Singapore!

Hello again everyone! Jenny and I just got back from a whirlwind vacation all around Southeast Asia! I have so many stories and pictures for you from this trip!

We started off by flying down to Singapore for a week in mid-December. Singapore, like Hong Kong, is both a city and a country of its own. It's a pretty small country! It has 4.5 million people, but it is only 10 miles long X 25 miles wide. From one area, you can see not only all of Singapore, but also the border of Malaysia and the coastline of Indonesia. Almost everyone in Singapore speaks English, though the city a population made up of people from China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Australia, America... they come from all over the place! This makes for great food.

Here is the Singapore skyline. It's not as big as Hong Kong's skyline, but it still has lots of skyscrapers! Most of the buildings are banks.

Singapore loves their Christmas decorations. This is the Christmas Arch on the famous Orchard Road, the most popular shopping area in Singapore. At night, the whole city was lit up with twinkling, multi-colored Christmas lights. It would make any Texan proud!

Here's an idea of what the Christmas decorations are like at night. Very crazy and colorful!

Here we are at Sentosa Beach. Because the original beach in Singapore was not so pretty, the Singaporean government actually built new land where there used to be water and called it Sentosa. The sand is from Thailand, and we think they might put dye in the water to make it more blue! Real or fake, it was still a very pretty beach!

Sentosa is at the very tip of Singapore, and Singapore is at the very tip of Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia is at the very tip of all of Asia, so we got to see the farthest southern point of the whole Asian landmass. It's not the southern most point of all of Asia, though - that would be in Indonesia somewhere - but continental means "belonging to the major landmass" so this is the farthest point south that is still connected to the main part of Asia.

That's all for now! Jenny and I mostly relaxed in Singapore, so there aren't many pictures here, but we were storing our energy for Vietnam! I will post pictures and stories from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in the next few days!

Happy New Year!