The Botanic Gardens is really big forest/garden/nature reserve thing in the middle of Singapore. It's huge in that it's borders stretch from the edge of town, to the edge of Bukit Timah. Transport-wise, there are several buses that will get you there, and you can get there from several entrances because it's that huge.
We met at Tanglin Mall which is a short ten minute walk from Orchard Road. The thing about a picnic is that you got to have food! So we arranged for some people to bring food, but that's not very reliable, so we went grocery shopping at the Marketplace at the basement of Tanglin Mall. We bought two bottle of drinks, chips with amazing salsa dip and bread, sliced cheese and ham. It sounds like a lot, but it only adds up to less than $5 per person.
It's like a cheap lunch!
We walked over to Tanglin Mall. One of us, Jonathan (follow him on Twitter @TheJohnnyBoy) works at the Botanic Garden so we had a sort of tour guide person for our convenience. Awesome shit, because he dropped fact bombs like....
1) The gate at the Botanic Gardens has been there since the 1800s!
2) There are over 20000 varieties of orchids there, and if you're famous enough, they'll name an orchid after you. I pity the nameless orchids though...Orchid 2341134?
3) One of the really big trees is featured in the $5 bill.
4) You can't fly kites, and you can't play ball games in the Botanic Gardens!
Even without a guide, you'll do okay though, because there's maps and all to guide you around.
We brought two picnic mats, so that we can lay it on the grass and chill around. If you don't have picnic mats, you can use newspaper. But that's unglam. Slightly less unglam would be to ask your guy friends who just finished NS to bring their groundsheets.
We settled in nicely at a huge grass patch (at what point does a grass patch become a field?) but the weather was unpredictable. It was sunny, then drizzly, then rainy. In the end, we walked to a shelter and just settled in there. The Botanic Gardens has plenty of gazebos, and shelters, so you won't really run out of space. Also, if you have enough people, you can make so much noise that you drive off other people around you.
Other than the food, we had cards to play with, a guitar to strum and a camera to camwhore with. Not that we have anything to show for it...our camera man accidentally deleted the pictures!
Make sure you bring umbrellas with you. At least one umbrella for every two people. It started pouring at the end, so we had two people squeeze into one umbrella and then splattered all the way to the bus stop. There is no shelter, sadly. Oh, there is a taxi stand at the main entrance thingy, so if you have the money to spare, that's a viable option.
That's about it for me. Take only photographs, leave no litter.
Clockwise, from that girl in white: Jolene, Glenn, Thandar, Rebecca, Han Lin, Me! Not in the picture is TGX (I don't know where he is!), Moses (late) and Zhuying who took the picture.
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