in chinese we had no way of knowing what was what to try and physically show them the issue, but finally we got it sorted out.  Word of advice don't try to change anything in Singapore it just causes problems.

After our longer then anticipated dinner we headed up to see some fireworks.  The crowds were crazy and took up every bit of outside space, but we did our best to squeeze in and we were able to see the very impressive fireworks show.

 

A lot of the crowds headed out after the fireworks, however we were not about to go into the MRT with all those crowds so we just hung in the mall area watching the crowds, and happened to hear the sound of a drum line outside and went out to check it out.  We were able to catch the army, air force, navy, and civil defense parade going by.  The crowds were still rather fierce so Nate persuaded me to go into the Casino for an hour to kill time.  We played some slots and then decided to check out the MRT.  It wasn't too bad, but still a rather good amount of people on the trains.

Wasting time in the mall..

 


Nate took a good video of the crowds, fireworks, and parade