January 27, 2019 - Singapore - Sunday, Day 21

January 27, 2019 - Singapore - Sunday, Day 21

We had an early breakfast in the dining room and headed off for another busy day in Singapore. As is often the case our indulging in the activities of the places we visited yesterday caused us to defer some things to today.

We rode the MRT to Little India. Here we visited another temple before wandering the shops. We cannot believe the number of stores selling gold jewelry. It is beautiful, but we are not informed enough to know what is real and what is a good price. We just admired things.

Now the MRT took us to a stop near Arab Town. Our lecturer had mentioned a street, Haji Lane. It has paintings on the walls of building, funky shops. good crafts and eating/drinking places. It sounded like fun so we put it on our list.

While the MRT does a fine job of getting us places, the MRT map is less than useful in providing orientation when you come out of the station. It also does not put landmarks where they really are relative to other structures. So when we exited the station I looked over the map, threw a dart and chose a direction. Whew, I was right. We came to a majestic building with a sculpture garden several flights above the sidewalk . This was Parkview. It had me second guessing because on the map the building across the street was not the hospital that was actually there. After admiring the garden and strolling through the open lobby of this office building we marched on in search of Haji Lane.

Soon I saw Bali Lane and thought perhaps I had misread Bali as Haji on the map because there was no Bali Lane on the map. Not to worry, the next block was Haji Lane. Unreal.

Haji Lane did live up to the description Bret gave in his lecture. We enjoyed its difference. It was alive with people ad mid day on a Sunday. Impressive.

At the end of Haji we took a cross street the led to Arab Street. We spent a lot of time on Arab Street last year. It is lined with fabric and carpet stores. there are many beautiful things to see. Last year the vendors were rather aggressive. Today they were pleasantly passive. We actually enjoyed our stroll here. 

At the end of the block we went to visit the large mosque. Because it was Sunday it was closed to visitors. After a quick perusal of the neighboring stalls, we made our way back to the MRT. Again we had spent more time than expected. Our diversion to Parkview accounted for this. When we come back on February 15th we will visit the old city, the Merlon and Clarke Quay. For now we went straight back to the ship. As we eft the subway we stopped at the MRT ticket office to turn in our transit cards for $20.

We were in our cabin by 3:00. We showered and prepared for the safety drill at 4:00. All passengers are required to attend the drill even those, like us, who have already been through it. 

We opted to follow the announcements to the letter this time. We remained in the cabin until the emergency blast and the instruction to now proceed to the lifeboat station. When we got there we are among the last to arrive. Nobody pays attention to the plan.

At 5:00 Mass was celebrated. There were far more people there for this Sunday Mis than we ever had on last voyage. We will see if this is just because it is Sunday.

Later at the Mariners cocktail party we talked with a couple from the Netherlands. They had been frustrated at the disorganized check-in procedure. They had to delay boarding because the ship was not in o time and there was no seating in the departures hall. 

We were late, they were told, due to bad weather. That was true however it was not rough seas but strong winds that delayed us. On our last sea day headed toward Singapore we needed to make an average speed of 20 knots. Maasdam’s top speed is 22 knots so ordinarily this would not be a problem. However we experienced 20 knot winds head on. This reduced our maximum speed to 17 to 18 knots. Losing 2 knots for over 20 hours made us 2 hours late.

After church we went straight to dinner. The dining room was louder than usual. We attribute that to new arrivals greeting each other and settling in. 

We went to our regular table. Soon a waiter approached and introduced himself. He had just boarded and would be our waiter. He worked at earning our names and like and dislikes. He is OK, but he is no Sinar. Sinar and Noer have been reassigned to a less busy area to compensate for the time they spent in our very busy section. We hope our new waiter Eko will measure up. Our new wine steward, Allan had been nicely briefed by Yvette, and had our bottle of wine ready for us. He is very personable. We had seen Yvette in the Lido earlier and she said she had come down last night to introduce us to Allan, but because we stayed out late we missed each other. She is such a sweetheart. We will miss her too.