Jay’s school holidays started a few weeks ago and as an extra birthday present we decided to take him to Legoland just over the border in Malaysia. For those who don’t know Singapore, it has their long summer (it’s always summer here) holidays in November and December, 6 weeks of no school, and return to classes at the beginning of January. We’d taken him there earlier in the year on a one day trip, but this time we decided to spend the night at the Legoland Hotel and spend one day at the theme park and the other at the water park.
To get there we took an early 8am bus that took us straight to the park, after stopping at the Singapore and Malaysia checkpoints where we had to disembark to go through immigration. You know it’s funny, Jay has been through the immigration process so many times (somewhere between 40 and 50 times in his 8 years) that it’s something of a second nature to him now. It does make me wonder how many other kids out there his age have had the travel experience that he has.
Anyway, after we got there and checked into the hotel we ran into our first obstacle. In the lobby are areas filled with Lego blocks for the guests to play with, and Jay decided to wanted to play with them instead of going to the water park as we had planned. After a little encouragement though we ended up getting changed and headed off to the water park.
The parks are designed, I believe, for smaller children up to about 12 years of age, with smaller versions of the water slides that you find in the larger water parks. Surprisingly though we found a lot of teenagers present, which my wife, SO, explained were probably there because they didn’t have the more traditional water parks that we find in other countries. It was quite surprising to me to see how excited these teenagers were for rides that were obviously designed for much smaller children. Even the smallest slides that I would say are most appropriate for 5 or 6 year olds.
That day also gave us the opportunity, painful as it was, for Jay to learn about the sun and how my skin is different to his. If you guessed I got sunburnt, you’d be right. Even after applying sunscreen several times during the day, I still ended up with a nice reddish colouring, and on the back of my shoulders I must have missed a spot, because they were quite painful for several days afterward. The good thing though is that Jay got to see the effects of sun on our skin, and even though he has darker skin than me and tends to go darker rather than burn, I believe he has learnt a valuable lesson about what can happen when you spend to much time in the sun.
We had a nice lunch there, but I didn’t feel the food was as good as the theme park foods I’ve had in Australia and the U.S.. Or maybe it was just that I was a lot younger then and the food just tasted better because I was having so much fun.
At one stage Jay had a nose bleed, nothing major but SO thought it best to take him to the first aid post. I would’ve just grabbed a couple of napkins and waited for it to stop, but I was grateful to step into the air conditioning and get away from the heat for a while. After a few minutes he was okay and off we went again to plummet down more slides. Jay definitely knows what he likes and we kept returning to the ones he enjoyed the most.
Unlike most water parks I’ve been to, the Legoland park was quite empty, or maybe we just got lucky. Oh, there were a lot of people there and even a couple of largish school groups, but nothing like I’ve seen at the water parks in Australia. So most of the time there were little to no queues at the slides, and we managed to go on some of them between 20 and 30 times.
Overall we had a great time that day, mostly because I got to experience the fun through my son’s eyes. After we got back to the hotel, we showered and got changed and headed down to dinner…
To Be Continued…