Hawker Centers and Hawks

Sorry for the delay, I just realized I enjoy running around Singapore more than sitting in my room blogging, but I will try to keep everyone up to date with what's going on in my adventure. Day 2 consisted of a trip to the Clementi (an area) Hawker Center and the Jurong Bird Park. The Hawker Centers are outdoor food courts that are extremely cheap and diverse in options. I ordered a Singaporian favorite, chicken rice for a whopping SD$2.50. The Hawker Center was great to see the market type open stores and masses of people eating.


Our next stop was the Jurong Bird Park, the largest aviary in the world. Very similar to the Animal Kingdom exhibit, there were penguins, owls, and flamingos. The neat part was the tropical birdlife that actually belonged in the country. The birds were amazing and everywhere.

One of the great tourist traps of the park was the Birds of Prey Show, exhibiting the largest vultures and hawks anyone would like to see. Expecting the performance to run similar to past animal shows, I decided to get front row seats... Surprise! They needed a volunteer especially a young lady (after all 6 years handling hawks might be a recipe for disaster). So I had the great privilege to help out Gan, the Falconer, feed raw meat to an enormous bird, help a vulture land mid-flight on my hand, and become mildly assaulted by another bird [See picture for explanation]. Oh and the last picture is just trouble - Patrick and I had to pose on the Stuffed Animal Motorcycles, which you could rent for 2 dollars to ride around the mall - they were actually quite large and quite fast.