The day started off with me meeting Zara down in the common area of the house, and being introduced to her two kids, Fatima and Abdullah. She had a third kid, a slightly older boy named Mohammad, but he wasn’t there at the moment. The two kids that were there were around 4-5 years old, with the girl being the older one, and they were both shy around me!

This day also finally had some significant rainfall early in the morning. It had drizzled a little bit on Day 6, I believe, but otherwise the weather for the entirety of my first five days here had been hot, blazing sunshine. It was odd, it was sunny for the entire week up before I left Edmonton as well, but was then forecast to rain every day for the rest of the calendar week after I left on my trip. Conversely, Singapore’s forecast was scheduled to rain for a few days preceding my arrival, and then turn into an oven once I arrived, especially since the 24 hour delay in Vancouver and Sydney meant that I missed a bit of rain on May 25th itself. Anyway, it was nice to finally get a bit of respite from the heat, especially now that I had my umbrella!

I had two main objectives to do today, one to re-visit Dunman High again before 1pm so that I could visit the school bookshop, and the second to meet Zixiang and Rachel at Toa Payoh for lunch. I took a slightly different bus route to Dunman this time around, but the memory of how to get there was still fresh in my mind, so I felt like a Real Student, Going to School on Consecutive Weekdays! How quaint, how nostalgic.

The gatekeepers (the two security guards maintaining the gate) had told me that I would have to contact Dunman High if I wanted to come back for another visit, but that that was not necessary if I was coming back just to visit the bookshop, and they recognized me from the day before as I stepped up to the gate again, my pink and black umbrella in tow. I popped in to buy the metal buttons for the blouse, and ended up buying a few other keepsakes as well — a shirt badge (which I did still own, but it was old and tarnished), collar badge (which I did not own), some branded stationary, and even a couple of the nice coloured casual PE(?) shirts that I’ve seen the students wearing. It turns out I could have bought the actual uniforms directly from the school bookshop as well too, at least if I didn’t care about sizes. I also picked up a notebook that had nothing to do with the school but that amused me as everyone in the cover art picture, including the Merlion, was wearing a face mask. Definitely a limited edition picture.

The proprietress was really nice when she heard my story and offered me a Dunman High branded umbrella to buy as well, along with a doll mascot plushie (that I believe was inspired by something like this), which was wearing a Dunman school uniform. I told her I couldn’t fit the former into my suitcase, as it was a full-length umbrella, but I was very tempted by the second. Ultimately I didn’t bite though, as it was a large plushie (about twice the size as the Napatak tiger cat plushie I had won from the claw machine yesterday), and they only had the male version of the plushie in stock — the female one was sold out. It hurt to say no to that plushie though, maybe I’ll get it next time I come by (if ever again). She said they couldn’t be bought online, sadly.