Hi everyone!

We woke up at 7am this morning which was a vast improvement on other days. We think we’re starting to beat the jet lag which is nice. We planned for a slow morning so took our time getting down to the hotel breakfast which we have mastered at this point and is now actually quite good. The coffee is piss poor though so we went and grabbed some ice coffees at Starbucks which is a vast improvement (and that’s saying something). After that we headed back up to the room to get some clothes washing done as it is only possible to wear anything once before it’s completely covered in sweat, we need to do a lot of washing, lucky for us there is a washing machine in our room.

At about morning tea time we walked down to Great world and jumped on the MRT over to the botanic gardens.

The botanic gardens of Singapore are world heritage listed and you can see why. They are beautiful. We walked for a few hours and enjoyed it thoroughly.

At the end of the gardens they have what they call a children’s garden. It is basically a splash pad. Julian loved this so much and it was a great way for him to cool down.

It was great until suddenly the clouds came upon us and it started pissing down rain so we had to run for cover and spend the next 20 minutes waiting out the heavy rain so that we could proceed. The rain left as quickly as it came though and we walked the rest of the way through the garden and caught the MRT to Maxwell.

Maxwell is the station that is on the edge of Chinatown. The reason we travelled here was so we could have a late lunch at Maxwell food centre. It’s another hawker centre that hold Singapores national dish and most popular hainanese chicken rice. It’s Michelin recommended and it rose to fame after Anthony Bourdain ate here and talked it up.

We then walked down the street in Chinatown to get a viral snack that we had on our radar a long time ago. It’s called a champion bolo bun. It’s a pineapple bun which is sweet, craggy-crusted with a sweet top and a slab of cold butter.

They make it fresh so we had to wait for ages, but it was damn good. We rated this highly and would love to have another one should we get the chance. We also had a hong-kong style milk tea which was nice. By this time Julian was getting tired from all the walking around the gardens and restless so we decided to skip the rest of Chinatown for another day and head back to our hotel.

We got back to the hotel and rested for an hour or so. It took all of our remaining energy to get out for dinner but we walked down to great world for a sit down dinner at Din Tai Fung which is a very famous dumpling house that you’ve probably heard of that no longer exists in Australia (because the Australian version went so far downhill that they took away naming rights).

It was all not too bad, but not great either. The main reason we came here though was for the dessert. We ordered the chocolate xiao long bao. It came with a sea salt cream. It was a very odd, but delicious pairing of sweet and salty. Very unique.

Step count – 19,881 or 13.79kms way more than we had planned.

Costs:

Fraser suites: $351

Trains: $10.82

Starbucks: $18.93

Singapops and a drink: $11.08

Champion Bolo Bun: $13.85

Maxwell lunch: $27

Din tai fung dinner: $104.39

Supplies: $29.01

Total: $566.08

Much love,

Ronnie, Aimee and Julian