We'd Lived Here Six Years and Never Seen the Merlion Until My In-Laws Visited

 We didn't take my in-laws to a single place I'd actually been to before, and they were only here for a week.

That sounds worse than it is, but it's true. Six years in Singapore, and it took family visiting from Korea for us to finally see the Merlion, walk through Gardens by the Bay at night for the tree show, look at the waterfall inside Changi Jewel, go to the Zoo. My wife and I had built an entire life here without doing almost any of the things people fly here specifically to do.

What we do instead, most weekends, is get on bikes.

The Weekend That Actually Repeats

We lived in Bishan for a few years, and Bishan Park was basically our second living room. Not once a month. Most weekends, sometimes on weekdays too. Then we moved out to Pasir Ris, and the rhythm just transferred to Pasir Ris Park.

The setup now is my younger daughter riding on the back of my bike, my older one on her own two-wheeler, my wife on hers. Ten minutes and we're at the park. There's a beach, and there's an adventure playground that is genuinely enormous, zipline, slides, climbing structures, the whole thing, plus proper toilets and outdoor taps that work.

Those taps are the real reason we keep going back, honestly. The kids end up soaked and covered in sand every single time, without fail, so we rinse them off there before heading home. Spare clothes for both of them are permanently in the bag now. I learned that lesson the hard way exactly once, driving home with two damp, sandy children who were extremely vocal about the situation.

When It Rains, We Go to the Library

Singapore rains hard and often, and the fallback is Pasir Ris Library at the mall near us. The children's section there is really well done, a proper corner for kids with a serious selection, and it's cool and quiet in a way a wet Saturday afternoon needs.

That's the thing about how we actually live here. Everything near home is good enough that we don't really travel across the island for weekend plans. The park, the library, the mall, that covers most of it.

The One Place We'll Cross Town For

When we do go further, it's usually National Museum, mostly to meet up with friends. Their children's space is free, air-conditioned, and the themes rotate, so it doesn't get stale the way a permanent exhibit would.

I'd guess most tourists skip it entirely, or assume there's nothing there for young kids. There genuinely is, and it's one of the few places I'd actively recommend to another parent here rather than just mention in passing.

The Public Pools Are Almost Free

Here's the one I think foreigners living here underuse the most. The government-run sports centres, ActiveSG, are all over the island, and ours in Pasir Ris has tennis, badminton, table tennis, and a swimming complex.

Entry is a dollar or two. Not a typo. There's a regular pool and a themed one, slightly different prices, and as long as you don't leave, you can stay all day for that.

The pools are outdoors, which matters, because the moment there's lightning risk, a siren goes off and lifeguards clear everyone out of the water immediately. No negotiation, no waiting to see how bad it gets. The first time it happened we were mildly annoyed, half an hour into a swim. Now I think it's one of the more quietly impressive things about living here, that the default is to pull two hundred people out of a pool rather than gamble on the weather.

The Days That Didn't Work

Not everything lands. We went to an event at Expo once, something around mother tongue language, and I think we'd pictured hands-on activities for the kids. What it mostly was, in practice, was booths promoting worksheets and tutoring programmes for children whose mother tongue needs work.

Singapore takes education seriously, and I understand why an event like that exists. It just wasn't for us. It was crowded, it was long, and we left more tired than when we arrived.

Street food festivals and night markets have been a similar story, though it's not really a criticism. The climate here means the food that survives outdoors for hours is fried, then fried again. Anything more delicate would spoil. So you end up with rows of oil, and after twenty minutes I feel like I've absorbed the smell into my clothes without eating anything. We just don't seek those out anymore.

The Week We Were Tourists in Our Own City

When my wife's family came, we did all of it in six nights and seven days. Merlion, the Marina Bay Sands mall, the Cloud Forest dome, the tree show at Gardens by the Bay, Bacha Coffee in Orchard, a sauna at Dempsey Hill, dinner at a hotel, the Zoo, a Chinese restaurant in Bedok that I'd honestly recommend to anyone, Changi Jewel and the indoor waterfall. And then, because it's ours, the Pasir Ris beach ride we do every weekend anyway.

The weather held the entire trip. One night of proper thunder and lightning, at maybe three in the morning, and that was it. They flew home and it rained for days straight afterward, which felt almost personally insulting.

I'm glad we did it. I'm also aware we only did it because someone came to visit, and left to ourselves we'd have spent those seven days at the same park we always go to.

Legoland Is Basically Our Second Home Now

Johor is close enough that Legoland has become a regular thing rather than a trip. We book a van door to door, our place in Singapore straight to the hotel there, usually three or four nights, sometimes five, occasionally just two. One day theme park, one day water park, one day aquarium, mix and match depending on how everyone's holding up.

We went annual pass years ago, which pays for itself in two visits. If you're in Singapore with young kids, the arithmetic is not close, buying day tickets repeatedly makes no sense. That place probably deserves a post of its own.

Separately, my wife and I take leave sometimes and go to JB without the kids. Early morning crossing, brunch, massage, Korean BBQ, or the premium outlet in Johor for shopping. She gets her hair done there too. Everything costs a fraction of what it does here, and we're back the same evening.

That's six years, roughly. A park we go to constantly, a library for wet days, a pool that costs less than a coffee, and a city we finally visited properly only because someone else wanted to see it.

Related reading:

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