I had more time on my hands this time so I explored this mall, and was surprised to find it so labyrinthian. I furtively collected papers and business cards for my human anthropology self-project as I wandered, and took a couple of pictures of things that caught my eye too. Not many, since most shops were closed, but here’s one of a friendly but very dusty tiger:

And one of an aquarium/fishtank vendor set up in the middle of a walkway. I hope someone’s feeding the fish in the tank despite the holiday perioud.

The layout of the mall was so weird. Not only did it have shops around the five storey tall central atrium, but there was a side food wing that I had to cut through a carpark that bisected the ground level to reach, as it was not directly connected to the main atrium. And there was a separate secondary wing that curved out from the main circular atrium but not on every level. And there was a hidden level 6 with some medical facilities, a whole bunch of seats, and a small but fancy rooftop garden, that you could not access by escalator but could access using the stairs or elevators on the corners of the mall. It was a secret hideaway that I’m guessing most people did not know about.

Down on either the ground floor or the basement, concealed underneath a flight of stairs and a corner turn, was a mailbox area for the tenants too. Concealed but not otherwise locked or closed off at all.

And then there was an underground area, which led to a tunnel area still labelled Centrepoint and that I think eventually led to a train station. But I didn’t want to go to the train station today, so I went back above ground from there, and found myself across the main road and facing the original entrance that I had started at?

The rain had finally stopped though, so I crossed back over, but walked past the building and went behind it instead, and when I went to take a picture of a mural there, even though I had already gone past the retail portion of the mall, I saw more Centrepoint branding, this time an attached carpark for it or something.

I studiously ignored it and concentrated on the nice mural and the birds perched on top of it instead. The archway by the right side of the mural was the starting point for a shared and covered cafe area, but this place seemed both more expensive as well as being too alcohol-oriented for me, so I ended up not eating here.

I went past it and to the right, and ended up by Cuppage Terrace, the Japanese-focused strata mall, again. And then on the other side of that was Orchad Plaza. I was hoping that the Teochew Porridge store with the flashy yellow sign that I had seen two days ago would be open, but alas it was not. Two other stores nearby were though, and while I was looking at the menu for a Malay-Thai place, a guy from the Korean stall next to it also handed me a menu because I was standing at the border of the two stalls, leaving me with this awkward situation in which I was dual wielding menus from different stores.

In the end I made a mistake here, which was that I elected to eat from the Malay-Thai place instead of the Korean one. I went for the Bee Hoon Tom Yum, which looked like this:

Also overpriced, at $7.50 for the dish and $2.50 for the drink (more ice bandung!), but whatever, so many shops were closed today. It also took 20 minutes for them to cook it for some reason, and while it tasted mediocre to okay, it also gave me some sort of weird stomach cramp halfway through the meal that left me sweating like I was going through another one of those blood rush episodes after running for a train back in Edmonton or something, and I had to struggle to finish the second half of the meal.

Bleh. I started cataloguing nearby toilets, but I was feeling well enough again after the meal to instead ignore all that and go walk off the dinner instead. This I did in another nearby mall that I knew the name of from young, Plaza Singapura. I had walked past it the other day while on my walking journey as well. This one was a lot more glamourous than I remember it being.

It also had a huge food wing that was connected to the main building on some of the middle levels but not all, oddly. Although most of those shops were closed for the holidays, despite many of the shops in the main part of the mall actually being open for some reason.

I wandered around here for an hour, liking a store in particular called Co-Play that was a larger version of the Makers store in Southgate Mall back home — a bunch of little stands for independent creators to rent and sell their cute stuff on.

I also found another Yamaha Music Store on the top level that had more shopfront space than the one I had seen the previous day, and this one also really leaned into Bocchi the Rock! branding. There were cutouts of all the main characters there, and then some.

Even the little kids in the first picture above were dressed in Bocchi the Rock! character colours, specifically the two characters to the left in the same shot as them. How weird.

Anyway, after two days with nearly 30k steps preceding today, I still logged nearly 20k steps today despite the small area covered, and was all tuckered out from the walking, so I started to head home from here. I took a night picture of the Orchard Road mall area, and was suddenly overcome again with a sense of nostalgia and a sense that the people currently walking down the road won’t appreciate what it looks like now until it’s all gone and changed 20 years from now.

I stopped into a police station along the way to grab an armful of brochures for the archives, then also wandered into the Fairprice supermarket near my residence for more drinks. I saw this, and went down a rabbit hole when I returned to the hotel about Canadian ginseng that apparently is actually grown in Ontario but around 95% of it gets exported to places like Asia. What, why. I’ve never seen this at home and it’s so weird.

I ended up with a couple of soft drinks to try overnight, and a cheap packet of herbal tea that turned out to be, surprisingly, herbal in a not very tasty sort of way. They stand here next to the oranges that the front desk had given me 8 hours hence.

And as a final bit of bookkeeping to wrap up this post, I had mentioned buying some transit cards yesterday to add to my collection, but had not actuallt provided a picture of them. Here they are, in the Kokuyo Novita card holder that I had bought way back on Day 3: