The Singapore Flyer

My niece, Mala, is visiting from Auckland, New Zealand, with her two children – Ananya and Avinash. Though the children have visited before, now they are both older and not so shy of me.

We celebrated Ananya’s 10th birthday last Monday and as a treat we (together with my sister Vasantha who was visiting from India and her husband) went for a ride on the Singapore Flyer last Tuesday.

It was an interesting experience and I think we chose the best flight time – 7.00pm – as it was daylight as we went up and it had darkened by the time we began the descent so we got to experience both the day skyline and the night one.

It would have been a really pleasant evening except that the ride was spoilt for me by a group of Indian tourists who were in the same capsule as us. One man in the group spent not even 10 minutes looking at the sights. He was focussed solely on taking photographs and kept marshalling his brood of 5 adults and 3 children into different vantage points. He wasn’t interested in the view and oblivious to the fact that that was why the rest of us were on that observation wheel! He directed his photo shoot in a loud voice, kept getting in people’s way and was just such a pain. To top it off he was an indulgent father and the children were allowed to run around the capsule shouting and then twice his daughter had a screaming tantrum. I just wished I could shake that man. He had just no idea that the capsule was a confined space and while his children running around and his family posing at different places would have been fine if we were at the Botanic Gardens, this was a capsule in the sky, for goodness sake! Aargh!