FANTASY ISLAND AND THE SHITTIEST HOTEL IN THE WORLD

"What they don't have, they created".

Thus Bulan mused after Day 1 as we endured Night 2 in cramped Room 210 of Calmo Hotel Chinatown, the shittiest hotel in the world.  

Singapore did created Gardens by the Bay in 2011 so they can have their own Cloud Forest where for a hefty wee, we walked through a fake forest with artificial waterfalls while living Avatar: The Experience.

In the Flower Dome, they recreated garden ecosystems from all over the world except the Garden of Eden and our small plot in Bakal 2 where our dogs shit to forever remind us of Hotel Calmo in Chinatown as the shittiest hotel in the world.

And for another SGD 10 each, an elevator inside a giant steel tree delivered us 22 meters above ground level for a 128-meter walk through the OCBC Skyway but that is not enough for us to forget even for a moment the shit that is Hotel Calmo Chinatown.  

Also opened in 2011 is the Universal Studios that for the record is the most expensive entrance fee we've ever paid for access to four of its advertised 28 rides (the roller coaster and canopy flyer where I almost lost my glasses, a boring treasure hunt and Battlestar Galactica where the kids queued for two hours) and a fleeting experience of Disneyland, Jurassic Park, The Transformers, New York City and Hollywood.

It came with a fake snow, long lines for expensive food and the possibility that it is where we are likely to get COVID, so we left as the crowd become more thicker than Frida Kahlo's eyebrows to endure another night in our shitty hotel.    

The day before Christmas is an open date, our laundromat experience, a day we decided to spend doing "fun and free activities" in Orchard Road mainly because we don't have shopping money and we booked a shitty hotel.

What was once a plantation is now a 2.5 kilometer stretch of upscale shopping district where we sought FREE fun at the overhyped Rooftop Garden of Orchard Central, the quaint picture perfect heritage houses of Emerald Hill and ION Orchard's Opera Gallery where admission is indeed free.

But there's the Singapore Botanic Garden, a 163 years old tropical garden and a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is as real as the weekends spent there by my mother who worked for a year as a domestic helper in Singapore, crowded by trees and vegetation, serenaded by an orchestra of forest creatures and punctuated with promenadors, one of whom volunteered to take our family Christmas photo as she was walking her dog, her kindness enough for us to somehow come to terms with the shittiness of Hotel Calmo in Chinatown.

And there's the National Orchid Garden whose discounted entrance fee for Bulan and Balong convinced my wife that it's worth it and is definitely worth more than what we paid for the shit that is the Hotel Calmo in Chinatown. 

We ended Day 4 of our trip to Singapore with an early noche buena hosted by relatives from Bakal 2 and there, I steeled myself with three cans of beer and two shots of Jim Beam Bourbon for one more night in the shithole that is Hotel Calmo in Chinatown.