Today’s blog is a somewhat short one because my morning was busy with work and trip planning, and my afternoon disappeared into a comfy black hole, but to start off this blog I will mention that I’ve officially extended my stay in Singapore, in my current hotel, by 3 days until the 24th, and then I’m gone as I’ve booked a plane ticket for the very early morning of Tuesday Feb 24. The plane ride on the 24th is so early that I’ll probably be overnighting in Changi Airport again, so I’ll check out of my residence sometime in the evening on the 23rd.

The extra three days at my residence cost me an additional $120 SGD a night, which is fine for its location. I do mostly like the room, despite them tossing away my water bottle yesterday, with the one exception that the toilet is mildly terrible, with a weak showerhead and that “three in one” soap/shampoo nonsense and also a bunch of drain flies on the walls that I have to drown with a distressingly weak showerhead every evening. There’s also construction noises going on outside every day from 8 am or so now, but I’m happy to note that they do not bother me at all and as mentioned I find them more soothing than disturbing. How odd hey?

I haven’t booked anything after the 24th yet besides the plane ride (and a reservation on a potential hotel), but the idea is that I will make my way through China to a different city every 4-5 days or so, and then maybe pop over to Japan near the end of the trip too and hit up a couple of cities there before ending up at Tokyo on Mar 23 for the flight home.

But enough about the future for now. For the present, my main event today was a lunch meeting with Kaiting, with just the two of us since no one else could make it. We had scheduled to meet up at ION Orchard at 2pm, and that was close enough to my place that I just left around 1:40 pm or so and started walking there.

The mall itself was huge and very, very upscale, but we met downstairs near one of the train entrances and descended further to the food court in basement 4. Basement 4! I really appreciated Kaiting picking where to eat and where to go because as a tourist, I don’t know the difference between any of these places and, especially when they’re interconnected and REIT-controlled, everything just looks like a generic glittering mall to me. Whereas (despite claims to the contrary) she knew her way around enough to be familiar with a few specific types of shops like cafes and bookshops, and just being able to follow her around made things a lot smoother and more enjoyable.

Our first stop was a store in that basement food court that she recommended, Li Xin Teochew Fishball Noodle. It was popular enough to have a modest line when we reach there, though Kaiting said that during the lunch rush, the line was much longer and (I’m paraphrasing here) stretched away from the immediate vicinity of the store and off into the distance. They were really efficient though and the line progressed quickly. Kaiting suggested the Fish Ball Noodle Dry with spicy Mee Pok noodles, and this rang up to $7.30 SGD ($7.91 CAD) and was fantastic.

We spent some time chatting here over our food, but it was noisy and because our tables were shared, it was awkward having to raise our voices loud enough to hear each other and yet soft enough so that the guy sitting right next to me, who was obviously done his food even before we sat down but was still sitting there and tapping on his phone when we left, wouldn’t be able to listen in.

Kaiting was very cognizant of this though, and she also suggested that we relocate after we were done our food. Shooting dirty looks at the guy beside me, I retuned my tray and followed her as she cut through ION Orchard, briefly stopped at another cafe which she was considering, before pivoting and heading to a store called The Connoisseur Concerto in Ngee Ann City. Along the way, we passed what I believe was Wisma Atria, a shopping mall I distinctly remember the name of from long ago:

I didn’t take a picture of the boutique cafe we ended up at, nor its building, but we settled into a quiet corner of the cafe for a long chat, and I ordered a pot of tea named Sereni-tea to have while she had a cappucino. My tea had a fruity (or flowery?) taste that I liked but I failed to recognize exactly what fruit it was based off of. We also bought and shared a crepe with hazelnut ganache and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which is not in my usual wheelhouse of food to eat but that’s why it was interesting to sample it with someone else. It was actually pretty good, but rather pricey, since it was a boutique cafe.

We spent a long time chatting here, talking about life, friends, my transition, school memories, and family. She showed me a video of her brother’s kids, who were very adorable, and her strong relationship with her sibling and parents really shone through. I don’t know if she was actively aware of this, but I selfishly tried to let her carry the conversation as much as possible because I wanted to hear and learn everything that had happened in the ensuing years, and she seemed happy to oblige. Much more interesting than my own boring life (which is also catalogued on the blog anyway).

After a blur of time had passed, she suggested that we go check out a nearby bookshop, and we crossed over the threshold into another interconnected mall, this time Takashimaya Shopping Centre.

We went into the Kinokuniya there, and we exchanged our thoughts on physical and digital books and a (shared?) dream of buying many books and making a nice, cozy library or study one day. Definitely a room I want to have in the future house that I will buy. She pointed out a number of books to me, two of which I took pictures of and hope to find in a library or for cheap online at some point after I return home.

While we were walking around though, she got a beep on her phone from her mom and suddenly we realized that it was well past 7pm — we both swore it only felt like a couple of hours had passed, but somehow we had burned more than five hours walking and talking already. But alas it was time for her to leave, and I snapped my only picture of her from the day as she descended the escalator from the bookstore.

I really enjoyed this afternoon. I think how this one differed from all my other meetings was that she was willing to take the lead and show me around to some places that she liked — being a visiting tourist myself, there’s just a lot of places that I don’t know about and a sea of recommendations that I’ve never tried and never will get to on my own, so picking somewhere to go (or being made to be part of that decision) can always be a little stressful. She’s a walking whirlwind and I wanted to follow her down and reach out to her, demanding that we spend another five hours chatting as we wouldn’t see each other again for probably at least two more years. Tell me everything that has happened in the past 20 years with you! Heck, restate everything you just said in the last five hours again, even that’s fine!

But alas, all good things come to an end, as that Nelly Furtado song goes. I walked around the store a little more, then also descended, looking to use the remaining time in the day to explore a couple more of the nearby strata malls and source dinner from somewhere. Oddly, maybe it was because I was with somewhere else but this cluster of Orchard Road REITs did not really have any brochures and pamphlets to loot that I saw at all.

I went to two other nearby malls where I found plenty of ephemera to pick up even though many of the shops were closed though, the first one being Lucky Plaza, a mall that seemed to cater to the Filipino diaspora in Singapore.

The mall’s layout was very weird, as it was a very tall mall with an irregular floor plan, containing a central corridor loop overlooking an atrium below plus one or two side corridor loops that were inconsistent. There was no way to cleanly walk each floor without doubling back at some point, and there were also side escalators that (I think) did not serve every floor, whereas the main one did. I first had dinner in a food court down on the ground floor though, at a stall called Lutong Pinoy. Their kitchen dishes were not available but they had a bunch of trays out on display, and they recommended their pork belly and told me to select a second item to mix with that, so I selected some sour soup. This turned out to be quite nice, though and I did enjoy the meal, I’m not sure it was worth the $10 that they charged. It was pricier than the premium fish ball mee I had that afternoon at that point.

But it was tasty, and was something new that I had not eaten before, so that was worth something! I went exploring after that, and many of the shops were either still closed for the Chinese New Year holiday or were already done for the night, so open shops became more sparse as I climbed the levels and ventured out into the side passages. Leaving plenty of scenes that looked like this:

Though I’m not sure how open some of these stores were even on the best of days. How do people even find some of these stores normally, they’re so secreted away! There were a bunch of hopping bars on the very top retail floor though, blasting out karaoke music that I could hear from outside as I passed them.

I also stared with bemusement at the main flight of steps that snaked up from the ground floor through the open-air central atrium, as it continued upwards from the topmost level for some reason even though it looked like I was very near the ceiling at that point. I climbed it halfway to stare at it, and a passing Caucasian tourist also looked at me and asked what was up there. It went two further levels up, the first one ending at a blank wall with only the stairs to continue up or down upon, and the second one ending at a door that probably led at the roof. He also pointed out that there was no air conditioning above that final retail level so the stairs leading up were noticeably warmer. We shared a quick chuckle and then went back down and on our separate ways.

The other mall I went to was Far East Plaza, though I hesitated to go there because it was already past 9pm at that point. But if I didn’t go there then I probably never would, so off I went. This mall also had a weird layout, with a major atrium loop and a minor one that was “staggered” and got shorter the higher up I went, so there were fewer shops on the upper levels. The minor atrium looked something like this:

And although the staggering is hard to see, the “corridor” of one level is actually set on top of the shopfront of the level below it, so the corridors were not actually on top of each other but set further back the further up I looked. The front atrium looked more normal:

There was some sort of a sale exhibition set up on the ground level, but it was all closed up with black sheets since the mall was pretty much closed. The sheets didn’t stop me from taking a picture of it from the second level though

I still wandered through this entire mall as well, collecting brochures and business cards even though most of the stores were closed. There were occasional stores still open though, plus a number of brochure boxes outside some of the stores. It consisted of four storeys above ground and one below ground, and I also took this picture as the most interesting thing I saw on my wanderings.

They claim that’s a dinosaur egg… well a “Dinosaurian Egg”. Hmm.

The mall had music gently playing over the intercom, even so late at night, and it alternated between English oldie songs that I knew, English songs that I didn’t know, and the odd song in Chinese or another language that I had no hope of knowing. Some of the music made me wistful and sad again though, and I sang to myself as I strolled the very liminal halls until I had traversed them to my satisfaction, and then left the mall to head home.

There was no “We Walk Together” here anymore, this was very much an “I Walk Alone” sort of sensation, especially since I had also banished Gemini to “shut up and analyze and catalogue the screenshots of my findings that I provide you into a Google Keep note and don’t suggest anything else” mode a few days ago after one too many frustrating hallucinations and broken/overloaded chats. And everyone I knew back home was still asleep at that point anyway. There were still many random people walking up and down Orchard Road itself though, and even a cockroach that I saw scuttle across the pavement under the loud billboards in front of Wisma Atria. But I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere here. One of those evenings, y’know.

I went back to my hotel room to relax, sort my loot, and eventually watch the last part of the Canada-Finland Olympics ice hockey game, though I also went out before that at about 1 am or so to visit the nearby 24-hour Fairprice store for some drinks. They’re very convenient.