SINGAPORE

V and I stopped by the little island of Singapore to visit my cousin and her family. We were on our India trip that year and stayed with cousin for a few days. She was excited to take us on the grand tour of Singapore. The spotlessly clean city where you can shop for all kinds of materialistic favorites. It is a mecca of International food and seafood is everything that you can imagine and more.

We walked around Sentosa and the Butterfly Park. The many Chinese and Indian restaurants we dined at served up some decadent plates for the three of us -ravenous women. The evening we relaxed at the Palawan Beach and took the monorail across the white sands. The best Singaporean dish that I thoroughly enjoyed and still remember after all these years is the tantalizing delicate taste of the Shark Fin soup.

You cannot beat the elegance of the Merlion Statue which is 8.6 m and weighs about 40 tons. This emblem is one of Singapore's national icons and was designed by Fraser Brunner. It is now the symbol of the Singapore Tourism Board. The statue itself was designed by Kwan Sai Kheong and is currently situated on Merlion Pier. The Merlion is an imaginary creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish.

You can imagine the excitement of three females going around the Malls of Singapore trying to see the many sales we could cover in two short days..... By then, the impact of our shopping spree had become so severe that we had to borrow a piece from my cousins' luggage collection to accommodate our purchases.