29th – Last day

Today had no plans as I had pretty much seen and done everything I was interested in so the planning for the day was more along the lines of “what do I want to eat and how do I best spend the time in between the meals?”.

When waking up I heard the rain pounding on my window and as check-out wasn’t until 1200 I had no problems turning around and sleeping for another hour. I finally rolled out of bed, checked out at 1100 and headed towards Maxwell Hawker Center.

Hawker centers are basically a grouping of food stalls where you generally can get good food at a very reasonable price – they are also known as food centers. Maxwell is probably considered the most tourist friendly (without being touristy), and has a booth famous for its chicken rice called Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice. And obviously, when arriving during the lunch rush, that was also where you could find the longest queue. They are efficient, thought, so it didn’t take long before I had my own portion. I had high expectations to it considering how much I had heard about it (mentioned by the Michelin Guide (Bib Gourmand) and praised by Anthony Bourdain) and had made it seem almost godlike, but I realized it was only very good. And let’s be honest; a dish being very good and it only costs S$5,00 and is filling is pretty damn impressive.

Maxwell Center, after the lunch rush.

To kill time I returned to Marina Bay Sands Hotel to get the daytime view from up high. The view wasn’t bad but the night-time views were far superior. It could also have something to do with the utterly dull weather today.

Gardens by the Bay.

Downtown.

The new theater Theatres on the Bay looking similar to durian fruits.

The new theater in the rear and in the bottom is the ArtScience museum shaped like a lotus flower.

I returned to Chinatown where I got a piece of durian sponge cake. It was quite good, especially considering all the stories you hear about the durian fruit. The taste was a bit different than expected which it likely got from the fruit and the sweetness seemed to be coming from added sugar. Overall it was a very pleasant experience and not nearly as bad as expected, though I could imagine that if you turned down the sweetness and up for the fruit’s taste in the cake my impression would have been very different.

From there I wandered for a few hours until I at around 1730 entered a restaurant to have my last dumplings and beef noodles. From there I went to a place that did desserts; I ordered a crushed ice with red beans. Apparently that was very literal – below the mountain of crushed ice and beans was more crushed ice. A bit disappointing to be honest.

Not having anything else to do I left for the airport and having already checked in everything was a breeze when arriving. I had 2-ish hours before boarding and I wanted something that could compensate for the dessert that let me down. I found a small Dunkin Donuts booth that sold massive donuts for a very friendly price which suddenly made the evening much, much sweeter. Success!