3030 Singapore’s new financial district. More conservative facades than Shanghai but I guess that would be expected.
3086 The top of the Sand’s building from the Singapore Flyer.
3098 The new Botanical Gardens. You can see the ships anchored in the inner harbor at the top. The two buildings are huge. The shorter one of for growing plants that require a more temperate climate. The shape and the glass make for convection air currents inside the building that keep things cool. The taller building on the left is called the Cloud Building. It’s sharply sloped walls create rain inside. This is for flowers very sensitive to humidity changes. Inside it’s like a rain forest.
3102 The Superflowers in the Botanical Garden. These structures are to all sorts of flowering plants. You can see that part way up there’s an orange walkway gunning in a half circle from the second tallest ‘flower’ through the two shorter ones and ending at the other second tallest.
3119 The Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort, the Lotus Building and the Financial District of Singapore.
Oct 29 – Singapore. Today we are on a ship’s tour around the city. It’s a small group and a regular size bus so plenty of room to spread out. The first stop of the day was at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel promenade. The Sand’s hotel has 2,500 rooms and a casino. Gambling used to be illegal in Singapore and sort of still is. If you or I want to go to the casino we show our passport and we’re in. If a Singaporean wants to get in he has to pay $100Singapore, about $88US every time he enters. The tour guides are discouraged from using the term casino and are encouraged to substitute the term ‘integrated resort’. The building has a strange structure at the top that spans all three of the towers and looks like a long, curved ship. Like Shanghai and Hong Kong they have some very creative architecture here. There’s one building that looks like a lotus.
On the waterfront they have an Olympic Walk. It’s lined with trees; each one has a plaque showing the flag of an Olympic member country with the name and other information. From the walk you get great views of the tall buildings of the new financial center as well as the old colonial building of downtown. The harbor has a fleet of dragon boats that give tours of the area.
After a walk along the promenade with our guide pointing our historic and modern buildings and giving us an overview of Singapore we headed to our next stop the Singapore Flier. You’ve probably heard of or seen the London Eye, the large wheel of observation cars that looks like a bicycle wheel. Well the Singapore Flier is the London Eye on steroids. At 541 feet (about 42 stories) it’s the world’s tallest observation wheel and 90 feet taller than the London Eye. Our little group will easily fit into one observation car. You enter the building by going up an escalator. Then you follow the signs to board the Flyer. Most of the way you are inside an air conditioned building and walking up a very slightly inclined ramp. I’d estimate that the walk is about 100 yards inside the building. Along the way there are models and exhibits but there’s no crowd today and we just walked up to the boarding area.
Like the London Eye the Flier never stops turning so they have a concave boarding platform that allows you to step into the car along about 30 feet of slightly curved space. The complete loop takes about 30 minutes and gives you plenty of time to move around the capsule and take pictures. The botanical gardens, the Sands, the financial district, the harbor, residential district, floating soccer field, Merlion and the colonial district are all easily visible. The Singapore Grand Prix, a Formula 1 race, is held on the streets of the city every year. The starting grid and the pit area are easy to pick out. Some of the pipes from the temporary grandstands were still stacked a spots around the track. The race must have been on a little while ago.
The two most interesting sights are the Sand’s building and the Superflowers of the Botanical Garden. These large structures are home to plants of all sorts. The tallest superflower appears to be about 10 stories tall. There’s a walk way that connects four of them about halfway up running between the two second tallest through two of the shorter ones.
Our last stop of the day was at the Peranakan Museum. It presents a broadly Southeast Asian view of Peranakan culture, with educational interactive exhibits. The Peranakan Museum explores the main themes of Peranakan life in 10 permanent galleries. The themes include the elaborate 12-day Peranakan wedding, the role of the Nonyas (women), prominent in Singapore’s history, and feasting—a favorite pastime of Singaporeans. Peranakans have evolved with their culture, adapting to Singapore’s role in an ever-changing Pacific Rim environment.
The exhibits include clothing, especially wedding garments, ceramics, pottery, jewelry, glass ware, furniture, historical documents and other items. There’s one room that’s set up like a Peranakan funeral complete with the sound of mourners wailing in their language from the other side of a privacy screen. .
The ceramics they made are beautiful. Very clean lines, tasteful designs and wonderful colors. They seem to have been fond of a certain shade of lavender, middle green, light blue and a dark burnt orange/red. It would not have occurred to me to use the combination of the lavender and green that was very common but it’s a striking and pleasant blend. Some of the pieces had all four colors together. The repetition of the colors was striking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a collection so uniform and yet colorful. It’s even more remarkable when you consider the time span covered by the artifacts. Or then again, maybe most collections are like that but since the color combinations were not so unusual and attractive, maybe I just didn’t notice.
One room in particular interested me. They had the opposite sides of the small room set up to show how the room might be used by two different faiths. On one side was a sideboard with a marble top like you might have found in any house in the USA in the 1800 and early 1900s. Here in Singapore they were decorated with Taoist motifs such as dragons, phoenix or the three star gods and used as household altars. What makes this on unique is that it was owned by a family that converted to Christianity so the sideboard was converted to a Roman Catholic altar. A painting showing Mary, Joseph and Jesus with a dove representing the Holy Spirit hovering over them had replaced the Taoist gods. In the heavily carved wood of the upper frame the dragons and the phoenix still remain.
On the other side of the room is a deity altar. Often this would display statues of the three star gods and a picture of the household god would be hung on the wall behind it. Offering of fruit, tea, cakes and the like would be placed on the altar. Some Peranakans felt that only one god should be placed on the altar, others were comfortable with three. The three star gods are Hok, Lock and Slew representing happiness, prosperity and longevity respectively. They are the three you would find on the altar. Another, totally different, household god could be hung on the wall behind it.
I’m pretty quick in museums, I know what interests me and what doesn’t. This gives me plenty of time to strike off on my own. As we approached the museum I saw some interesting buildings in the neighborhood to I left the museum and took a little neighborhood tour on my own.
My first destination was the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory the Illuminator. It’s a stark white simple building with a small steeple. It has a portico on two sides and a covered area that was probably a buggy drop off for rainy weather. The inside is a simple as the outside. The Stations of the Cross are outdoors and just about life size statues. The displays are simple often just Jesus dressed or situated in some way that tells you what’s happening at the time. Sometimes there’s another statue if some individual was important to the story. The graveyard was interesting. The headstone of Agnes Joaquim is there. She died in 1899 at age 41 apparently unmarried as the headstone lists her as Agnes beloved daughter of Parsick Joaquim. The state flower of Singapore, the Vanda Miss Joaquim Orchid, is named after her. One person, Mary Anna Martin, had died in a Japanese internment camp, Sime Road, in August of 1945, very close to the end of the war.
I also went by the Mason’s Lodge and the Singapore Philatelic Society building. Both are colonial buildings and very nicely maintained.
Our entertainer was Chris Michaels. He plays a number of instruments including the guitar, banjo, bagpipes, saw, bones and turkey baster. His show is humorous and he plays very well. He only sings comedy songs because his voice is really not up to much else but they are funny.
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