Singapore Travel Diaries - Fancy Shmancy Samples at Marina Bay Sands
Originally posted March 30, 2021
Let me paint a picture for you.
The date is April 28, 2017. (I know, I know… it has taken me a million and one years to actually share this. Worst travel blogger ever). ANYYYWAY…
I’m wandering around Singapore - one of the most expensive cities in the world - and I’m searching for the train station.
It is absolutely blazing hot outside, and, I eventually, needing a reprieve from the heat, find myself wandering through Marina Bay Sands. Yes, THE Marina Bay Sands. Not the hotel, but the casino bit filled with expensive shops and restaurants… and lemme tell ya, that air-con was *chefs kiss.*
My eyes sparkle as I look through the fancy shop windows from afar… Gucci, Armani, & Balenciaga... and I wonder to myself just how many plane tickets I could buy in the place of the pretty little items inside.
I know there is a 100% chance I will not be making any purchases here, but I welcome the break from the blazing hot sun.
With only three days in Singapore, I’d been running around like an absolute mad woman trying to see, do, and taste as much as possible. I hadn’t eaten since brunch, and, at this point in the day I was starvingggg.
You know in the cartoons when the characters get so hungry that the people they see start turning into hamburgers, ice-cream cones, and pizza slices? Well, I was reaching that level when I caught a whiff of some (surely luxurious) meal wafting from the food court downstairs.
My stomach growled… and it was precisely then that not one, but TWO shop employees urgently held out a bright pink stick of what surelyyy had to be a sample of fancy rock candy or something.
To this day, I’m not sure what they said… because their words were drowned out by my thoughts.
“Prasie Jesus! I’m SAVED. Ask and you shall receive,” …I said to myself… as I immediately went to put the unidentified but seemingly delicious shnack sample in my mouth.
The male employee who had handed me said candy looked at me like I was absolutely insane and shouted, "NO DON'T EAT THAT."
It was soap.
I almost ate soap, y'all... and this was BEFORE I’d even had any Singapore slings!
Looks like candy though, am I right?!
Flash forward to now, and soap samples seem like a pretty normal thing. In corona times, its rare to NOT enter a store and get a free little spritz of hand-sanny. But, this was ages ago… practically another lifetime.
I suppose Singapore is always years ahead of its time.
Anywho - Before I could figure out what kind of shop it was and why in the world they were randomly handing out SOAP samples, I beelined out of their and straight to a riverside bar for a Singapore sling to mull over the fact that our mums were right…
