New Year in Tropics!

Old story to share; how I met my first New Year in Tropics. Definitely, no winter no snow in tropics. So when I got this traineeship in Singapore, I was very excited about not having a winter and meeting New Year in shorts and T-shirts. Imagine, no winter whole year! :-) As it's also my birthday, so I had more reasons to celebrate it. We (Sharon, Shirin, Triin, and me) started our New Year eve with dinner at Jamie's place. After that we headed towards Esplanade area hoping to enjoy New Year fireworks! Thousands of people already were there. We were just on time... But... It hit 12 midnight and nothing happened?! Where is that promised firework show?!... Later we learned that it was cancelled due to tsunami disaster in region, makes sense. Well, not worrying much about it, we went towards Chijmes for Salsa Dance Night, met Yamini n her friends there. It was kinda fun. Some dances. And then Michal appeared from nowhere. Also Triin and others got some icy cake from I dont know where, it was meant for me as I got 24 that time, well we swallowed cake immediately. Well, what's next? Definitely, it was not enough. Especially for me n Triin (from Estonia), for whom it is a big event back in their homes, were insisting on doing some more things so we headed towards Orchard Road. Youngsters all around were spraying fake snows and stripes as we were walking in Orchard, some tourists were enjoying it in rickshaws, some were just sleeping on the benches. Light up in Orchard was beautiful as usual. ( Comment: Singaporeans just need a reason to immediately light-up Orchard Road and make it very attractive to both citizens and toursits. So Orchard is lighted-up almost for half of the year. As it contains mainly shopping malls and eating spots, I think, this is just another commercial trick.) After a rest at coffee house till first trains, we took MRT to East Coast Park to meet first sun-rise of 2005! Well, although cloudy weather didn't allow us to say hi to the Sun from the beach, we still witnessed the first morning of the New Year on the beach with bare feet, T-shirt and shorts. Amazingly, beach was full of people, mainly families, who built tents and spent whole night at the beach. That should be a great time. Well, our extraordinary New Year experience ended-up with a nice Dim Sum breakfast! What a beginning for a new year.