The advantage of having an eleven-year-old visit is that you do things that you might never have expected would end up on your agenda. In this case, I am referring to a visit to Legoland Malaysia — a visit that ended up being a whole lot of fun!

The biggest downside to any Legoland trip has to be the car ride. Legoland is only 25 miles away from my apartment, but there are only two bridges that lead from Singapore to the Malaysian mainland. This means that you have to sit and wait in traffic for a really long time at an immigration checkpoint on the Singapore side and then drive over the Straits of Johor…

… and then, just when you’ve gotten to this sign …

… you get to sit in traffic at Malaysian immigration. So what should end up being a half-hour trip ends up taking closer to two hours. Fortunately, Nina, Nelson and I have all become experts in “I, spy.”

I found Legoland itself surprisingly interesting. It’s amazing what people can do with Legos. The finest examples of this were on display in Miniland, where they recreate world monuments in Legos on a very small scale. We found Malaysian mosques and government buildings …

… the tallest twin towers in the world (the Petronas Towers of Kuala-Lumpur) …

… the Forbidden City …

… and the Taj Mahal:

I really liked seeing places I’ve actually visited (and featured in this blog), including Angkor Wat …

… and a temple on the Chao Praya River in Bangkok (complete with a Thai dragon boat, which I have yet to see):

The building wizards at Legoland have even recreated little bits of Singapore! I was delighted to find a replica of both the Singapore Flyer and the Merlion.

But my favorite model was that of a Singapore bus, which is how I get to work every day (though sometimes my bus is a double-decker).

We all were excited to see Star Wars Miniland, which is largely indoors. Outside, you are greeted by these familiar faces (plus a photobombing Nina):

Inside were large replicas of many figures and planets, including Tatooine and Hoth:

Legoland also has large Lego figures dotted all around the park. There are animals galore:

But there are are also models that I didn’t expect, like the pigeon chef …

… the sad tourist man …

… and the very random grape:

There are lots of rides at Legoland, most of which are geared towards younger kids. But we did enjoy several roller coasters — one large, one very small, and one in VR (you ride an actual roller coaster while wearing VR googles, which is both fascinating and disconcerting). My very favorite ride was Legoland’s extraordinarily wet version of a flume. Here we are getting really, truly soaked:

My least favorite ride was this crazy contraption that requires two riders (but mostly the adult) to put on gloves and haul on a rope to get to the top of a column.

It’s a crazy amount of effort for very little reward. On the upside, my biceps got a workout.

While enjoyed Legoland itself, the absolutely best part of the day was the Legoland Water Park.

I could have spent all day there! The water felt amazing after a hot morning of running around an amusement park, but more importantly, the slides and water-shooting gizmos had me smiling the entire time. Who knew how much fun it could be to have an enormous bucket of water dumped on your head from three stories up?

The ride home took us past a great storm front, which gave us something to admire as we sat in more traffic on the bridge back into Singapore:

We somehow found the energy to hop onto the MRT (Nelson likes to be in the very front car, where he can pretend that he’s driving) …

… and go out to the Beauty World Food Centre for dinner: