Having been lured into buying cheap tickets for the bird park, it seemed rude not to go. The talking birds were suspiciously quiet, giving you odd looks when you talked to them (maybe I need more of a chinese-english accent), but at least we weren’t as bad as another western tourist who tried speaking to every single bird in the park in the hope they would talk back (which they didn’t!). It was also weird seeing the Australian birds captive in a zoo, like the Australian Pelican that had a fish wriggling in it’s mouth, and was then chased around by another, much larger pelican in hope of a feed. As soon as we walked into the Lorikeet enclosure (another Aussie bird, a small red parrot), one landed on Caroline who screamed, so it landed on me instead, pirate style. At $2 to feed them, who could resist, within seconds a flock of them had landed on me, all jostling for a slurp of the murky brown liquid, and only outnumbered by the gathering Japanese tourists. Occasionally, one would take a nibble of a t-shirt or finger, I wonder if they get bored of the same old slop (the birds that is, not the tourists…).
With 2 pairs of shoes to choose from and only one night to drink in Raffles, Caroline had to pick her favourite. Saying that, we needn’t have got dressed up so much, the place was full of tourists (who’d have guessed!), and the floor littered with peanut shells that crunch unpleasantly underfoot, as the thing to do is eat peanuts and chuck the rest on the floor (if anyone knows why please let us know). But we had our one or two Singapore Slings, revelled in the colonial surroundings and left, another landmark done.