It was a hot and steamy Friday morning in Singapore with warnings of torrential rains late in the afternoon.
I enjoy Singapore Zoo, you don’t have the depressing concrete and wire cages that you see in many zoos around the region.
You can explore the zoo in 4 or 5 hours but be warned that on a hot and humid day you’ll be well worn out by the time you finish.
Ah Meng Restaurant, Singapore Zoo, Singapore
The temperature was hovering in the low 30s when I arrived and I spent around 3 hours wandering around and watching the show.
On the show, is it my imagination, or have they made the show shorter with less animals than 5 years ago? It was a little disappointing, but I guess its really for the kids.
They’ve also started doing “theatre”, for the want of a better word, with a Dinosaur walk that was somewhat underwhelming.
But I’m not supposed to be writing about the zoo itself, rather the meal that I had.
Come 2pm I was feeling peckish and ended up in Ah Meng Restaurant which is setup as a mini hawker centre with about 5 or 6 different styles of meals available.
I chose the Indian chicken curry briyani option. It was freshly cooked which then allowed me to join the queue of 30 people who were snaking around the restaurant to pay the single cashier. Pathetically noone bothered to open the 2nd or 3rd registers to let us pay faster.
So, I then sat down with a COLD briyani – yes, it took about 15 minutes to get to the register to pay for my meal. While it had a decent taste, it had no kick to it and was not what I would have expected.
Overall, while the zoo itself is good, the whole experience at Ah Meng was pathetically bad. Food should be more authentic and the management need a good, solid kick up the arse for keeping people waiting so long to pay for their meals.
Ah Meng == don’t bother!
As I jumped into my taxi to get back to my hotel the heavens opened and one of the most torrential storms I’ve ever seen descended on the city. By the time I got to my hotel around 30 minutes later it was still bucketing down. Ahh… humidity!