A Weekend in Singapore

This weekend, I visited my friend Yang in Singapore. My Friday night flight had a two-hour delay because of bad weather coupled with Lion Air’s inexplicable decision to begin refuelling only after everyone had boarded. These unfortunate circumstances have added to my ever-deepening dislike of Lion Air for imposing a ban on the use of all electronics during take-off and landings (regardless of whether they are in flight mode) and for its strict policy of “no outside food.” To this I add the fact that I was not able to check-in online for my flight from Bangkok to Singapore, but I was able to check-in for my flight back with a different airline. This may not have even been Lion Air’s fault but at this point I am not exactly primed to be understanding.

Having gone to bed at half past one, I awoke at eight o’clock in the morning and rushed to get ready to meet Yang. She had prepared an itinerary based on a few priorities I had sent her, and its first stop were the Botanic Gardens. Founded in 1859, the Singapore Botanic Gardens helped the British Empire dominate the global rubber trade thanks to their director’s research on rubber extraction. Nowadays, the gardens are famed for their orchids, which are on display at the National Orchid Garden – a ticketed part of the compound. Among the sections of the National Orchid Garden is the VIP Orchid Garden, which houses cultivars named after celebrities and world leaders. For example, we saw one named after Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan.

From the Botanic Gardens we took the bus to the centre to meet one of Yang’s friends and proceeded to eat lunch at the Maxwell Food Centre – a famous hawker centre with an array of stalls selling mostly Malay and Chinese foods. At the back of the building are a few shrines to Chinese gods, and in order to keep visitors cool, the building employs rows of big ceiling fans. Across the road from the centre stands the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, a five-story Tang-style building that houses a museum and multiple galleries with memorabilia. The statue sitting opposite the entrance on the ground floor is Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. The niches in the walls surrounding him are filled with statues of smaller buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the iconography and writing mostly derive from the Vajrayana tradition. The roof of the temple has an orchid garden and big Tibetan-style prayer wheel.

From the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, we continued to the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, where a ceremony was underway. To the vivacious playing of wooden pipes, we could make out people receiving blessings, but the crowd was so large we could barely make out what was happening. In front of the temple, we saw ornate processional vehicles and a man fastening decorations to the lintel of the main gate; the preparations for Deepavali – or Diwali, as it is more commonly known in places with a history of immigration from Northern India – were underway.

After walking around Chinatown for a bit longer, Yang and I continued to the Singapore River. We mostly followed the waterfront, beginning with the row of British pubs and ending across from the landmarks in the bay. On the way, we made a small detour to visit Fort Canning Park and see some of its massive trees with drooping, verdant foliage, but we soon ended up by the Esplanade again: Singapore is, after all, unspeakably tiny.

We began our second day in Singapore with a traditional breakfast of kaya toast and soft-boiled eggs, after which we took the bus to Little India. With Diwali soon approaching, the streets were bustling with people, and the stalls were selling fistfuls of colourful blossoms to devotees. We judged it best not to go in one of the temples at such a busy time, and instead kept our religious visits confined to the Sultan Mosque in the Malay district. Since Yang had work to prepare for in the evening, we finished our tour of the colourful quarter quite early – though not until having some delicious mala noodles, Singaporean carrot cake, masala brussels sprouts, and a rich portion of gelato.

I spent most of Monday teleworking: first at a café in the National Gallery, then at the airport. The reason I stayed in Singapore for an extra day was I had a lunch meeting at Violet Oon with my MPhil supervisor from Oxford. After his year lecturing there, he began a permanent contract with a university in Singapore. When our lunch was over, I took one last walk along the bay, getting all the way to the Gardens by the Bay before riding the metro and bus to the airport.