Singapore

I know school has started a few weeks ago, but this is my first chance to write something. I will try to catch up this blog in between studying over the next week. Warning: this is not directly vet school related. Anyways, my only vacation this summer was going to Japan, Singapore, and Cambodia for a couple weeks. Research and jobs ate up the rest of my summer.

This was my first international trip. To start off, I flew 13 hours to Japan where I had about an hour layover before I left for Singapore. This first flight was not that bad. The flight to Singapore was 7 hours and the last 3 hours were the hardest. I don't sleep well on planes and I was trying to stay awake so I could sleep when I got there at 2 AM. I was only in Singapore for 26 hours before flying back to Japan. We went to the Singapore Zoo during the day and a Night Safari that evening. The Zoo was cool - white tigers were the best and it's probably right up there with the San Diego Zoo. I was slightly disappointed because I had read about how they used natural barriers instead of fences for the animals and I expected to get amazing pictures of all the animals. Sadly, there were a lot more fences than I expected. The best part was being able to pet the lemurs - they were roaming in the bird and bat area that you walk through. One was just chilling while we were petting it so I decided to start palpating anatomical landmarks. So I started with the spine of the scapula and the borders going to the humerus and I stopped when it snapped at my sister-in-law. Lesson 1: Lemurs don't like to be palpated. Another lemur was walking across a log above the path when it stopped, looked my way, and appeared to be getting ready to leap. There was only this small branch right above me that it surely wasn't going to jump onto. Lesson 2: Lemurs will leap onto seemingly too small of branches. It jumped, landed on the branch and swung into me. It let me pet it as it sat on the branch so we were cool even though it smacked me with a branch.

The Night Safari was cool, but we couldn't take pictures. This was probably the place I read about with the natural barriers and very few fences. It was cool to see the animals do their thing in the dark as they were looking for food and wandering around. However, it was a lot of walking in one day and we didn't see all the animals because we were tired and couldn't find the rest of the path.

Overall, Singapore was cool because it was so clean and green. Granted, there's some harsh punishments for chewing gum, littering, and jay-walking. The Zoo was still really cool and filled up the whole day with no problem. It was a good start to my first international experience.