The Great Singapore Sale

It is the 20th anniversary of The Great Singapore Sale. We are spoilt for choices when it comes to shopping. Local, up and coming designers, international brands or high end boutiques, Singapore has it all. Shopping is one of the national pastimes after all! The sale is from 31 May to 28 July, see you out there!

Pose for a picture on Orchard Road with your shopping bags. This is where you go when you want to do some serious, all day shopping with malls on both sides of the street for more than 2 km you can't go wrong. Of course you are never far from great shopping in Singapore!

Ngee Ann City is one of my favourites with an excellent bookstore, Kinokuniya.

Tangs still had some construction around it so it was difficult to get a good picture, but they had the best sale signs. 

Love these guys in front of Ion on Orchard Rd.

I think Singapore would be a great city to shoot a syfy movie, such cool buildings!

Plaza Singapura renovations are almost completed, there is a whole new section of the mall open. Still working on the older section where Carrefour used to be. 

This escalator was interesting with the lights changing colors.

Ceiling aquarium?? 

I managed to find a few items to bring home at this mall. 

Paragon had a three piece band to get you in the mood to spend lots of money! Everyone was stopping to take their picture.

Giant escalator for a giant mall. 

In honor of Vesak Day

Hi everyone,

Friday is a public holiday, Vesak Day, which is the commemoration of Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death. It is the most important day on the Buddhist calendar. I decided to go to the Buddha Tooth Relic Museum and Temple to take pictures since it seemed to be the most "tourist friendly" temple. All visitors are free to take photographs of most areas of the temple and there were plenty of cameras out so I felt pretty comfortable snapping away. The lighting is sort of odd, it is sort of dark and bright, at the same time, you'll see. I love that Singapore celebrates so many different holidays, Vesak Day, Hari Raya Puasa, Hari Raya Haji, Deepavali and Christmas to name a few. There are so many fun and exciting things to see, do, learn and explore that is very different from what I am used to in California.

The back of the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum.

The lanterns have names hanging from them. Some are families and some are companies.

Inside the courtyard in front of the temple.

The red square box to the right is where you can purchase incense to burn during your prayer and then place in the giant urn in the middle of the picture. 

For Vesak Day you can come into the temple and make a donation and then wash the Buddha. Washing of the Buddha is the single most common ritual on Vesak Day in Asia. According to legend when the Buddha was born he stood straight, took seven steps, raised one hand and declared "I alone am the world honored one" to indicate he would unite heaven and earth. There is a line of people waiting to wash the Buddha and another group of photographers taking pictures of everyone.

Gorgeous temple. The gold was super shiny and the rest of the room was sort of dark with areas of brighter spot lights so it was hard for a newbie photographer to get a good picture! This one turned out pretty good.

Here is the roof top garden with the Ten Thousand Buddha's Pagoda housing the Vairocana Buddha prayer wheel. 

The prayer wheel. It is large enough for about 15 people to walk around it together. Just happened to be empty when I was there. You hold on with one hand and walk slowly around chanting. 

Happy Vesak Day everyone! For more information about the temple, please visit: www.btrts.org.sg

The wrong side of the river...

The Singapore DBS Marina Regatta 2013 is this weekend and next with Dragon Boat races May 18 and 19 and a Bay Festival May 24 and 25 with dragon boating, kayaking and live bands. I am hoping to get over there to take some pictures this weekend, wouldn't that be cool? According to dbsmarinaregatta.com there are over 120 international and local dragon boat teams racing. I was hoping to catch some of them practising today but it did rain pretty much all night last night and the river is full of muck, there were a lot of branches down, not many teams practising. Of course it doesn't help that I probably went to the wrong-ish place to look for teams. I was at the Kallang River but I took the train to the Kallang exit. Sounds good, right? Well I think I should have gone to the Stadium exit, I think that would have put me on the other side. There was a lot of construction at Kallang and it was hard to figure out where to go. As I was wandering around trying to figure out why I wasn't where I thought I was going to be I did manage to take a few decent pictures. I hope you enjoy them.

Started out at Marina Bay, close to home.

You can see the dragon heads and the drums in the boats. 

Then after taking a few pictures of Marina Bay I decided to go to the river and I got lost, but it is pretty there. I think I needed to be on the other side of the river. 

I love egrets!

Is this a stork?

Across the river one team is getting ready for practise.

They kick up a lot of water when they paddle...

That is really all the action I could find. Leaving the park this pretty yellow bird was flying around and then went up into the tree and started singing. So nice of him to pose for a few shots!

Happy Friday everyone, enjoy your weekend!

A bit of the Singapore Botanical Gardens

I made it out to the Singapore Botanical Gardens today. This is my favorite park in Singapore and I think maybe the most beautiful. I took the train to the gardens and close to the entrance there is a small pond that I had not noticed before.

This cutie pie was there and he loved getting his picture taken!

He wasn't so bashful either.

My last lesson in my online photography class was on composition. One of the guidelines of good composition is leading lines. Not sure I accomplished my goal since these lines do not lead to anything but the photos are still pretty :)

And a few pretty flowers from the gardens...

I love how all of the trees in Singapore have plants growing on them. So pretty and tropical.

See you next Friday.

Tulipmania

Hi everyone! Happy Friday! It was a rainy day in Singapore so I thought it was a good excuse to check out Tulipmania at Gardens by the Bay. I love taking pictures of flowers and landscape. Probably because I never have to worry about the "eye roll" when I say, wait, one more shot! Here are some of my pictures, enjoy!

This was at the entrance of Tulipmania in the Flower Dome at Gardens by the bay.

I learned how to adjust the exposure value in the manual setting in my last online photography class. All of these pictures were taken in the manual setting. I feel pretty good about them but I know I have a long way to go when it comes to learning photography. 

Looking forward to completing a few more classes before next Friday!