SINGAPORE

Although I’ve been to Singapore several times, I still love our stop there. It is an island country, the name of the city is Singapore and the name of the country is Singapore. It has the highest standard of living in Asia. Over 35,000 people commute over the border daily from Malaysia as Singapore has many jobs and not enough people to do them. They truly have mastered integration – any new housing complexes have to have equal percentages of nationalities, alleviating any slum development.

One of our sister ships, the Zaandam, was in port with us the first day. My long time ship friend (since 1996 in my Celebrity days) Debbie Buchanan happened to be on board. We are both Future Cruise Consultants with Holland America so we never work on the same ship together. Her youngest son skates for Disney on Ice and they were performing in Singapore that day. Several of us, some from each ship, went to the performance that day and had a wonderful time. We got to go backstage after and meet some of the performers.