Merlion Land Loves Me: Singapore Rain and the Flower Dome

I mentioned in my previous post that I went to Singapore a few months ago. While it was my second time going there, this trip was the first time that I actually went all-out touristy. I prepared a long list of my must-go-to places and one of them was Gardens by the Bay. Thankfully, my dear friend Darryl offered accompanying us! And honestly I’d say it was one of the highlights of my vacation. Here’s why.

Story time!

It was Sunday when we—me, Darryl, Exie, and another of Darryl’s friend, Daniel—met. It started good, clear, and bright. In other words, there was little expectation that it would rain. I say little because Singaporean weather pattern is pretty much…confusing. It could rain anytime.

When we reached the Marina Bay area, it started drizzling. Then as we walked closer to the entrance to the Garden, it got a bit stronger. It appeared something we could take with two umbrellas so we decided to just walk from there to the ticket booth (it was quite a distance) instead of taking the shuttle which was rather expensive (it costed SGD14). Apparently, it was a wrong decision.

The rain suddenly went torrential. We were hardly a quarter away from our destination and we were already drenched—the umbrellas were pretty much useless. We couldn’t go back though because first, we thought it’d be awkward, and second, you only live once. By the time we reached the ticket booth, our clothes were 80 to 90 percent wet! Before buying our tickets we even had this idea of drying our socks at least on the washroom’s hand dryers which, as crazy as it may sound, we actually did!

So yeah, it seemed like Singapore was glad to know I decided to finally act as a legitimate tourist that it even made me experience Singaporean weather! Oh, and one more thing. The Flower Dome and Cloud Forest were holy-sweet-heavens freezing. So imagine entering these humongous walk-in chillers with wet clothes!

Photo dump

We went first to the Flower Dome then to the Cloud Forest so all the photos here are from the former. The Dome is sort of divided into smaller gardens but to simply describe it, to the right of the entrance (the Baobabs and Succulent Garden parts of the map) was the “arid” area which has a lot of cacti, and to the left is the floral one. So for now, we’ll have the more colorful half.

I like taking photos of flowers using my phone because they look nice. Cue sparkly eyes.

So that’s it. It was a crazy day really but it was enjoyable! Spending a day and experiencing funny, unexpected things with friends is always fun to begin with. Anyway, I’ll be posting more of my Singapore trip in the next days as soon as I’m done editing the photos.