High Tea at Raffles Hotel

After a fortnight of delays, my Aunt Sheryl was, to my great excitement, able to book us for an afternoon at Raffles Hotel.

Specifically, we were booked for High Tea. High Tea is this wonderful English invention in which one puts on pants, goes somewhere classy and eats fancy food. I have begun to like tea, and I do like to eat, if not large amounts. Oh, and the pants thing is significant; it is very rare for there to be a dress code for restaurants in Singapore, but going to High Tea means that men must wear pants, no shorts allowed.

This handsome fellow demonstrates what it looks like to wear pants.

The tea room was off the lobby of the main hotel. And it was quite fancy. Raffles is also supposed to be a great hotel; on display in their museum were a bunch of "World's Best Hotel" trophies.

I was kind of disappointed in the food, because much of it tasted like cheap store-bought hors d'oeuvres. But it was OK, because the tea was good, and we had a live harpist.

I'm not going to post too many pictures of the actual tea, because sitting around and slowly eating small amounts of food isn't the kind of material that makes for exciting photos. However, I will post some shots of the very attractive colonial architecture.

This looks a lot cooler than it would have had there been better lighting.

Arab Street

Continuing my tour of Singapore's cultural districts, I recently went to Arab Street. "Arab Street" is actually the name of one the roads that goes through the district, but for the sake of simplicity I'm going to refer to the whole area as Arab Street.

In order to get into Arab Street, one must first dodge it's guardian robot.

After Singapore was claimed by the British in 1819, money was given to Sultan Hussein Shah in exchange for his ruling power. With this money, Hussein built himself a palace. As I don't like taking good pictures, this is all you get to see of the palace:

With the his remaining fortune and some money that he borrowed from the East India Company, he decided that he would build himself a mosque too. It is this mosque, the Masjid Sultan (Malay for "Sultan Mosque"), that now dominates the local skyline. And it is darn cool looking.

One goes to Arab street to either eat food or buy a carpet, and I didn't have enough money for a carpet. This is where I went for lunch:

This girl was kind enough to smile for my picture.

I also went to a few cafes, like Sleepy Sam's.

Notice the wooden furniture? All of it (all of it) was broken and/or breaking.

Then I went to this place that turned out to also be the Museum of Chinese Opera.

I liked Arab Street the most out of the different cultural districts I've been to; it didn't smell funny, I liked the food, it was cleaner. And had palm trees.

Sungei Buloh

I like nature a great deal. Animals are so diverse and well-suited to their environment, fungus decomposes stuff  like no tomorrow, and plants are awesome. Nature just does it right. Anyway, my Aunt, Uncle, offspring and I went to Sungei Buloh, which is a Singaporean nature reserve.

As we brought my cousins, we opted to walk the shorter of the two available boardwalks. It was a good meter above the ground/swamp, and there were shaded rest stops along the way for hikers to get catch their breath. However, we saw our first animal before we even began the walk.

He saw us coming, so he hid.

Shortly afterwards we came upon an algae-covered pool that was a brilliantly icky shade of green.

Fortunately, lizards like to bathe in sludge.

But lizards weren't all we saw; there were also lots of little mud crabs jigging around and staying cool.

And plants. The tropical climate allows for vast biodiversity, so if one was to look at any given section of a Singaporean forest, one would notice that nearly every tree is of a unique species. Thusly, there were multiple plants on the walk that were alien enough to me so as to warrant a picture.

And in classic Chapman tradition, I took a picture of a dead tree.

And I don't really know what's so special about this tree, but the Asian family in front of me was taking lots of pictures and gesturing wildly at it's upper bits, so I figured it was worth a picture too.

Chinatown

Let's get this blog post started. I have things to do! Big important things, so let's get this post over with so I can go and do those things.

Chinatown. Most big cities have a place called this (when I say "most," I mean Toronto, cuz that's really the only big city I know that has one. I don't go to many big cities), but in case you don't know, Chinatown is just a district in a city full of Chinese-type things. I.e. people, food, shops, etc.

Chinatooown!

As it was near the MRT stop where I got off, I went first to the Chinatown Heritage Center

I have no idea where that pole came from.

It was interesting, I suppose. It was a pretty much three floored museum that documented what the early Chinese settlers coming to Singapore did, where they lived, how they slept, etc.

I can't remember what this is, but it's kinda cool looking.

There was also a hindu temple in Chinatown.

And this is where I ate.

The restaurant was on the main food road of Chinatown. At lunch, it's busy and crowded, but mid-afternoon, when I ate lunch, it's empty and it looks like everything's been closed up for the winter (the terrible, terrible, Singaporean winter).

So anyway, the place I ate at was still open. To show the waiter what I wanted, I pointed at something that looked like meat on the menu, and said "hot pot" beside it. He came back with a metal box that had a hole cut into the top, inside of which I could see some white lumps of something. Being sheltered and uncultured, I had assumed that a "hot pot" dish was a meal that was served hot, and in a pot. I was sort of right, except that the meal was kept hot because the pot was placed over the aforementioned metal box, and the white lumps in the box were lit aflame. so that was pretty cool.

There was also these vegetables in the mix of food I ordered. I couldn't tell whether they were okra or green chili peppers. So I ate one. They were chilis.

Sentosa Aquarium

So, last Tuesday was National Day, a national holiday celebrating the 43rd(?) birthday of Singapore. Because of this, Aunt Sheryl got the day off work, and she took my cousins and I to the Singapore-owned resort island of Sentosa. I had been there once before, but I didn't get to see very much of the island.

Specifically, we went to the Aquarium. But before we went inside, we watched a dolphin/seal show that we had arrived just in time to see.

After the animal show (which I may or may not have ethical qualms about), we went into the aquarium itself. It was packed. So, because of the high amounts of people that obscured my vision of all but that directly in front of me, I didn't get any pictures worth putting on my blog.

The animals I saw were pretty much all the animals that you see in books or online whenever you're looking at collections of cool looking animals. Lion fish, spider crabs, meter-wide stingrays, tiger sharks, etc. And the aquarium has this really cool glass tunnel that goes through their tank-of-sharks-and-other-things-that-swim. And because they aquarium knew that nobody would go through the tunnel to see sharks and lame animals like that, they installed a moving sidewalk that uses magic to transport people around the tunnel. We also arrived just in time to see the shark feeding. Yeah!

And then afterwards I took a picture of this handsome guy holding a snake.

He seemed to be very intrigued by the snake's neck.

Then we walked past this thing that used to be a fountain until it got beaten to death by art.

And then I turned into a haunted tree gate.

The Singapore Flyer

With a diameter of 150 meters, the Singapore Flyer is the largest Ferris Wheel in the world. So, along with my Aunt, Uncle and cousins, I took a half hour ride.

The Singapore Flyer.

Our capsule.

I mean, there isn't really much else to say, so here's a few pictures I took of Singapore while being way to far up in the air.

See those dome things? Yeah, they'll be in a future blog.

How did that handsome fellow get in my picture?

And here's a picture of the tropical garden that the design people thought it would be a good idea to have underneath the wheel. Because in Singapore you're allowed to just sort of set up a tropical garden wherever and it'll look good.

The ArtScience Museum

So far, the coolest building I have been in is the Singapore ArtScience Museum. It looks like this:

It was kind of an adventure to even get to the museum, because I didn't actually know where it was. I knew it was within 15 minutes walking distance of the Marina Bay MRT station, but I didn't know much more than that. So after choosing a semi-random direction and drinking a bit of luck juice, I managed to find my way there.

There were three available exhibits; one on Salvador Dali, one on Vincent van Gogh, and one on some sunken boat artifact treasure stuff. I went to the first two.

The van Gogh exhibit was inside this large, oddly shaped room with screens and walls sticking out everywhere, and it didn't actually contain any van Gogh paintings. What you do is you walk into the big dark room, sit on one of the benches, and then hidden projectors project paintings (or parts of paintings) onto the various walls and screens. The artwork changed every once in a while, and dramatic classical music was played all the while. The whole thing was very well put together and really, really artsy.

The Salvador Dali exhibit did actually display some of his artwork. And man, is it demented. Really cool, but demented. The display taught me that Dali not only made surrealist paintings, but also surrealist sculptures, sketches, furniture, and glass art. He also designed the set for a dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Spellbound.

Dali made over 1500 pieces of art throughout his life, and I sort of got the feeling that he started to reuse the same old motifs (melting clocks, angel wings, crutches, etc.) later in his career just to pump out more paintings. Still, he did make quite a few unique original paintings, as well as have one of the best mustaches ever.

NOTE: I didn't include any pictures of the exhibits because photography wasn't allowed, and it's not hard to find art by either of these men if want to go look at some yourself (which I would encourage).

Little India

First off, I'd like to apologize for how long it's taken me to put this post up. Verily, my heart is filled with deepest regret and shame.

So anyway, I went to Little India. Little India is this smallish district in Singapore that houses a denser-than-usual concentration of Indian people, restaurants, and markets.

Part of Little India's main drag, Serangoon Road.

There were shops that sold anything you can think of. I passed shoe stores, innumerable watch stores, clothing stores that sold fan shirts of various WWE wrestlers, I passed a guy who had three big boxes of tiny golden padlocks, I even passed a tiny garage.

Right in the middle of Little India I passed a picturesque Hindu temple.

The Sir Veermakaliamman Temple.

Later on I met up with a group of friends that I made earlier that week:

I guess they were having some sort of block party.

Big Joe kept complaining about the food.

On the outskirts of Little India I found a rather bland looking mosque.

The Angullia Mosque.

And that is Little India. I didn't include more pictures of the different shops because they all look about the same. I leave you with a picture of the pungent smell that was somehow everywhere: