A sunday in Singapore

Sunday.  Had a lazier day today.  Wandered round Bugis Street "market"  This was once the red light area and offended the government so it has been cleaned up and is now dedicated to hundreds of stalls crammed into a small space selling clothes, jewellery and food. 
Next we jumped on the hop-on hop-off bus and travelled  round parts of the city we had not seen before including Cinatown, Little India, the Malay kampon.  We saw that there are still some old buildings and I suspect they will be preserved for their heritage interest and -of course- for the tourists.  To their credit, the government has built thousands of blocks of flats and 86% of the pop live in them-somehow owning them as home ownership is the highest in the world.  There are almost no street people here.
We whizzed round the Singapore Art Gallery but there were few works that appealed to us.
In the evening we went in search of the Long Bar in The Raffles hotel to have a Singapore Sling.  The hotel is a beautiful, airy building with all the atmosphere of its colonial past but the Long Bar has become a tourist trap and was so noisy we decided not to stay and went off in search of supper.  This night we chose Chinese- cispy duck, ddelicious.
Monday. Heeding the advice fro Lonely Planet we took the metro (MRT) to the harbour area to find a harbour cruise.  It started so well.  The MRT is a marvel to anyone familiar with the LOndon Underground.  As you might expect it's clean, fast, frequent, easy to use cheap.  Where it all went pear-shaped was once we reached our destination: according to LP there are many companies offering cruises just "east of the station".  Unfortunately events have overtaken the book and the area between the station and the harbour is now a massive building site.  We walked for about 30 mins skirting these works (which include new public gardens) and when we finally reached the Marina South pier there is only 1 company doing harbour cruisesand we'd missed their only 1 of the morning by 20 minutes!!
Feeling hot and aggravated with LP we decided to take a taxi all the way up to the zoo-about a 30 min drive.  We had been intending to go there later in the day so we could go straight to the Night Safari next door which opens at 6pm.  It was just as well we were there earlier as the zoo is wonderful with lots to see.  Almost all the enclosures are  large, although we thought some of the big cats needed more room, and it's particularly good that the orang utangs are living unfettered in the tree tops.
Unfortunately I had forgotten to bring the 2nd battery for my camera and the backup camera stopped working so we have hardly any pictures.  I did get some of the elephants showing how they work with humans.

The night safari was also very enjoyable.  We saw many animals from our tram, apparently roaming free (I guess we just couldn't see the barriers in the dark)  Too tired to walk any of the trails we headded back to the hotel.