Miles Away From Home: What country am I in again?

Well, I've arrived in Singapore, in one piece. It took me a bit of time at the airport to get my mind out of "work mode" - and I did have a good bit of time, as I'd allowed for an hour in the taxi to get from the hotel, but we made it in 35mins, which means I had a half an hour to kill before I could even check in! The flight itself was uneventful - everyone always rhapsodises about Singapore Airlines, but I didn't find them anything special. Maybe they're different on long-haul, all I had them for was an hour and a half. They had the in-seat entertainment system tho, which was good, but I didn't get much of a chance to play with it.

After I landed, I got out of the airport in record time, and onto the metro - at last! A city with a decent public transport system! 30mins from the terminal to the MRT stop my hostel was near! At that stage tho, things started becoming a little strange. I was staying near Little India, and when I got off the MRT I was faced with streets like Arab St, Baghdad St, Kandahar St, and Haj St, all of the restaurants were serving middle eastern food (with big signs in the window saying "Halal food") and within eyeshot of the hotel was one of the bigger mosques in Singapore, the Sultan Mosque, and just as I got there I could hear the "Allah Akhbar" coming from the Muzzein, calling people to prayer. So, despite me always considering Singapore to be a predominantly Chinese city like Hong Kong, I felt like I was somewhere in Saudi Arabia!

After I checked in anyway, I pretty much ended up going straight out. This is what I love about hostels, you always meet people who are up for a bit of a night out. In this case, it was a bunch of Canadians - altho not your ususal "aboot"-saying canucks, one was chinese-canadian, one was malay-canadian, one was indian-canadian, and one was a white guy! We decided to go into Clarke Quay, as the chick at reception had told us of a good microbrewery place there called "Brewerkz". Unfortunately, in our wisdom, we decided to walk in as it didn't look that far on the map, forgetting about the 31 degrees and 70%+ humidity outside. 30mins later we stagger in the door of the place, shirts sticking to us, half dead from dehydration, and in need of liquid sustenance. Luckily, they had it in spades for us in the form of a "tower of beer", effectively our own mini-keg of beer, big enough for 2 1/2 pints each and at S$80 (or about €40), pretty good value). After that, some other bars were visited in the area, and bed was hit around 1am-ish (I think).