Sentosa

We started the day by eating cereal and dragon fruit for breakfast. We found dragon fruit at the grocery store for about 75 cents! It was really good; kind of a cross between a kiwi and a pear.

We spent the day at Sentosa which is a popular island resort. It has lots of beaches, golf courses, hotels, Fort Siloso, and a Universal Studios on the island. We had a great time! It was also really nice to visit on a Wednesday when there weren't that many people there. We spent most of our time at Siloso beach which was really nice. It was nice and sandy and there was music playing. It wasn't very crowded. The water was super warm and had lots of seaweed floating around. There were several bay areas of the beach and each one had an island just off the coast. There were also lots of bars and restuarants right on the beach. 

After we left there we went to Fort Siloso which is a restored gun battery now turned military museum. It's free so that was pretty cool. We decided to take the skywalk to the fort so we rode the elevator up and were met with a surprise. Right outside the elevator was a monkey eating his lunch! I'm not kidding, here's a picture:

There were actually three of them, but this one wasn't sharing the food. Apparently there had been a group of schoolchildren sitting up there when the monkeys approached them. Frightened, the kids abandoned their stuff and ran off; we could see them about 50 ft down the walkway watching the monkeys apprehensively. The monkey proceeded to raid their belongings and one lucky monkey found a lunch box full of goodies. It was really interesting watching him eat; he prioritized which food he wanted to eat first and he had no trouble at all removing the wrappers from the food. The other monkeys rifled through the books and things and tossed some things around. Seemed like they were having a good time. The monkeys were pretty aggressive if you got too close to them, so perhaps the kids had good reason to be frightened.  It was a pretty interesting situation to walk into, though.

The skywalk was really cool and had great views of Sentosa and the city. It also had information panels along the way describing the history of the area. We were in a bit of a hurry because it looked like it could rain any minute so we didn't stop and read all of them. Fort Siloso also had lots of informative panels set up, describing the history of the fort and their part in WWII. 

The island was a bit difficult to walk around and we wandered around at first struggling to find the beaches. We later found a pamphlet with a map which was super helpful and discovered that there were three buses running for free on the island so that would've been good to know. In our wandering though we did find the famous merlion. It's a 37-meter tall statue that you can go inside, but we didn't do that. We just snapped a photo and went on our way.

We made our way back to our airbnb and it never rained on us! Success. We plan on checking out the 1-Altitude bar tonight, so I can report on that tomorrow.

Special birthday shout out to mama Ann!! We hope you have a great birthday!