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— this entry is written by Ari.

Since Thalia fell sick, my mom came to stay with us to help out with our daily routines. And since we came back from our trip to Bandung, Aina’s been super busy keeping up with school and her ballet lessons, its been a while since she got to play outside. So we decided to take her to Sentosa to enjoy the beach this weekend.

We left the house in the late morning and took the circle line to Harbourfront. Then we decided to take the scenic route and walk across the bridge to Sentosa island. As we exited Vivo City, we were greeted by a marching band from the ship Esmeralda, which happened to be docked right outside. Although not too big, the ship was in immaculate condition.

We continued on to the Boardwalk and took more pictures along the way.

We had a quick lunch at the Malaysian Street Food area, serving authentic hawker food around the region. Aina was of course amazed by the fact that the place serves food indoors but pretends to be outdoors. I think the strange part was the second floors of the make-shift shophouse facades were chopped off half way. It looks good on camera though…

We took the monorail to Beach Station, turned left and headed to the kids area. It turned out that the previous little pond for kids’ water play had been transformed into a kid’s club called “Port of Lost Wonder”. At first, we stumbled through the wrong entrance, through the “Secret Entrance” to an area sectioned off for a kid’s birthday party, apparently. I put sunscreen on Aina as fast as I could before she ran towards the kid-infested-brightly-colored pirate ship which splashed water all over the place. It was spectacular. Even I wanted to join in.

Only later did we find out that we actually had to pay an entrance fee ($15 on weekends) for the kids and parents come in for free. I guess we should have noticed earlier that everyone wore these colorful bracelets in the compound except us! So I quickly bought the tickets and came back in.

There were lots of people, but not too crowded to be uncomfortable. There were even “attendants” who observe the kids and tell them off nicely if they misbehave. And every two hours, there were kids educational shows and story-telling sessions in one corner.

Aina had a great time playing with the water slides. She even met one of her friends from ballet class there, and the two were running around everywhere together.

more photos are in the sentosa 11.08.2012 photo album.