Happy New Year!

Happy New year everyone!

This is the first time that I celebrate New Years Eve outside of Europe and it was really amazing. This was my night:

I met some of my friends and we had dinner (very delicious chinese food (I am guessing here it was chinese...let's say asian to be on the safe side)). Since we did not want to spend a buckload of money on one night and our goal was to see the fireworks at Marina Bay we decided to go to Esplanade at Marina Bay and enjoy the free open-air live music.

The bands played some classics and it was fun to dance and sing along. The Marina Bay Sands was illuminated and so were the spheres floating on the water in front of it (I told you about them in some ealier post).

Here we have attention seeking Marina Bay Sands again. As if it was not ugly enough by itself it needs lights and lasers to make sure everybody has to look at it. Mind at all those people who can't stop watching in horror and disgust.

The skyline did not look very impressive either, as you can see...

We then somehow managed to sneak into an irish bar at Esplanade which was close to a miracle considering the immense crowd and the huge queues, and just as we got in a table got free so we even got a place to sit (at a time where people were not even allowed to go into Esplanade anymore because it was so full that the police had closed everything down). Next thing we know we got these awesome hats and masks from the Pub (they were handing them out to all customers - thumbs up, pub whose name we were not able to find out while we sat insinde because it is not written ANYWHERE!)

We had some serious trumpet fights going on with our neighbours from the other desk. Some patience the waitresses had...

Shortly before the countdown we found a cool spot to watch the fireworks and we prepared the grapes that I had been carrying around all evening. This is a spanish tradition that involves eating one grape with every of the 12 chimes at midnight. Since they don't do this here we had to improvise a bit, which means we ate two in advance and then ate the remaining 10 grapes during the countdown. The chimes in Spain are usually extra slow to keep the death-by-chocking rate as low as possible, which is something that cannot be said by the countdown in Singapore. Nevertheless we managed to eat the grapes at high speed so that is some good luck we are going to have in 2013.  

The fireworks were really AMAZING! They were huge, coordinated with music and lasted quite some time.

After the countdown we met the rest of our friends and we went to a club called the white rabbit:

It is a former church that has been transformed into a restaurant/bar (apparently I only go to buildings that have gone through this transformation...).  As you can imagine the place was pretty cool:

There was no entrance fee and the atmosphere was really nice (they had a great garden with a dancefloor). After they closed this place one of my friends and I decided to go to Boat Quay where we went to Home Club (where we stayed until it closed and we had to look for another club) and then to Asia One. After this we walked home (which is actually nice here in Singapore due to the comfortable temperature and the fact that one can walk around barefoot without having to be afraid of siringes or dog poop) and had some pasta before going to bed. Let's hope the rest of 2013 is as great as it has been so far!