Tour and see the world! Singapore's Marina Bay Sands & Gardens by the Bay

Singapore is my beautiful home country, and recently I visited the awesome, beautiful, and exciting Marina Bay Sands (MBS) and Gardens by the Bay, so here are some beautiful pictures of Singapore's skyline from MBS, showcasing beautiful Singapore where the F1 Night Race will be held, and showcasing also Singapore's beautiful Gardens by the Bay. Hope you like the pictures of Singapore's skyline - might be worth a visit!

The above picture shows Gardens by the Bay, as well as the much smaller and also interesting Marina Barrage. Singapore is clean and green as the saying goes. You can see the tall super trees and the domes that make the view iconic. Singapore really has a lot of green spaces! :)

This is how the Central Business District of Singapore looks like at night. From the right to the left, you can see Fullerton Hotel, followed by the many business skyscrapers in the middle, and then on the left is the Sail (a beautiful and luxury Marina Bay condominium). This wonderful picture was taken from over 30 floors up high in MBS, from one of the windows overlooking Singapore city.

I don't swim, but at the top of MBS there is the Infiniti Pool where lots of people have fun lazing about and viewing Singapore from up high. The skyline is definitely worth the ticket price of getting a hotel room at MBS. Thanks for sharing the view with me, and thanks for reading! Perhaps in the next post, or subsequently, I will share more pictures of Gardens by the Bay or more beautiful pictures from Singapore. 

Thanks for reading and cheers! :)

Note: I realised that I had not been posting for a long time, so I decided to post up some pictures of places I visited recently. As my friends and family know, I have recently been to Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, and Berlin, as well as many staycations in my beautiful Singapore with my friends and family, such as Orchid Country Club in Yishun and most recently Marina Bay Sands (MBS). So techically I could have shared lots of pictures from diverse places on my travel blog. However, I realised that I hadn't even gotten round to showing the world about how beautiful Singapore can be - so here I am after some time to do so. Hopefully this will bring more tourists to Singapore to share the view with haha. Thank you for reading and cheers! :)

Tour and See the World! - Singapore, Marina Bay Sands (MBS) and Gardens by the Bay 

Tour and See the World! Tuol Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

This post is a bit morbid because it's on a serious topic, so take note and take care!

I also visited the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to learn about the destruction caused by Pol Pot's regime when they ruled Cambodia with an iron fist. Tuol Sleng was also known as S21 prison, and was a concentration camp in which Pol Pot, the communist dictator of Cambodia, interrogated his political opponents and bludgeoned many of them to death in the killing fields near the concentration camp. It is a tourist attraction today, with various exhibits on the instruments of torture and interrogation. Yes, I told you it would be a morbid topic - but one that is integral to Cambodia's history. 

In many ways, it could be said that Cambodia with its natural resources and rich lands, teeming with people and bounty, is backward today partly because of the destruction caused by Pol Pot's despotic leadership. However, I think that it's important to learn the history of a country and musuems are a great way of doing so. Take note that Tuol Sleng, the S21 concentration camp, is not for the faint of heart - as it is a really gruesome and horrific place to visit, but very, very educational. Many Western visitors (I counted many French people there! After all, formerly the French controlled Indochina (Indochine)) visit Tuol Sleng to learn about this part of Cambodia's past. 

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia

The Stupa, a Buddhist structure, at the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I learnt how to use captions, so there they are - hope these captions work! Anyways, I also visited the Killing Fields, located near Tuol Sleng genocide museum, and it was a very interesting journey. The stupa you see in the picture contains skulls that are piled high up to the ceiling. There were many victims and ... it was quite scary to visit. The tour guide mentioned that Pol Pot killed 3 million people during his reign of terror, and these are the remains that the Cambodians and the international community could find. There were many others, whose skulls weren't found, and whose remains are lost forever. A very sobering and morbid place to visit indeed - but definitely worth a visit to learn about Cambodia's dark past. I must say that I did a lot of reflecting during the visit! 

There will be happier and more positive posts to come on nicer, happier, and livelier places to visit - coming soon! Thanks for reading and learning about Cambodia's past here on my travel blog. 

Tour and See the World!

Tour and See the World! Prey Angkungh in Prey Veng, Cambodia

I visited Prey Angkungh in Prey Veng province, Cambodia, on an overseas outreach programme, to lead a team of 27 to build toilets and well facilities in the small, remote, and very poor Cambodian village which lacked basic facilities. In a way it made me reflect on how lucky I am to be in Singapore, and in a developed country where we take many basic necessities for granted, like running water and electricity. [On a slightly different note, as I've not blogged for a long time here on Tour and See the World, I now see that Blogger has a different format and that I can't place the text underneath the pictures, so I'll have a chunk of text describing my experiences, and then the pictures below then. Sorry about that - I'm a Luddite, whoops!] 

The village is very pretty and Cambodia in general is a very beautiful and interesting country. To get to Prey Angkungh, we had to fly from Singapore to Phnom Penh, and then take a long two hour bus ride, cross a river on a ferry, and then take another one hour bus ride to Prey Veng, the eponymously named capital of the province. It was an interesting journey, but let me show you some nice pictures from my travels in Prey Angkungh - in the village we stayed, so you can see Prey Angkungh through my eyes! :)

The last picture is of a village kid, which I call Loki, standing in the middle of the Cambodian rice fields of Prey Veng. I really love that kid as he's so cute and funny - and his innocence and happy expression made me feel comfortable, just like I was home! More pictures to come from my travels in Cambodia, showing Phnom Penh and other areas! Stay here with me on Tour and See the World!

Tour and see the world! 

Tour and See the World! My South Korea Trip, last part

Tour and See the World! My South Korea Trip, last part

Finally, I've come to the end of my series on South Korea, which I visited in June 2010, this year. I will be flying off to London soon, and will be definitely posting up wonderful pictures of London and the London School of Economics, where I will be at, soon enough! I will also be touring England once again, so you can expect pictures of my varied travels :)

However, back to the topic at hand - the final travel pictures of South Korea! Some of you might be wondering why I haven't written about or shown pictures of Dongdaemun and Namdaemun (or something like that), the Dong Da Men and the Nan Da Men, which are gates, and which are also very famous for demarcating areas of shopping in South Korea. Well, the thing is that this is my travel site, and I love theme parks more than I do shopping; however, I have added in Dongdaemun right here in the pictures in this post. Without further ado:

Below you can see the very famous and high class Shinsegae, nearby Myeong-dong (which you can read about in my earlier post). This is a departmental store for the rich or the up and coming parvenus.

Apparently, many women go to South Korea for cosmetics and stuff like that - people literally cry out BB CREAM!! FACE SHOP!! FACIAL MASKS!!! when they are here. I kid you not!! So, here, I've included odbo, which sells facial masks and BB cream and all the rest of those interesting cosmetics that South Korean women crave. I can assure you that Mavis loved those facial products as well :)

And finally, as promised to my faithful readers: below, you can see the famous shopping complex/ shopping mall at Dongdaemun. I did not visit Namdaemun this time when I toured Korea, so my sincerest apologies to those who were hoping for more!

You have been right here touring South Korea with all its interesting places and shopping malls with me, here on Tour And See the World! travel blog. Thanks for reading and cheers!

Tour and see the world - special thanks to Mavis

Tour and See the World! My South Korea Trip, part 8

Tour and See the World! My South Korea Trip, part 8 - Myeong-dong shopping district!

Hello and welcome back to Tour and See the World! 

In today's post, I visit the Myeong-dong shopping district, which is a shopping area and commerical/business zone in Seoul, South Korea. It is very popular and apparently the tour guide brings hundreds of thousands of tourists to this spot every year. Many people who visit South Korea indeed do so for the amazing opportunities to shop, eat and get all sorts of other trinklets. I would say that if you like shopping or window shopping, this is the place to be! Without further ado, I hope you like the pictures of Myeong-dong that I show below:

The last post of miscellaneous pictures of Korea will come right up, so stay tuned here! Thanks for reading and browsing, and cheers.

Tour and See the World! - South Korea