Number Five Singapore Flyer
5 October 2012

The dates on these missives correspond to when I start writing them; sometimes they take a week or more to finish.

At the very end of August, we headed to the museum district in the evening for the Night Festival, which included special lighting of the outsides of museums, activities and performances. We started near the Peranakan Museum, which was lit up in a slowly changing color scheme. One of the delights of the night was a bit of performance art by an Argentine company that consisted of a dancing lady supported by a harness suspended from a long boom that was pushed down the street to the accompaniment of a Latin drum corps. The boom could rotate 360 degrees, and also shoot out confetti. (We were finding bits of tinsel for a couple weeks after that had snuck home in the folds of our clothes.) The street where this act was going on was quite narrow, and I kept worrying that the dancer was going to clip a tree or building when they got the boom rotating around real fast. In the alley beside the Peranakan Museum someone had set up a play area for kids that involved rolling (or flinging or shot-putting) bocce balls at a network of bells and bits of metal to make interesting noises. I kept listening for the interesting noise of smashed fingers, but, gladly, it never came. There were light shows on the the National Museum and the Singapore Museum of Art. I especially liked the latter, as the projection carefully matched the architecture, and there were images of it being erected, crumbling, being covered by growing vines and the like. Around the corner at the SAM annex there were three balconies full of pairs of eyeballs painted on giant lanterns, plus a circular, multi-player ping-pong table in the courtyard. We also caught a performance outside Singapore Management University that had dancers sliding and cavorting in a clear Mylar pool suspended over the heads of the audience. It could be tipped to slosh the water back and forth, as well as being raised or lowered.

Speaking of the Peranakan Museum, Kaye has begun training to be a docent there. She had joined the Friends of the Museum (FOM, for all the national museums), partly because of the favorable rates for those 60 and older**. She went to the fall orientation meeting for volunteering, and ended up getting one of the last training slots. Generally, they only let people in who will be here at least a year, because they want to get some payback on the training. They made an exception for Kaye, probably on account of her art-history background, but possibly also because she looks cute in a kebaya. It's a real serious program. She came back from her first class with two thick notebooks and a bunch of books, and has a series of talks and papers to do, working up to a tour script. It's very much like she's in school again. Her training team has two mentors who are actually Peranakan, so she's getting her information from the mares' mouths. She has training sessions on Tuesdays, plus lectures to attend on Fridays, most of which have been really informative. In addition, there are FOM lectures on Mondays, plus other special tours, such as the Spice Garden in Fort Canning Park and a new Buddhist temple on the north side of the island. She is often out every weekday but Wednesday. I'm a bit jealous.

I finally made it to the nearby wet market while it was in full swing. (It starts around 6am, and most stalls are cleaning up between noon and one.) The vendors are largely what you'd expect (fish, fowl, beef, pork, vegetables, fruit), but with varieties of things I can't yet identify: something that looks like a horseradish root with 5 o'clock shadow; 2-foot long green things that are somewhere between a bean and okra. I bought some items for dinner at the fish-paste stand. The stall offers fish paste spread in many kinds of "holders": chunks of eggplant, rings of chayote, tofu chunks, inside thin wrappers. You boil them briefly as an accompaniment to soup.

We seem to be following a routine of visiting nearby places for a walk on Sunday evenings. One such excursion was to Haw Par Villa, for which words will hardly suffice to create a picture of it. Haw Par Villa dates to before WWII, having been been built as "Tiger Balm Gardens" by the Aw brothers, Boon Haw and Boon Par, who made their fortune on Tiger Balm. (Tiger Balm is so named because it once contained tiger bones, but now relies on camphor, menthol and various oils.) It is full of colorfully painted statues meant to edify and educate. Some depict animals from other parts of the world, or are organized into tableaux contrasting virtue and vice. But a lot of them are based on Chinese legends and stories, most of which neither I nor Kaye was familiar with. There were some plaques by some, but they had often weathered a lot and were hard to read. (There was extensive restoration work in 1988, but I'm not sure how much has been done since then.) One part I did recognize was a series of multiple scenes from the classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West", about a monk Triptaka who travels to India to get Buddhist scriptures for China. It's fairly easy to recognize, because of the key characters: Monkey King, Pig of the Eight Prohibitions ("Pigsy" to friends) and Friar Sandy. I had seen them in "Princess Iron Fan" at the Northwest Film Center, which was the first feature-length animation made in China, based on a few chapters of the novel. My favorite scene was the cave of the spider women. Har Paw Villa is possibly best known for the Ten Courts of Hell exhibit, which is the Chinese counterpart to Dante's Inferno: different kinds of punishments for different kinds of transgressions on earth. One divergence is that at the end of your ordeal at the courts, you are given a potion of forgetfulness, and reincarnated.

Kaye, I and another visitor to the department here were invited out by the dean for dinner recently on top of Mt. Faber. It's a bit over 100m high, and the restaurant we ate at had a great view over to Sentosa and of the cable-car ride that runs there from the base of Mt. Faber. Sentosa is an island that seems to be aimed largely at tourists. Universal Studios is there, along with golf courses, resorts and beaches. While most of those have limited attraction for me, I do want to see Fort Siloso and a huge new aquarium that should open there in December. Sentosa is also the one location where there are not restrictions on foreign ownership of houses with land.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Esplanade performing-arts center by Marina Bay, affectionately known as "The Durian" for the spiky roofline (though, if you ask me, it looks much more like two haves of a jackfruit). We headed down there last month for Pesta Raya, which is a festival of Malay arts. We went to see a free singing and dancing performance in the outdoor theater. Weloved the dances. Definitely a distinctive style, but hard to describe. Lots of lateral movement, as opposed to front-back, and very different hand positions from what I know from other traditions. I didn't get as excited about the singing, perhaps because the I wasn't able to follow the lyrics. We were going to have dinner in an outside food court nearby, but got rained out. We ended up at a Japanese spaghetti restaurant. (Yes, it's a real thing.) Pasta was cooked perfectly, and lots of choices of toppings, both Western and Eastern.

** 60 is uniformly the age for senior discounts. I think it may come from 60 years being viewed as a "full life", as you have lived through the complete 5 x 12 year astrological cycle of years (12 animals and 5 substances). I was thinking I was in store for a big celebration next year when I hit 60, but ages are reckoned differently here. You advance in age on Chinese New Year (in February), plus the big birthday is actually the 61st, after you have completed the 60-year cycle.