Singapore

We drove to Singapore a couple of weekends ago to ‘reset’ our visitor’s pass in Malaysia since we haven’t gotten our visas yet.  It was a fun little road trip that only took us about 3 and a half hours to complete.  We crossed the border with no difficulty and then we were in what seemed like a completely different country.  Even though Malaysia and Singapore had the same history until 50 years ago, Singapore is totally different.  The most noticeable difference was the road systems.  It didn’t take us very long at all to figure out the roadways (unlike in Malaysia where we still haven't figured it out), and people drove in a normal, sane manner (meaning they actually obeyed common driving rules).  It was rather reminiscent of the US.  We only got to spend one night there before coming back and since we didn’t get to the hotel until late, we didn’t really do much besides eat dinner and sleep.  We are definitely going to go back so that we can experience Singapore properly.

Anyway, we were laughing about how spoiled we got in the less than 24 hours that we spent there.  When we left Malaysia we were told we had to purchase a Touch & Go card (kind of like the Easy Pass on the east coast) where you put money on it and then tap it against a pad to pay tolls instead of using cash.  They told us it was 20 ringgit for the card, but they didn’t tell us that paying 20 ringgit only left us with 9.20 for the next toll and we didn’t find out until re-entering Malaysia because there were no toll booths after that.  So, we came up to the first toll booth back in Malaysia and we tap our card and find out we need 10.80, but we didn’t have enough.  We had to back up and go to a different lane (there wasn’t anyone at the booth we were at) so we could pay cash and move on.  Well, shortly after this we decided we wanted to put more money on the card and at the next toll we pulled up and asked the person if we could top up.  They told us to go to booth one, so we said we would do it at the next toll.  The next toll comes and we pull into booth one and say we want to top up and the person tells us we have to go to booth three…oh brother.  We just said never mind, we’ll pay cash ‘cause it’s easier.  So long uniform and easy to understand Singapore…hello random Malaysian ways!