Thanks, that’s good to know. We’ll be down there in a few months ourselves, so we’ll keep it in the running.
Just a slight disclaimer - I’m only looking at their map - I haven’t checked it on google maps. But if it really is within a 5-10 minute walk of the two MRTs as it seems to be - I’d stay there 
If you need anything while you’re here - drop a note
The Venue is about 10 minutes from my condo. Nice place to live (Joo Chiat Road and Katong are interesting places to wander and nosey) butif you’re only here for a few days, it’s realistically a cab ride or a bus ride to anywhere. If you deliberately don’t want anywhere in the touristy touristy centre it’d be worth a go, but it’s not super-convenient for a limited stay otherwise.
Resurrecting this thread to piggyback my own question. We’ve booked our hotel in Singapore for May. Want to know if Jurong Bird Park is worth a look. A Singaporean friend of mine loves it, but she may be thinking in terms of her children. How is it for adults? I’ve read mixed reviews.
We like the Bird Park - it’s surprisingly good and quieter than the zoo. I wouldn’t go for it over the zoo though, even a return visit to the zoo. If you haven’t been for a while, the River Safari is the new kid in town. They’ve moved the pandas there.
In the interests of full disclosure I should say that, although the River Safari gets good reviews, we thought it was kind of crappy. Smaller than the zoo, it sounds like it will be more exciting than it is. It’s mostly a walk-around park - there is a river ride but you have to book separately and it’s very very heavily booked so do that the second you get there. The pandas were great, but the rest of it I didn’t rate. A good thing is you can get combo tickets for the Zoo/Bird Park/River Safari or any combination, so I’d go see the pandas, do a whip round the rest then head to one of the others. We did River Safari and Bird Park in the same day and the birds were better.
Thanks. We’re definitely doing a return visit to the zoo and Night Safari. Never been to the bird park and wasn’t sure if we wanted to include it. It’s a bit out of the way. We’ll probably pass on it. Not sure about the River Safari. We have pandas in Thailand, although you have to go up to Chiang Mai to see them. May pass on that too, but we’ll keep some free time open.
Yeah, that’s the other thing - it’s not really near the others. The RSafari at least has that going for it - it’s next door to the zoo.
If you’ve not done the Aquarium on a previous trip, I’d choose that over the bird park.
Is that the aquarium on Sentosa Island? We’ll be doing a day on Sentosa.
Yep - the S.E.A. - specifically in Resort World Sentosa, where the casino and Universal Studios are. It’s the largest in the world by some measures, and it’s fairly cool.
We’ve been to Sentosa, but that was before Universal Studios and the casino. Should be a fun day.
The Sentosa aquarium may have grown larger since we were there, but we have one here in Bangkok that was in the beginning famously billed as “the largest aquarium in the Southern Hemisphere.” No mean trick considering we’re north of the equator. We were wondering if it stretched all the way down. They soon changed that though and have since been eclipsed by others anyway.
Iv’e been to Singapore a couple of times and found it very clean, organized, too westernized, and very expensive to shop. Much more expensive than the US. My wife, who is an avid shopper, was forever saying “expensive” whenever she wandered around the shops.
Kuala Lumpur is a cheap place to shop. It has good eating places and we found it more interesting than Singapore. If you don’t want to lie on beaches you may like Manila. The people speak good English, they are very friendly and hospitable, the shops are cheap to shop and restaurants are fantastic. If you like beaches go to Boracay (Philippines) which is almost like paradise.
Thanks, but I already live in the Third Word, and this year we’re opting for clean and organized. Been to Kuala Lumpur a couple of times myself though, and it is a very nice place. But that’s not for us this year. We’re doing Singapore. Shopping won’t be an issue anyway. We don’t have any space left to put anything new! We’re not big shoppers.
BTW: We’ll be there in just a few weeks and I can’t remember the tipping situation. What’s tipping like in Singapore nowadays? Restaurants, taxis, bellhops etc.
I lived there in '83-'84. I really liked it. It’s been long enough ago that I can’t speak to hotels and restaurants, but be sure to spend a good long while in the Japanese and Chinese gardens. And you must plan to eat a couple of times in the Newton Circus food court.
No tipping. Pay the list price for everything, taxes (7% GST) should be included in the list price. Restaurants generally add 10% service charge, which should be included on the invoice.
Not sure about bellhops, since I’ve never had to use a bellhop here (if in local hotels for a staycation, I generally carry whatever little luggage we have myself), but I’ve never left anything for the chambermaid or similar. I expect no tipping, as is the case everywhere else on the island, but they’d probably be used to receiving tips from Americans, if nobody else.
Depends on what you like, really.
Chinatown, Little India, Geyland Serai etc are nice for the ethnic flavor if you’re coming from the west.
Shopping on Orchard road if you’re into shopping.
Zoo if you like Zoos (it’s a great Zoo, and a generally good tourist thing to do).
Botanic Gardens and the new Gardens by the bay if you like flowers.
Fort Canning if you like WW2 relics.
Asian Civilisations Museum for Musems, if that’s your thing.
Boat Quay and Clarke Quay for drinking and tourist partying.
Various foodie places for food, although you really do need a local guide for the real good local stuff. hungrygowhere.com is the local version of Yelp, it includes the local establishments in places you might be worried about visiting, but avoid chain restaurants and the like unless you aren’t feeling adventureous. Or ask hotels, the standard of food in foodcourts and the like isn’t too bad in general, and you get to see the variety of food.
Sentosa for touristy things. I’m not partial to it myself, but in terms of checking off checklists it’s inoffensive.
Thanks for the … tip. 
Has the OP gone to Singapore yet? We just got back last night (Wednesday night) and had a great time. There seems to be more things to do, and our four full days was not quite enough, and that was with us blowing off Sentosa Island.
We stayed at the Carlton Hotel on Bras Basah Road in the Colonial District. Decent place, good location. City Hall subway station is diagonally across the street inside the Raffles City shopping mall. Bras Basah subway station, which serves a different route, is only a block and a half in the other direction. If you look on their booking page, you can get an exceptionally good rate IF – big IF – you book at least two weeks in advance and agree to no refunds and no date changes. So you really need to be committed to those dates come what may.
Do yourself a favor and purchase the Singapore Pass for S$79 (about US$63). It pays for itself. Good for 48 hours, you get three hop-on/hop-off routes, admission to several museums and the Singapore Flyer (the world’s largest observation wheel, bigger even than the London Eye), a boat ride on the Singapore River, and an hour-long land-and-water tour on one of those amphibious duck vehicles. Don’t bother booking it online, just get there. We bought ours at the very helpful Singapore Visitor Center on Orchard Road, about in the middle and close to Emerald Hill Road. But the tour company’s main stand is at Suntec City just a couple blocks from the Carlton.
Don’t miss the extensive Botanic Gardens, which are free, although there is a S$5 (US$4) admission to the National Orchid Garden on the grounds (but the admission covered with the aforementioned Singapore Pass.)
We had planned to spend our final full day on Sentosa Island. We were there before, but that was in 1999, and we heard it’s changed a lot. Now the big attraction is Universal Studios, which was not there before. But the last day arrived, and we’d not been to the brand-new Gardens by the Bay. Well, we’d been to Sentosa before, plus we’d done Universal Studios in California and quite frankly found it lacking compared with Disneyland. Plus Sentosa Island is a known money pit, you will spend a lot of money (although I do recommend it if you’ve never been), so we went to the Gardens instead. They are free, although there are charges for the two greenhouses – which are “cold houses” and not hothouses, wonderful for beating the heat – Skywalk and the brief audio tour ride around the gardens, all worth paying for.
So I think we could have done with a fifth day, although admittedly we probably could have used our time more efficiently. Also, the shoreline has been extended through land reclamation. The Singapore Flyer, Gardens by the Bay and a lot else are all standing on reclaimed land where it was just ocean on our last visit.
Glad you enjoyed yourself!
When were you here last? Sentosa has changed radically over the last 5 years even. If you’re used to big American theme parks, Universal Studios will seem rather tame in comparison, so no big loss there.
Sounds like you enjoyed flowers, pretty much. Did you get into the more ethnic parts, or was that just not your thing? Coming from Thailand, I guess Chinatown might not be very interesting, but Little India might be.
1999 was our last visit. We did take the tour through Little India and Little Arabia, but the wife being a Thai of Chinese ethnicity, she generally needs prompting to explore that side of things. We did end up spending more time in Chinatown than in the other areas. Certainly a cleaner Chinatown than Bangkok has!
The new Peranakan Museum in the Colonial District is quite nice too. (For the other Board members, the Peranakans are descended from ethnic Chinese men who migrated to Singapore and married local Malay women. There are also Peranakans of Indian Muslim and Hindu descent, but it seems to be mainly a Chinese-Malay thing.)
And we did eat at the Gluttons Bay food hawkers’ court, where we stuffed ourselves on some really good chili crab, a local specialty.