Today was Chinese New Year’s eve, and I knew I was going to be out real late so I languished around and didn’t leave my hotel until lunch. My first picture of the day, in fact, clocked in at 12:42 pm and was me on the train heading east along the East-West line. This is probably going to be the same the next day (Day 10) as well since I’ll probably be sleeping in from being out late.

This first picture I mentioned above was of Kallang MRT Station, an area dear to my heart since a lot of my childhood was spent at the McDonalds there (now gone), as well as a cemented square in a park area (also now gone). The last time I came by back in 2024, I had taken pictures of the construction, and I was curious to see what it looked like now. Well, it was still under construction.

Comparing it to the picture I had from May 2024:

Those tall buildings have sprung up their place, though they’re not completed yet. They sure work fast. Kind of pity the people in the blue/yellow building behind who have had to put up with the construction noises for over a year and have also now lost their nice view, though. They can always maybe move in to Kallang Horizon too though.

Anyway my first stop of the day was two more stops east, to Paya Lebar MRT station, and then the nearby Geylang Serai Market and Food Centre. Unlike Albert Centre Market yesterday, here the ground floor was where the dry goods were being sold:

And the hawker centre food area was upstairs. Most of the Chinese food stalls were closed or closing early due to Lunar New Year, and Gemini had suggested this place because this market and area were more Malay than Chinese, so they generally wouldn’t be closing for Chinese New Year. I ate at a stall called Iqbal Soup Kambing, opting for a dish that I had never heard of before called Kway Teow Kerang. Aren’t pictures helpful?

Two Indian ladies seated at a table next to mine were enamoured by my choice and asked where to get it, I helpfully pointed them on towards the store.

It had been drizzling when I was walking over here, and I still don’t have an umbrella to my name on the trip, so I took a covered walkway over to the neighbouring Joo Chiat Complex.

This mall had stalls that sold Malay clothing and snacks and jewellery, and a bunch of renovation companies and home furnishing stuff (someone asked me to buy some curtains) among other things. It was most interesting because there was an indoor component:

And then an outdoor, but sheltered, component around the outside:

There was also a Fairprice supermarket that I spent some time walking around in, and an outdoor kopitiam that I took a picture of:

I was sadly still full for the moment, but one of the stalls there sold weird pizza flavours. Is seafood laksa pizza really a thing? Hmm.

On the way to this area, I had passed by a bunch of tents with a night market being set up there, and although it was still in the early afternoon at this point, I passed through it to have a look-see anyway on the way back. This temporal market was called the Geylang Serai Bazaar Raya 2026.

I didn’t order the “DUCK SHIT Lemon Tea” featured in that image, buit from a nearby stall I bought a drink called Jagung Power. Jagung is sweetcorn, my favourite flavour of ice cream, but I had not seen it in drink form as far as I remember, so I wanted to try it. It was pretty great, if pricey, at $6.

I raided a couple of real estate booths for some brochures showing median prices of HDB flats across different neighbourhoods in the country while I was there — really fun stuff! — and then walked back to Paya Lebar Station. I then wandered around the PLQ Mall there for a bit after using their washrooms, at which point I discovered that perhaps my infatuation with strata malls did not actually fully jive with my trip’s goal of finding as much interesting paper ephemera as possible to bring home and scan. PLQ Mall had a fair amount, and that’s probably because REIT malls consist of more of the type of stores that would be able to afford to make brochures and pamphlets. This is actually opposite from Japan, a very paper-centric society.

Anyway, after that, I took the train over to Tampines, as close to an area I consider home as there is, since we last lived around there before moving to Canada as a family. I finally found some special transit cards that I had been looking for on sale at the station offices there as well. Then I did a walkthrough of the bus interchange area where so many of my strong memories were.

They haven’t fundamentally changed much from the past two times that I was here, although parts have changed a fair amount since the last time we lived in Singapore. Bus 292 is still going strong, though, that’s the bus we used to take to actually get home from the interchange.

Next, I continued my usual Tampines pilgrimage by going to Sunplaza Park/Sun Plaza Park.

This is probably still the place in Singapore that hold the most sadness or wistfulness for me, and like at least one of my previous visits here, it was gently drizzling as I walked to the center of the mosaic on the ground and reached out to my former 14 year old self still stuck here.

I passed some chickens leading an army of crows around on the way out:

And also took note of some signboards that David Neo, MP for Tampines GRC, had put up.

Sun Plaza park had some minor changes since I was there, like there was a weird rentable exercise pod in the middle of the park now, and the sign says there’s a new wheelchair-accessible therapeutic garden somewhere now too (I didn’t notice this), but I’m glad there are no plans to majorly revamp it or anything. It’s one of my few remaining childhood links that hasn’t been paved over in the name of progress, y’know?

I walked back to Tampines MRT via Tampines Central Shopping Street, a little shopping row between a couple of residential buildings, taking a picture of this fresh produce store as I passed it.

The Tampines area around the MRT has a cluster of REIT malls, so I went into each one one after the other to look at them, both to try to raid their brochures and pamphlets as well as just to see what they looked like under a liminal light, since many of the stores even in these malls closed early on Chinese New Year’s Eve.

First, Century Square. It was indeed quite quiet, though I was early enough that not everything was shut down yet.

The food court was also still open, though many of the individual stores were closed. I ended up eating Yong Tau Foo again even though I had just had the dish yesterday from a different store. No oddly aggressive sour plum juice today to ruin the taste though.

Next, I went to its neighbour and counterpart in my memories, Tampines Mall. Both these two malls will be forever linked in my mind as they were the two original ones standing when I lived here.

Both also look nothing like how I remembered them from decades ago though. This one was a lot more deserted, but since my focus has been on keeping my eyes out for brochures and stuff this entire trip, my trained eye found plenty of loot still. This applied to Century Square, here in Tampines Mall, as well as the next mall I’d visit, Tampines 1. Not all of them were accessible, but a lot of laces, especially food places, didn’t have shopfronts that completely sealed off their doorway, and there were often brochures within reach from the outside if not outright placed outside the shopfront. This was even more prevalent down in the basement level, where it was all food stalls, many of them islands in the middle of the walking path.

I came away on the day with several dozen pamphlets, more than I had gathered in all my preious days in Singapore combined, I think. Here’s a bunch, for example, from NTUC Learninghub, a continuing education provider, advertising different courses that they provided.

I also noted with amusement that if you remove the C from the name/website then you get a string that starts with “nuclear”. Nuclearning hub. You should definitely hire me for advertising.

I mentioned a few days ago that I’ve also been using Gemini to file these, by showing it a picture of the brochures, having it analyze them on the spot, and then having it add that quick contextual blurb to an ongoing Google Keep note. That’s been going fairly well, although it has hallucinated a bunch of things along the way — the most often being that it would say it added them to the note when it actually called no such function. Repeating the command here usually works though. It’s also hallucinated things like the meaning of a brochure when part of it is obscured, and sometimes it’ll randomly start talking about earlier pictures again instead of only the one I just sent it. It’s entirely made up a picture that didn’t exist, with metadata and filename and all, twice now as well.

That, coupled with a complete inability to properly know when to consult Google Maps to not send me out the wrong exit, onto the wrong train, or to the wrong building entirely to look for a stall, has seriously impeded the usefulness of the tool. That and how every day, without fail, the thread that I am using to talk to Gemini with will become unloadable on the app for the rest of the day at some point, regardless of how much or little I use it, even if I make Samsung keep the program loaded in memory. For some reason the website version often can still load those threads though, but not always. Then the next day it’s fine again. It’s like I hit some sort of rate limit, but only on individual threads.

It’s still a neat tool for generating a quick look on the significance of an item on the spot, to use as inspiration to find neat places within my stated constraints nearby, to do multimodal searches when I don’t really know what I’m using for, and as a companion to help organize and track the things I do in a day (and the order/time I do them in), but this Gemini 3 Pro still has a serious number of small flaws like that at the moment. I assume it’ll improve over time though.

Talking about improving over time, I also found a surprise cutout of Bocchi from Bocchi the Rock! tucked away and silently practising in a Yamada Music School on the top level of the mall.

Despite most of the malls being closed, there were usually a couple of Chinese restaurants open late and they were jampacked with people waiting to get in. I didn’t really get it, but I think these were people looking to have a Chinese New Year’s Eve reunion dinner with their family (instead of on the day itself) and who chose to go to a mall restaurant instead of home-cooking the meal themselves, for whatever myriad number of reasons? There was at least one restaurant like this in every mall here, and several more along the way when I visited Chinatown later as well.

I’m not sure if they had reservations and were still forced to wait outside, or if those were the folks without reservations. Many restaurants also had preorders that one could make to get large platters of seafood and other premium dishes to bring home and use in their Chinese New Year dinner (assumedly the next day), and I saw many, many people carrying these food platters through the day too, but I don’t think that was what they were queueing up here for? Not all of them anyway? Who knows.

Although I have not shown most of them here, I have plenty of those ephemeral pamphlets showing the meals that they could preorder, and also a handful of promotional materials from stores specifically advertising that they’ll be open during the first couple days of the holiday. This one below from a store in Tampines 1, for example, which was my next stop in this cluster of malls.

Tampines 1 also had a couple of Chinese restaurants with a ton of people waiting outside:

Not my kind of thing though, and I was tired of REIT malls at this point so once I was done with this third mall, I went out and joined yet another night market/pasar malam that I had seen while transitting between the malls. This one was called the Tampines Pasar Malam Pelita Raya 2026, and was also a Malay-centric one, celebrating their Ramadan and Hari Raya Puasa holiday rather than Chinese New Year.

I ate dinner here, specifically buying something called Seblak from this Indonesian food vendor.

I had no idea what that was, besides a picture that they provided, but it turned out to be a curry soup sort of dish with veggies and fishballs and keropok in it. It wasn’t too bad. She cooked it right in front of me too, which she was apologetic for because it took a while, but which I reassured her was perfectly fine and kinda fun to see. It also meant the food was piping hot.

It was almost 9 pm by the time I was done, but I was not done for the evening yet. There were two main Chinese New Year event locales somewhat reachable relative to where I was and where I was staying, and I went to the first one of the two, Kreta Ayer Square in Chinatown (local). Chinatown in Singapore is highly tourist-irradiated and always packed to the gills, and tonight was no exception, though there were lots of pretty lanterns along the main streets:

I ducked into a small strata mall called Lucky Chinatown to get away from the crowd a bit, and found more ephemera, specifically these sheets promoting some uh.. slightly shady hair loss shampoo. The pamphlets were straight up my alley to scan and preserve though. I took one of each.

The mall seemed very close to deserted even though there were hundreds of people passing by a minute outside. Most of the businesses themselves looked like they’re been shuttered for decades, not just for the holiday season. Yet, on the top (5th) level of the mall, I found a karaoke parlour.

And on the bottom level (Basement 3) there was a game centre.

What weird things to find on either side of the mall! The mall with two “off” escalators, one outright broken escalator that was fenced off, and one elevator serving the entire eight levels.

Anyway, I walked back out, and although at times I rubbed sweaty elbows with the crowd, I also found that it was much easier to walk on the sidewalks between the shops and the stalls out front, away from the throng that was just traversing in the middle of the road. It was far more sane and also allowed me to get some nice shots, like these:

If you press the durian, you will have to PAY!

Seeing them, especially the Taiwan sweets shop  (with the shopkeeper in the powder blue shirt) keep their tables restocked by bringing forth boxes and ripping them open and emptying the contents onto the table gave me this very sudden and strong urge to play TCG Card Shop Simulator again!

Chinatown soon opened up from crazy stalls to actual shops and then to a wider area as I approached Kreta Ayer.

Very touristy, not really my type of vibe, but cool to see once I guess. Kreta Ayer Square was packed, and there was a fenced off viewing area with seats in the middle for what I guess were paying people or invited guests, and then tons of people standing around the edges, watching people sing and dance on stage.

I couldn’t get anywhere near to the stage though, and I was planning on visiting the other big celebration nearby, River Hongbao (local), as well anyway, so I didn’t stay here too long. I did take pictures of the famous temple next to Kreta Ayer Square, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum, which come to think of it probably has ephemera in it if I visit it while it’s open, huh.

But it was gorgeous at night.

I slipped by the crushing crowd back toward the MRT station, passing by the Taiwan sweets shop again and taking another picture for good measure. Yup, still emptying out endless boxes of sweets.

River Hongbao was at the Gardens of the Bay, so I took the train three stops from Chinatown to Baystore Station. It was also packed. Entering the venue required a bag check, and there were pretty lanterns everywhere.

There were some other things set up, like this was a tent where you could write down various wishes for the future:

But the crowd was heavy, and we were all directed in a certain direction toward the main event stage area, so I could not find things like the food area in this mess.

The stage are looked like this from the right side of the stage near where we enteed its vicinity:

But the exit was on the far end, by one of the white tents, so I made my way around so I was standing on the left side instead, near that big lit-up statue.

There was a cordoned off seating area in the middle again, and people performing things like drum performances on stage. Honestly, not a ton of people were really paying attention, there were a good subset of people seated down on the grass and facing the exact opposite direction, since the fireworks were going to be happening in a nearby field once it hit midnight, and everyone else was too far and too hot to enjoy watching anyway. A high camera zoom was required to even see the people on stage from where most people were standing.

The hosts also bungled up their timing, and everyone’s watched ticked past midnight and into the new lunar year before they hurriedly finished up their sentences and flashed a sudden 10 second timer on screen. Everyone counted down to 10 to 9 and then turned around for the fireworks.

It went on for a good few minutes, and everyone had their phones out, recording. This did make me feel a bit bad, like we were here trying to catch Instagrammable moments instead of properly enjoying the fireworks. So I took pictures for some of the time, and otherwise watched, enjoying the rumbling and the popping in my ears. Of course, I also squeezed in some “pictures of people taking pictures” in there.

Too bad for the people on stage though, since they couldn’t use a phone while up there. Also, the dragon dancers on stage just stopping dragonning and watched too. Also also, cellular data in the area was extremely poor since there were so many people there. It took forever to send and receive any messages, never mind pictures.

Still, it was cool to experience and partake in once in my life. The venues were set to close at 12:15 am, right after the show, so people started streaming out of the venue.

Trains were on a later schedule tonight, shutting down at around 2 am instead of midnight, so there thankfully was an easy way to get home. I walked to Marina Bay Station, took the train four stops north, and was home in a blink of two eyes. I was veyr tired, so a shower led right into bed and everything else, the archiving and money tracking and blogging, got pushed forth to become the problem of my next day’s persona. Yeah, that’s me. Damn you, yesterday me.